The Edmonton Oilers and Their Version of "The Truth"
According to the NHL, players' salaries are the root of all evil. It's the reason why many teams can't win. Its why those teams make terrible trades and clueless free agent signings. It's why some arenas are half empty.
To see a classic example of men in suits dodging responsibility for problems of their own making, look no further than Edmonton.
The chairman of the Edmonton Oilers says the team is finished if the next NHL collective agreement does not include a salary cap. Cal Nichols told the National Post the Oilers will either be sold or "suspended" if the league backs down on the "cost certainty" issue.
"This isn't sabre-rattling. It's the truth," Nichols told the Post. "I have no desire to keep doing what I'm doing and I would recommend that we suspend the franchise and look at our options, or at moving it."
The Oilers' general manager made similar comments a couple of months ago.
"I would not do this job for another four years under what I just went through the last four years," said Kevin Lowe. "It was too difficult, too difficult emotionally, spiritually, psychologically."
But recent history suggests that payroll is the least of the Oilers' problems.
Kevin Lowe's angst is understandable. It's always hard on the spirit when a team has no clue how to draft young talent.
Consider the following first-round choices made by Edmonton over the last decade:
Between them, the above Edmonton picks have appeared in less than 300 NHL games, scoring 15 goals.
Everyone knows the draft is a crap shoot. Every team misses guys, every team makes bad picks. Still, that's one heck of a draft record.
In Lowe's defense, all those disastrous picks were made before he took over. It's too early to judge Lowe's draft record, but nobody has made him look like a genius yet.
As the article also notes, "In recent years, Edmonton has shipped key players like Curtis Joseph, Doug Weight, Bill Guerin and Anson Carter away for financial concerns."
No mention of the fact that apart from Joseph, the Oilers dumped each of these guys at exactly the right time - when the price was rising and the productivity was either levelling off or dropping.
The problem isn't the trades - which in each case turned out to be a regrettable acquisition for the player's new employer. The problem is what Edmonton got in return: Doug Weight to St. Louis for Marty Reasoner, Jochen Hecht and Jan Horacek? When you give away an asset like Weight, you should expect to have trouble making the playoffs.
And by the way, which team signed Adam Oates to a $1.95-million free agent deal in 2003-04, even though he was 41 years old and obviously washed up?
If Cal Nichols and Kevin Lowe want to claim that money gives the Rangers and Flyers and Leafs an advantage over northern Alberta, that's credible. (Though it must also be acknowledged that the rich teams rarely put that advantage to good use.)
But to blame the Oilers' competitive woes on players' salaries is a cover-up.
The real source of trouble in Edmonton is that for too long, nobody there knew how to run a hockey team.
Comments
And what do you have to say now that the Oilers played to game 7 of the cup in the “new” nhl?
Are you kidding me?
This season spoke for itself.
Maybe there’s washed up journalist somewhere who could start up a real franchise in st.johns and show us all how it’s done.
The Oilers had a fanstastic playoff run in 2006, no doubt about it.
Does that mean all their problems in the previous 10-15 years were somebody else’s fault?
I notice that neither of you guys defended the series of disastrous draft picks I listed. Or the return on the Doug Weight trade. Or the Oates signing. The ‘06 playoff run doesn’t change the point of this article: the Oilers were lousy for too long because they were badly operated for too long.
Kevin Lowe and the Oiler deserve full credit for building the team that came within a game of the Stanley Cup. They should also accept the blame for not coming anywhere near the Stanley Cup in the years before that.