That's me in the corner....

I've been an Oilers fan for as long as I can remember, though obviously it's a little different when you're six years old compared to when you're 26. Somehow I became one though, mostly I'm sure, because when you're six years old in 1987, there's only one guy you cheer for and one team you cheer for, even if you live in the middle of Southwestern Ontario. I distinctly remember being an Oilers fan not just because of Gretzky though, but because my brother and two cousins of similar age were Oilers fans as well, for obvious reasons. Bandwagon jumping is permissible at that age.

Anyway, I moved to South America for four years when I was seven, far far away from HNIC and cousins and all that. I kept up with the Oilers (in the loosest sense of the term) through the weekly Miami Herald our organization would get, so that's how I'd know when they'd clinched a playoff spot and whatnot. I still remember my dad calling me into the living room in August 1988 to tell me he had some bad news. I didn't understand why Gretzky couldn't just refuse to be traded, why he'd want to play in LA anyway. I was told he wouldn’t be allowed to play hockey at all then, which I guess was an easier answer than getting into contract law with a seven year old. I don't remember the 1990 Cup at all, my only knowledge of it came from a 1990-1991 sticker collector book a relative sent me. I think that's how Bill Ranford became my favourite player, in fact. In any case, being overseas probably saved me from Leafs fandom; when we got back my cousins were Leafs fans, and my brother soon became one as well. I managed to stay faithful, despite the successes the Leafs had in 93 and 94, and only being able to watch one or two Oilers games a year. And then there’s the telling anecdote about how when my cousins and brother and I would play road hockey in our respective driveways and we'd find NHL players to "be" while we'd play, I got stuck with being Petr Klima or Craig Simpson or, lowest of lows, Kevin Todd. Meanwhile, they were Gilmour and Andreychuk and Clark and so on. At least I got to be Ranford in net.


Fast forward to the latter half of the 90's, and the "success" the Oilers had in 97 and 98 had me believing that if they just had the money to keep the players they wanted, Sather could put together a competitive team at a fraction of the cost. Billy Beane before I knew who that was. Or most anyone not in baseball did. I certainly fell for the long running complaint about how small market teams couldn’t afford to keep their stars around, but I remember remarking to a friend around that time that I wasn’t too worried about what players the Oilers lost so long as Sather was still the GM. I figured they’d always remain at least on the fringes of competitiveness at the least, until that magical day somewhere down the line when the Oilers wouldn’t have to worry about money and they’d ascend to their rightful place at the top of the league. 2005 comes, and bam, the Oilers trade for Chris Pronger and Mike Peca. A month after that magical day actually arrives we get actual living, breathing superstars (ok, that should be singular) on the team. Right on track, exactly as I always assumed. Sather’s gone, yeah, (and somewhat tarnished by his spectacular failure in NY) but Lowe’s got that Boys On The Bus thing going for him, how could that possibly go wrong? And his thievery of Pronger only goes to show how the hockey gods have once again decided to smile on Edmonton. And that Spacek trade too? Nice. Then there’s that glorious run in the spring of that season, and everything’s clicking. No reason for me to assume anything was wrong with what I’d always thought as an Oilers fan, even if I’d never actually thought about what that was in any depth. It’s the Oilers, they’re smart, they’re exciting, and they can win even without spending big money and buying up all the stars. Just wait till next year….

Next year started four days after Game 7, and actually managed to go downhill from the-best-defenseman-in-the-league-who-also-happens-to-be-signed-to-an-amazing-price-demands-a-trade.

It took a while to dawn on me, but over this past summer, it became too obvious to ignore. Kevin Lowe doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing. The return on the Pronger trade, the inability to shore up the D in 06-07, the return on the Smyth trade (oh, and the fact that the trade occurred in the first place and Smyth wasn’t signed months before the deadline)…. And then this offseason: Penner and the offer sheets, the Souray signing, losing Hejda, that ridiculous offer to Nylander.

I’ve already written and moaned about the Smyth thing, so it shouldn’t be necessary for me to explain how I lost some of the sentimental attachment I had to my team. It was hard, but it would have, could have been manageable. Realizing it was done for all the wrong reasons though, that it was a poor hockey decision as well as a poor money decision, that hurt. A lot.

The Penner and Souray contracts are really what did it for me though, what made me lose the faith. I can handle a rebuild, I can. In this “new NHL”, it seems evident that a successful team needs players performing at a level well above what they’re actually receiving payment for, and the best way to pull that off is with good young players. The kind you get by gathering up good draft picks and prospects, which Lowe was doing in spades. Non-successful teams, on the other hand, went out and overpaid mediocre UFAs on longterm ball-and-chain contracts. Which Lowe went out and did over the summer.

So now where are we? Over the last few months, I’ve had to come to grips with something that shakes to me to my core as a fan of a professional sports team, whatever that counts for. My Edmonton Oilers aren’t anything special. There’s nothing that says that they’ll ever be competitive again. If anything, all signs (even over the last fourteen or so seasons) have pointed to the fact that they’re really very mediocre. But we had an excuse before, I could protest. Now though, now I’m seeing what’s really going on. It’s entirely possible that they’re nothing more special than a team like the Islanders or Bruins or Kings or Panthers or Capitals or …. Or the Leafs. Mediocre teams that make the playoffs sometimes, have a little promise, make some smart moves… but miss the playoffs as well, regress, never fulfill the promise of an auspicious end to the previous season. Make stupid moves in a panic, and worst of all, seem to think it means something is getting done.

So if that’s what I have to look forward to… well, it makes losing Smyth all the more painful. I used to know a guy who didn’t have a favourite team, he had a favourite player. His favourite team was whoever Grant Fuhr was playing for, he kept a scrapbook of Fuhr newspaper articles and everything. It made no sense to me then, but it certainly does now, especially when I find myself cheering for Smyth to score a goal against my very own favourite team, even when my team is down by a goal with an empty net. He was the team’s identity, the guy every non-Oilers fan thought of when they thought of the Oilers, when they had occasion to. But then he was gone, and though it’s survivable, though we Oilers fans have seen this story before, this one hurt even more than normal. And for me, he was just one facet of how I saw my team. My sentimental attachment to the Oilers took a big hit that day, but whatever other attachment I have (it’s all sentimental in the end, isn’t it?) took an even bigger one over the summer. In my mind, we used to be Ryan Smyth’s Oilers, former kings but now paupers; underdogs, but only because of filthy lucre. Once that was fixed we’d be back on our way to our rightful place as a respected and feared team in the league. Now though…. Who are we? This is a vastly different team than the identity I developed for them in my mind over the last few years. And I don’t mean vastly different in the player personnel sense.

But I can’t really ditch the Oilers. I can’t move on to another team. I’m still going to wake up early to watch their games, and I’m still going to schedule a decent amount of plans for my time back in Canada around when Oilers games might happen to be on TV. Like my first full night back, they’re playing Detroit, and I’ll have to work something around watching the game and visiting my grandparents at the same time. Part of the fun of having a favourite team is watching how it’s built from the inside, watching players get drafted, come up through the ranks and make an impact, become a core part of the team. You don’t get that if you have five favourite teams you rotate between, you don’t learn the stories that make the players interesting to you.

And you get to build an identity for them. I’d never thought about what identity I’d given my Oilers in my mind until it was suddenly switched on me, till it was gone. I have no idea how I’ll view my Oilers five years from now, though I’m guessing it’ll be less naively overall. Hopefully it’ll involve a new GM, and maybe even a new owner. But they’ll have an identity in my mind that goes beyond who’s playing for them at the time, and that’s something I won’t be able to just pull out of thin air with any other team, even if I started now.