SAN JOSE — This is about the Edmonton Oilers’ best players. The guys who wear the letters.

Yes, even Connor McDavid, who had a marvellous three-point night only to cough up a puck on the Sharks’ game-winner.

“It is everybody, for sure,” Draisaitl said after yet another loss in which the Oilers scored plenty of goals to win, but watched their net fill up in a 5-4 loss at San Jose. “Everyone is making the wrong reads right now, and maybe a little bit of (being) fragile on our decision making.”

A team that came out of the Olympic break vowing to shore up its defensive game lost 5-4 in San Jose Saturday, just a few days after losing 6-5 to Anaheim. In between as an 8-1 win over the rudderless Los Angeles Kings, the only points Edmonton earned on this three-game circus.

Edmonton’s power play went 50 per cent on this road trip and they scored at least four goals every night, yet they come home with two lousy points — all due to a defensive game that is stuck in pre-season gear as we enter the final 20 games of the National Hockey League season.

“You score three goals in this league, you win most of the time. Four, you should be winning,” head coach Kris Knoblauch said. “You shouldn’t be forced to score five or six to win hockey games.”

The most concerning element? It was Edmonton’s best players — the letter wearers and leaders — who let them down the worst in San Jose.

“It starts with us. It starts with the leaders and goes from there,” said Darnell Nurse, whose game was red rotten again on Saturday. “Throughout our lineup there are some (depth) guys that stepped up and made some really good plays tonight. But there are too many mistakes, by too many of us.”

Trent Frederic banged in his first goal since November, as his play continues to notch up. Matt Savoie was excellent again — this trip might be the best three-game stretch of his NHL career.

But when the Oilers needed to stem the bleeding defensively — calm a game down and check for their chances — it was Hyman and Nugent-Hopkins who were caught watching Alexander Wennberg stickhandle in the crease to restore San Jose’s lead. Sure, Ty Emberson lets a pass get to Wennberg. But two veterans have to identify trouble, and neither did.

When it was 4-4 with 9:30 to play — a time to settle down and make sure you leave San Jose with at least a point — it was captain Connor McDavid who turned the key puck over high in the offensive zone. The play went the other way and ended up in Edmonton’s net, where Mattias Ekholm stood screening goalie Connor Ingram — but not blocking the shot.

A sure sign that a team isn’t as engaged as it needs to be is when not enough players are selling out to block shots.

On this team, at this time, that is a noticeable shortfall.

“Maybe some blocked shots. Some shots that get through,” said Knoblauch, hinting at what’s bugging him these days. “You look at a point shot. It’s far away, and it has to get through several layers to get to the net. They scored a couple goals like that tonight.

“That’s probably one area I would like to see us get better at.”

Another area? The second defensive pairing of Nurse and Jake Walman.

Together they’ve been a liability. Individually, Nurse’s game hasn’t woken up all season.

He was fighting it again on Saturday.

“Good analysis,” Nurse replied.

In the final game before the Olympic break, Draisaitl poured out his heart:

“It starts with the coaches. Everybody. You’re never going to win if you have four or five guys going, and it starts at the top. Our leaders can be better,” Draisaitl said that night.

Three games and three weeks later, with his team having outscored their opponents 17-12 but collected just two points here in California, Draisaitl has run out of answers.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he muttered. “You just have to do it.”

“It sounds like a broken record, but we’re just giving up too many goals. It’s hard to score five, six goals every night.”

So, we are now 61 games into the season and the Oilers are grappling for some semblance of a defensive identity. We’ve seen them solve this Rubik’s Cube before — you don’t get to back-to-back Finals without being able roll out a better than average defensive game — but at this point, the struggle is real.

Is it about the sheer volume of games this team has played in the past three seasons, with two four-round playoffs runs followed by this compact season?

It’s a campaign of three-games-in-four-nights runs that has tested all 32 teams, but the only other team that’s played into the spring the way the Oilers have these past two seasons is Florida.

The Panthers are likely to miss the playoffs.

And the Oilers? Their game has a looong ways to go before it’s playoff worthy.