Oilers’ positives all come with negatives
If there’s a time for evaluation of the most disappointing season in Edmonton Oilers history, this is probably as good as any.
The Oilers hit the CBA-mandated, mid-season break in their schedule Saturday following the first ever Hockey Night in Canada telecast from Las Vegas.
And they hit this break at a point where the positives and negatives are at a better balance than at the Christmas break.
With a week between games before returning to play three at Rogers Place (then hitting the NHL all-star break) Edmonton actually possesses plenty of positives. The problem is when you look at every positive it just makes an Oilers fan more miserable because of the attached negative.
Like what happened in Vegas Saturday night?
It was the ultimate example of what a bad choice of words Kevin Lowe had with his, “Tier II fans” quote.
Those 6,000 Edmonton fans that made the trip to Las Vegas to sing Happy Birthday to Connor McDavid and to chant “Lets Go Oilers — Calgary sucks,” were mostly those Tier II fans.
They weren’t season ticket holders, most of them, they were the fans who create the spectacular scenes in Edmonton all over town during the playoffs and remind the players how great it can be to play in the City of Champions.
As one fan said, they bought the plane tickets to Vegas expecting to watch a top-of-the-standings team play a bottom-of-the-standings team, but didn’t think it would be the Golden Knights leading the league and the Oilers missing the playoffs for the 11th time in the last 12 years. But they wowed the crowd in the new Vegas arena.
And that’s the punch-in-the-gut negative that came with being there to co-create a scene McDavid raved about: “The atmosphere was incredible. I can’t say enough about both sides. They were loud. Oilers fans were even louder.”
I wonder how many of those fans from Edmonton couldn’t help but think how it might have been to return to Vegas this spring to see the two teams in a playoff series. Can you imagine going back and forth from last
The weekend was also the occasion to declare defenceman Darnell Nurse as having arrived.
year’s scene in Edmonton to this year’s scene in Vegas?
Even if you tend to dream in Technicolor, you know it isn’t going to happen. Vegas (29-10-3) is going to be there. If they totally came unravelled they’d have to finish up with something like 16-27-1 to miss. Edmonton (20-23-3) would likely need to go 26-11-1 to make it.
This is a team that won more than one game in a row for only the fourth time this year Saturday night.
This is a team that won four in a row to make it to .500 at the Christmas break. They finally won back-to-back games again but need to win all three at home when they return from the break to get back to .500 again.
The biggest positive, of course, is McDavid. He’s been beyond-belief spectacular lately and produced a pair of points to hit 200 on his 21st birthday. He has 52 points in 46 games and is tracking at the same rate he did in hitting 100 points last season despite a bout of strep throat and the flu in the first half of the schedule.
How many points would he have if GM Peter Chiarelli hadn’t followed two seasons making solid moves with a miserable season trying to surround his stars?
Chiarelli’s plan was to build this team to play in the Pacific Division.
After wins in Arizona and Las Vegas they’re 8-2 against the Pacific and doing great at that. But the Chiarelli Oilers can’t beat anybody else.
The weekend was also the occasion to declare defenceman Darnell Nurse as having arrived.
Nurse had two goals against the Coyotes and the overtime winner against the Golden Knights. In both games he was credited with scoring the winner. He had five goals on the five-game road trip and is looking like he’s developing into an all-star defensively, too.
But again there’s the rub.
If only Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson had progressed from how they were tracking last season and in the playoffs, and if only Chiarelli had found a replacement to fill in for Andrej Sekera to play the half season before he was able to return from severe injury. A big part of what happened this season has been the abysmal (31st overall) penalty killing and a power play that despite McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, has clicked for only 10 goals in the last 26 games.
We all know what’s been wrong. But would it be too much to ask on behalf of the fans that do pay the salaries of these guys to convince management and the players themselves that it’s time to be publicly accountable and to identify that a plan is now in place to fix it?
The most important thing with the games that remain when the Oilers return (and return again after the all-star break) will be for everybody to go forward convinced this still can become the Stanley Cup contender they were supposed to be this season.