The Edmonton Oilers & Making Sense Of All This

By Kurt Leavins |

It was a dark and stormy night.

The first night in December, in fact, and those dark storm clouds are swirling around the Edmonton Oilers. This season has not gone the way anyone thought it would, no matter if you predicted a playoff run or yet another rebuilding season. Here we are, last place. Again. Sigh.

The loss in Toronto Monday night, or more to the point the way in which they lost to the worst team in the “weaker” East, has seemingly caused the landscape to shift beneath the players skates. Long suffering fans no longer appear the lone frustrated ones. It would seem the club’s head office now is, too.

Yes, I am using the words “appear” and “seem” very carefully and selectively. This did not result from one frustrated comment from a coach at the end of his rope. No, this has come from the men in charge, Bob Nicholson and Peter Chiarelli. Both men have, in one week, swung from becoming “difficult” for the media to reach to granting one-on-one interviews on national sports networks.

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Suddenly, select beat reporters (or are they commentators, it’s so hard to tell these days) breathlessly repeat “what they have just learned”. It all seems so real, doesn’t it? The whole “we’re mad as hell, and ready to trade off ‘soft’ assets like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Jordan Eberle” thing? Brilliant. It has the whole town in a real tizzy, doesn’t it?

Look, friends, 9 and a half times out of ten, multi-million dollar corporations like The Edmonton Oilers Entertainment Group control the message. They are very careful which words are passed along, how and by whom. This isn’t at all to insinuate that they, or the reporters transporting the message, are lying. But they are keenly aware what, tactically, is good for business.

In Edmonton, what does that mean…good for business? Well, these days, with the oil patch in the state that it is, the local economy is increasingly being driven by the downtown arena project and the many tentacles reaching from it through the rest of the Ice District. The project and it’s related side-bars are keeping the Edmonton economy putt-ing along, and investors…well…investing.

But pouring all of that capital and concrete into the North Downtown only makes good financial sense if other people (who DON’T work for the Edmonton Oilers) are willing to sink their money into these projects, too. And most smart investors will never throw good money after bad. It has to be a reasonable (READ: Winning) bet.

Does this mean that Nicholson and Chiarelli are not really serious about trading playing previously thought to be in “the core”? No, I believe Bob Nicholson (an honorable man) is being honest with us when he says that if the right package comes along, his new General Manager would have to seriously look at it.

But if you think that has not been the case all along, think again. Everything, for the right price, is always for sale. Of all the cities in which I should not have to point this fact out, it is Edmonton, Alberta. Y’know…the former home of Wayne Gretzky? You remember that business deal, right? Lordy.

My bet is that while disappointed with where the team is in the standings (these are competitive men with good reputations in the game, after all), the Oilers brass doesn’t think that they are all that far off, really.

So before they go ahead and consider trading two precious assets like Eberle (the team’s best pure goal scorer) and Nugent-Hopkins (their best 2-way forward), they need to ensure two things:

–One, that they can get full value for these assets, if in fact they DO need to move along. A trade has to be “the step to the next level”, and not what acquiring Derek Roy was to this team a year ago. That’s not happening, right now. Both are currently devalued.

–Two, that when the players hear that Todd McLellan and Peter Chiarelli are going nowhere, it is understood that this is their problem to solve. The Toronto loss wasn’t as much about talent as it was about will. Or is that “won’t”. Most everything else has changed. It’s the player’s turn, now.

Yes, friends, what we are currently witnessing is a good, old fashioned shakeup. You’ve seen Slapshot, in particular the scene where reporter Dicky Dunn has the hapless Chiefs being sold to a retirement group in Florida?

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Would an Edmonton version of that plot shake something loose, help re-set Peter Chiarelli‘s project and make the good old War Memorial, er…Rexall Place…a happier place, for all involved?

We shall soon see, trade or no trade.

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