A balm for all our ills
But McDavid might not really walk on water
That’s quite enough harrumphing over the removal of those City of Champions road signs, Edmonton, thank you very much.
Cool it. Any lingering hard feelings will soon be forgotten, mark it.
And if the wounds fester, Connor will heal those lesions soon enough.
Connor McDavid, that is. He can mend anything, if not everything. Can’t he?
For example, this week McDavid, who is lighting up the Ontario Hockey League playoffs (37 points, including 18 goals, in 14 post-season games), won the Bobby Smith Trophy as the Ontario Hockey League’s Scholastic Player of the Year. He won for the second straight year. Of course, he did.
An ‘A’ student in Grade 12, McDavid’s course load at McDowell High School includes: Computer Applications; Personal Finance; Writing; World History; Equity and Social Justice; and High Performance Athletics.
Sounds like a well-chosen study program for a young man about to embark on a career in pro sport. It also sounds mighty impressive, if not a shade intimidating to those of us who acquired our most important career skill in Mrs. Butler’s Grade 11 typing class.
Mind you, I dropped out of an excellent course called Law, Liberty and Human Rights once, but that was in second-year university, when my time management abilities still weren’t up to balancing being editor-inchief of the student newspaper and, you know, actually completing a full course of study.
McDavid? He rips it up in the OHL, wins a World Junior gold medal, leads his team deep into the playoffs, aces Grade 12 and wins awards for it, settles revolutions in Spain and has flown around the world in a plane. Hasn’t he?
So, why wouldn’t he be able to salve tender feelings over this low-level, not to say lowbrow, civic signage issue?
For McDavid, that’s child’s play.
The Edmonton Oilers haven’t even officially selected the top-rated Erie Otters superstar centre first overall yet, and already, myriad alleged concerns for the oncedominant NHL franchise have become so much small beer, owing to the pending presence of McDavid.
A head coach for this highly skilled bunch who regrettably punch below their weight class? No sweat. There are many options, suddenly.
The lengthening line of marquee coaching candidates yearning to bask in McDavid’s reflected glory has formed on the right since the ping-pong balls bounced Edmonton’s way on April 18 and handed the Oilers the No. 1 draft pick.
And if they’re not yearning, exactly, several of them certainly are musing about the prospect of coaching McDavid.
Todd McLellan, late of the San Jose Sharks, is at liberty, his tenure in Northern California having been mutually truncated. He’s already said he’ll consider Edmonton as a possible next career destination.
Another possible coaching free agent, as the hockey world knows, is Detroit’s Mike Babcock. He’s a good son of Saskatoon, former head coach at the University of Lethbridge, a man whose hockey roots include Western Hockey League stints coaching the Moose Jaw Warriors and, more successfully, the Spokane Chiefs.
Would Babcock move on from Detroit, the NHL’s gold standard franchise during Babcock’s decade-long tenure there? Would he return to his Western roots to mentor McDavid and the rest of the skilled young Oilers? Not if Red Wings owner Mike Illitch and general manager Ken Holland get their way.
Holland was heard from on Friday, by the way, saying that money would “be no object” for Illitch, in terms of retaining the services of Babcock. For his part, Babcock said the decision will be up to his boss — by which he meant his wife, and rightly so.
Anyway, McLellan, Babcock, possibly Ken Hitchcock, a good Sherwood Park boy, or Marc Crawford, among others, could be in the Oilers coaching conversation. Rarely in club history have the Oilers had so much “hand,” as George Costanza might have put it, when it comes to hiring a top-quality head coach.
For that matter, Bob Nicholson, CEO of the Oilers Entertainment Group instantly became even more brilliant than many perceive him to be immediately after the Oilers won the right to draft McDavid at the NHL draft on June 26. Everyone in Oilers hockey operations got smarter, including Peter Chiarelli, the new, “hit-the-ground-running” general manager.
Not to diminish Nicholson’s well-documented skills as a consensus builder, networker, and assembler of teams, but the strength of Hockey Canada is founded on two key things; the power of the brand, which is rooted in this country’s long and rich hockey heritage; and the wealth of elite talent Canada continues to produce.
The first job of the hockey federation CEO is not to screw that up. His second is to leverage the opportunity to the hilt. Nicholson did both tasks exceedingly well during his years with Hockey Canada.
It is suddenly Nicholson’s good fortune or splendid timing — or both — that he has been given firm command of the helm just as the Oilers are on the cusp of the McDavid era.
If the Oilers don’t screw this up, there are generations of young hockey fans who will soon associate this growing, maturing, multi-faceted city with this smart, swift, skilled centre from Newmarket, Ont.
Edmonton? That’s the city where, among many other appealing things, Connor McDavid plays, isn’t it? It sure is. jmackinnon@ edmontonjournal.com