National Post (National Edition)
WELL, YEAH, OK. GO OILERS! I GUESS
MENTALLY ERASING A DECADE’S WORTH OF DREADFULNESS IS A CHALLENGE
The Edmonton Oilers’ last playoff game, a 3-1 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes in Game Seven of the Stanley Cup final, took place on June 19, 2006. I will spare you the usual list of pop-culture trivia about that date — you know the columnist’s trick here: mention the records that were topping the charts (mostly ragtime piano and recitations of patriotic poetry, I reckon), the box-office hits in the cinema (silent Westerns? Birth of a Nation?), that sort of thing.
I can assure you that absolutely nobody in Edmonton needs some contrived example to develop an instinctive feeling for how long it has been since Game Seven. In our minds we started the clock running immediately after the final whistle, and have since had to replace it a few times.
It is enough for any of us to look in the mirror.
I have a beard that was 10-percent grey when that game was played: it is more like five-sixths now. One hair, perhaps, for every Oilers loss.
After the first five or six years elapsed, editors in Toronto began to ask me every so often if I wanted to write an account for the Oilers’ perpetual, record-obliterating dreadfulness.
I ran clean out of amusing mathematical ways to describe it. The Oilers were the dominant team in the National Hockey League from 1984 to 1990; their period of anti-dominance, of being a gullible, crony-plagued laughingstock, ending up lasting much longer.
When the Oilers fell into their funk toward the second half of 2006-07, and it became clear after a couple of more years that they were unlikely to struggle free immediately, I started to imagine a large-scale strategic picture of a race to bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada.
I thought ebulliently at the time that the main threat would end up being the Montreal Canadiens, and who knows?
That might still be true. The Habs are a very goalie-dependent team, and when it comes to handicapping the playoffs there are two contradictory lines of argument I am never totally sure how to reconcile.
One is that you demonstrably don’t need a superstar goalie to win the Stanley Cup.
In 2006, Cam Ward, no slamdunk Hall of Famer, barely prevented Jussi Markkanen from lifting one for us.
And if you are betting on playoff series, it is wisest to ignore or down-weight goaltending almost completely.
But the other is that most truly elite goaltenders have seemingly won at least one Stanley Cup. There are counter-examples, but one tends to imagine, perhaps superstitiously, that somebody as good as Carey Price will go on a puck-stopping rampage in the playoffs at least once in his prime.
Then again ... how’s that working out for Montreal so far?
It turned out that the Oilers had plenty of time to stumble at the start of the race to bring home the Cup. They had time to stumble, soil themselves, tear a knee ligament, have a surgery or two, visit a Tibetan lamasery in search of enlightenment, and come back to the starting line.
I do not see the Oilers as a strong Cup contender this year, and I wonder how the new mallpark-style arena will influence their home-ice advantage in playoff games. Northlands/Skyreach/ Rexall Place was a secret weapon we cannot be certain we have truly replaced.
But the overall field seems more open than usual, with the league’s balance of power moving eastward fast from its longtime western locus. This edition of the Oilers would, frankly, not be threatening the 100-point mark in the standings if the axis of the hockey world had not wobbled away from the left coast a little.
The truth is, I haven’t watched much hockey in 2017.
About a year-and-a-half ago I realized that watching sports less intimately familiar to me — soccer, basketball, just about anything else — involves a species of innocent pleasure that it is hard to derive from the Oilers, even with Connor McDavid wearing their silks.
As an Edmonton taxpayer, voter, and political and social observer, I have eaten much from the Tree of Knowledge since 2006. Indeed, I feel I have hardly eaten anything else. It has been four thousand days of apple pie and candied apples and applesauce for dinner every night.
The sight of Oiler hockey confronts me with memories of arrogance and stupidity: they remind me of the team’s occasional veiled threats to shove off for warmer climes, its marionette-like use and abuse of local politicians, its endless cynical flogging of a receding history of greatness, its propensity for foreseeably poor decisions.
And now that they are back in the NHL playoffs, I know I will either become an ordinary fan again and forget all this immediately — though without forgetting to be ashamed of forgetting — or I will remain detached, and thus be left adrift in a celebrating city, a mere spectator of joy.
A man thinking: “How nice for all those happy young people.”
TURNED OUT THE OILERS HAD PLENTY OF TIME TO STUMBLE.