EDMONTON — We’re 57 games into the season, and the Edmonton Oilers have 64 points.

They are, to this point, an average team playing slightly above average on some nights, well below on others.

They resemble a Stanley Cup contender at this juncture of the season about as much as the Vanier Cup resembles the Super Bowl, or I resemble Brad Pitt.

“We can’t be letting in five, six, seven, goals per game. It’s just it’s too much. It’s just not the right way to win,” Kasperi Kapanen said after the Toronto Maple Leafs spanked Edmonton 5-2 on the Oilers’ home ice. “I feel like we’re just always trailing by two, three goals. And they’ve scored four or five.”

“As a good team, we can’t be doing that moving forward, and it’s something that we’ve addressed,” he said. “You know, it doesn’t happen overnight. We’re trying, guys. We’re trying, and we want to be better defensively.”

This is where the tracks always lead in Edmonton, home of those “High Flying Oilers.”

This team is never dominant until it starts to defend. Killing penalties, blocking shots, playing a simple, effective game.

In short, Edmonton’s advantage in scoring ability is most acute when the two teams are splitting up a minimum of scoring chances, not a maximum. When the high danger chances are coming by the boatload at either end of the ice, it in fact levels the playing field, history tells us.

“It’s a little bit of everything,” said head coach Kris Knoblauch, who seems increasingly perplexed as each week passes and his team still doesn’t get it. “Five-on-five defending. Obviously the penalty kill (0-for-2 Tuesday) — we’ve talked about how many penalty kill goals we’ve given up. And some goaltending. It’s a little bit of everything.”

On this night, the Oilers climbed back from 1-0 and 2-1 deficits before Matt Savoie took an unfortunate interference penalty at 6:38 of Period 3. Six seconds into the penalty kill, Mattias Janmark was racing for a puck against Auston Matthews and high-sticked him in the face.

The Maple Leafs scored on the ensuing five-on-three, and again on the five-on-four.

“I felt like I was maybe held a little,” explained Janmark. “I’m not going in there trying to high-stick a guy. But at the end of the day, they’re on a two-minute five-on-three in a 2-2 game in the third.

“It cost us the game.”

It was an original way to lose, something the Oilers have become rather inventive at. The familiar face, however, is their goals against, now at 3.28 and the seventh highest in the entire National Hockey League.

And the much-ballyhooed eight-game homestand on which Edmonton was going to vault into the Olympic break with a nice first-place cushion?

Yeah, they went 4-4, allowing 32 goals in the final seven games. If they hadn’t rescued two games with the goalie pulled, it would have been a full-on disaster.

“We haven’t been playing our best and obviously playing eight games in a row at home, you’d like to win more games,” Kapanen said. “But that’s how it is now, and you can’t do anything about it.”

They’d better figure out how to do something about it, because despite playing in an extremely forgiving division, loose, turnover-laden hockey with average goaltending simply does not take a team into May.

“We have to do our individual jobs better and not point any fingers,” said Darnell Nurse, who was screened by an official and missed a pass that led directly to the 2-1 goal. “I’ve been out there (for goals against). I have to be better in that department, so I’m not going to deflect it anywhere else.”

Toronto is 11-2-1 at Rogers Place in their last 14 visits, while Edmonton is now 0-9 this season when Connor McDavid doesn’t get a point, and the Leafs kept him off the scoreboard Tuesday.

Winger Andrew Mangiapane drew into the lineup for the first time in four games and was Edmonton’s best player in the opening period. Then he turned a puck over just inside the offensive blue line in the second period, causing the Oilers to have a bad change, and seconds later the game-opening goal was in Edmonton’s net.

Knoblauch sat him out for the final 12 minutes of Period 2, but played him in the third.

“Obviously the turnover had an effect on his ice time,” Knoblauch said after the game.

Mangiapane was very effective on the fourth line, for a team that has had zero production from its Bottom 6 of late. It will be interesting to see if he plays Wednesday in Calgary, with general manager Stan Bowman actively shopping him around the league.

Usually, when a player who is being traded plays well, he stays in the lineup.

But when the coach can’t stand the player….?