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This season will be a failure without playoffs for Oilers |
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What would you consider a successful Oiler season? It’s a question I saw this morning. It gets asked every year and now that training camp is right around the corner there it is again, showing its stupid face once more time. So what is it? What would I consider a successful season for the Edmonton Oilers?
Maybe if you look at a lottery team from the year before the rational and reasonable part of your brain starts to scream “BABY STEPS! BE HAPPY WITH BABY STEPS!” And there’s a lot to that. Edmonton was brutal last year. When your club finishes 29th the year before, what are you really going to expect the following season? Sure, we want the Oilers to be better but if they stay competitive for most of the season and finish 5th in the Division then that’s progress, right?
No.
No more free passes. We shouldn’t be judging this team on incremental improvement. It has been a decade out of the playoffs and 7 long years since this team told us that they were “Rebuilding”. We are talking about what constitutes a successful season in the National Hockey League for a professional sports franchise. Success for every team is the same damn thing: Make the playoffs and compete for the Stanley Cup. That’s it. Setting the bar any lower, like we have been for years, has just been empowering this false franchise to mail it in.
The Edmonton Oilers shouldn’t be exempt from regular expectations, especially not after this summer. After 10 long years out of the playoffs and a good portion of that time in lottery territory, it’s about time to expect greatness. This franchise has wasted all of my patience. This franchise has drafted 1st overall 4 bloody times and added a 3rd, a 4th, and a 7th overall. They’ve been at this for so long and been so terrible at building a hockey team that they already had to trade the guy they started this rebuild with to fix a problem that’s been nagging the club the whole time.
That actually is a big part of the reason why our definition of success has to be Playoffs at the bare minimum. This team just traded away its highest scoring player and a kid who was the face of the franchise until McDavid was drafted. This isn’t shuffling the chairs around the room. This is a huge change. This is it. As far as I’m concerned, if this team is out hunting for defensive defensemen to round out the blueline then that MUST mean we are close. Otherwise the move just doesn’t make sense.
If this team traded Taylor Hall and doesn’t make the Playoffs as the result then this season will be an absolute failure and everyone involved should be fired. The cost of that move can only be paid back with actual success. The Oilers can apply for an extension on handing in a team that isn’t a complete joke, but I’m denying the request.
Only adding to the urgency required for this team to actually amount to something is the ticking time-bomb that is McDavid’s ELC. The team has this season and next to commit the lowest amount of their Cap to McDavid that he will ever get until he is a 38 year old man in the twilight of his career. McDavid’s next contract will be max length at no less than 9 million dollars unless his agent takes a blow to the head between now and the date the contract is signed. That means even more changes are likely to occur unless the Cap jumps. There wont be enough room for everyone.
Edmonton does not have the luxury of being a bad team for longer without closing a window on themselves. The only thing that matters, the only thing that will deem this season a success, is getting into the Playoffs. The bar has been set too low for too long. There is no viable excuse for this team. They have had the time and the opportunity to get better. They have made a massive change to fill an organizational need. There is no reason why we should hold this franchise to a standard that is different than the 29 other teams in the NHL.
Playoffs. Anything short of that is abject failure.
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Edmonton Oilers Blogger • 
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