Living off the luck of lotteries
Jordan Eberle was in Vegas when the Oilers won the lottery that changed everything, which was just about right.
There’s a casino stapled to the side of the new Edmonton hockey rink, which is just about perfect. There’s also an old casino, the Baccarat, and it’s still sitting next door, abandoned and disused, surrounded by dirt in anticipation of some yet-to-be-decided building project.
If you want hockey metaphors, Edmonton is the place to be.
Yes, the Oilers finally won the lottery that mattered, and now a visit here not only features a gleaming new arena festooned with the relics of better days — the wall of historical pucks that Glen Sather scooped up and eventually forget he had stashed in his garage in Banff, marked up and scuffed and each one a totem, was a personal favourite — but the most exciting player in hockey in Connor McDavid.
The Leafs have their own version, and more than that. Everything is different now, because luck is an animating force in hockey.
“The history of the Oilers is so deep in this community, with Wayne (Gretzky) and Mark (Messier) and everyone,” said Oilers president Bob Nicholson, steps away from display cases featuring Gretzky jerseys from the WHA and the Canada Cup.
“But putting this building in place, it’s about the new team. And it’s important for this team to get successful. We haven’t been in the playoffs for 10 years, and we have a special player to help us do that.”
“It’s very exciting,” said Leafs centre Auston Matthews, the No. 1 pick who followed McDavid this summer. “I mean, just look at this team — we’ve got seven rookies in the lineup, I think? It’s pretty crazy.
“You don’t see that very often, and I think a lot of us have had really good impacts on the team, whether it’s offensively, defensively, everybody’s really working hard and just trying to get better every day, so I definitely think it’s exciting, not just for this team but for the whole league.”
The Leafs and Oilers have been twinned punchlines for a hell of a long time; one in the East, one in the West, one combined playoff appearance in the last decade, in a lockout-shortened sea- son.
Then they won the two most coveted lotteries in that time — McDavid, the greatest prize going, and Matthews — with 11.5 per cent and 20 per cent odds, respectively. And everything changed.
“I was actually on vacation,” says Eberle of the McDavid draft lottery. “It was right after the season ended, so we obviously weren’t in the playoffs, and I had to go to the world championships but I had about a week and a half off, so (me and my family) were actually in Vegas. We were just sitting around the pool, and I got about 40 text messages.
“At the time we were a bit tempered, because there’s been a lot of these players that everyone kind of, especially in the first couple picks in the NHL, they always blow them up to be the next big thing, right?
“I mean, obviously every one of them is a great player, but there’s only so many that really turn into the Crosbys, the Ovechkins.
“Even right now, obviously he’s off to an unbelievable start and the talent he has is amazing . . . you don’t want to blow it up crazy until you start getting some really big wins.”
Too late for suppressing expectations, probably, despite the fact that Edmonton and Toronto have holes beyond their promising core players. Edmonton’s locker room has four replica Stanley Cups spotlit as you enter; the statue of Wayne Gretzky hoisting the Cup stands outside the press conference room, whose floor-to-ceiling windows attract sidewalk gawkers as the coach answers questions inside. (Let’s all hope that Oilers fans start to bring protest signs if the going gets tough.)
Without McDavid, it would all seem as distant as Toronto’s worship of its modest relics did before things began to turn.
“You know, let’s be honest, this has got to be pretty exciting,” said Leafs coach Mike Babcock.
“I’ve been to Edmonton a long time, used to coach Red Deer College, and to come in and see this building . . . (Ryan) Nugent-Hopkins is a real good player, (Leon) Draisaitl is a real good player, but McDavid looks like he’s different than everybody else.
“Last time I saw somebody go faster than the whole league was Bobby Orr. I was nine years old. And this guy’s faster than the whole league, and it’s incredible to watch.”
Sports has been set up so that if you are rigorous enough in your incompetence, eventually you might get a chance at a saviour. Edmonton came upon it accidentally; Toronto was more deliberate.
And while McDavid trumps everything, you could argue over which franchise has the brighter future.
Brian Burke once derided tanking, saying, “You can say, Pittsburgh. Well, Pittsburgh picked a ball out of a drum to get Sidney Crosby. Don’t tell me there was any skill there. When you say, gee, what a great rebuilding job they did — they won a goddamned lottery. I know; I came in second.
“You know what I say every time I see Sidney?
“‘This close, Sid. You were this close to being a Duck.’ ”
But he wasn’t, and everything changed there, too. Sometimes you have to be lucky before you can be good.