How is that rebuild coming?
The arena project’s going all right, but Oilers are an outright mess
If you dig seeing a city evolve, it really is quite a thing to watch Rogers Place rise up, week-to-week, on 104th Ave. It’s going up swiftly. It will be precisely what Oilers owner Daryl Katz promised — a game-changing centrepiece in his hometown.
A huge driver for that project, obviously, was the Oilers franchise and history. It’s doubtful Edmonton city council would have endured nearly four years of often brutal negotiations to conclude an arena deal had the franchise been run-of-themill, just another NHL team, instead of Wayne Gretzky’s iconic Oilers.
Doubtful, for that matter, that Katz would have bought the Oilers were it not the best NHL team of the 1980s, perhaps of all-time, a team whose key players he befriended, back in the day.
It’s quite another thing to eyeball the Oilers current team, week-to-week, or even game-to-game right now. That, sadly, is about watching a once-proud franchise devolve. If the arena is a showplace in progress, the team is a damn mess.
The Oilers have lost 10 straight as they cannonballed to dead last overall in the NHL.
Glaring giveaways are on offer shift-to-shift, never mind game-to-game. There is insufficient attention to detail; not enough grit. The Oilers boast some highly skilled players, but overall the team doesn’t score much and can’t defend well at all.
Was it just 19 months ago that Craig MacTavish was installed as general manager, introduced by then club president Kevin Lowe at a news conference alongside senior vice-president, hockey operations, Scott Howson? A power trio, reunited again, capable hockey men every one.
After seven non-playoff seasons, a sense of real urgency attended the appointment of MacTavish. He pledged to add depth, competitiveness, install a winning culture and much else.
Not to be flippant, but how’s that going so far?
The annual search for consistent goaltending continues; some of the depth — like defencemen Keith Aulie and Nikita Nikitin — has been found wanting. Competitiveness? Winning culture?
Anyone who listened to team captain Andrew Ference on Monday night, following the club’s 5-2 loss to Arizona, knows the answer to those questions. Ference talked convincingly about players “moping,” repeatedly committing the same errors, on and on. And where is the club’s hockey management as the team founders? Mostly they have gone to ground: MacTavish working the phones to make a significant trade or two; Lowe, now a vice-chair of the Oilers Entertainment Group (OEG), out of public view and several storeys above the day-to-day running of the club.
Just head coach Dallas Eakins, the team’s fifth head man in the last seven seasons, MacTavish’s handpicked man, remains to face the music, which he does with professionalism and class, every day. His message to his players may be bang-on, but it certainly isn’t reflected in the team’s performance.
Added to the senior management mix last summer was Bob Nicholson, the longtime president and CEO of Hockey Canada, hired to be a co-vicechair of the OEG. His mandate is a broad one, taking in all aspects of the new arena project, the commercial as well as oversight — at a remove — of the team itself. Nicholson has ample experience with hockey rebuilds. When he took over the National Junior Team program in 1992, a Canadian team featuring Eric Lindros finished sixth at the World Junior Championship in Germany. The next season, Canada began a run of five straight gold medals.
Nicholson led Canada’s first men’s Olympic team that was stocked with NHL players at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano. That team finished fourth. In 2002 in Salt Lake City, 2010 in Vancouver and 2014 in Sochi, Russia, Nicholson led Canada to gold. Canada won gold with Pat Quinn (’02) and Mike Babcock (’10, ’14) as head coach, with Gretzky (’02) and Steve Yzerman (’10, ’14) as GM.
Bob Clarke, Bob Gainey and Pierre Gauthier, the GM triumvirate in Nagano in ’98, along with head coach Marc Crawford never were asked back for another go-round.
It’s true that Lowe and Gretzky both have been part of the management mix for Team Canada, but so have Detroit’s Ken Holland, Doug Armstrong of St. Louis and Boston’s Peter Chiarelli, among others.
As head of Hockey Canada, Nicholson had the luxury of multiple high-end applicants for just about any job with any of the various Team Canadas — junior, the women and the men.
Since 2005-06, when Edmonton last made the playoffs and embarked on that bittersweet run to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals, teams like the Los Angeles Kings, Boston Bruins, Chicago Blackhawks, Pittsburgh Penguins and Tampa Bay Lightning all have fashioned successful radical rebuilds.
The Kings under Dean Lombardi, the Bruins under Chiarelli, Chicago under Stan Bowman and Pittsburgh under GM Ray Shero, since dismissed, all were led by a young, capable general manager. All have won at least one Cup. There’s a lot of young hockey executive talent around. But, as is well known, Katz’s vision is to win Stanley Cups with Lowe, MacTavish and Mark Messier walking beside him. It’s a beautiful dream, a noble one. But is it realistic? Is it advisable? Where is the accountability for men like Lowe and MacTavish, who appear to have jobs for life with Katz? How does an organization enforce accountability among its players, if it’s absent — or perceived to be absent — for the senior executives?
“The most significant price is losing games over and over and over,” Ference said, when he was asked what punitive measure would light a fire under the players. “Constantly being considered a loser is probably the biggest punishment you can have.”
Not in the Oilers organization, it isn’t. Not for some of the players and definitely not for senior management.
It seems a strange way to construct a Stanley Cup champion.