History of an Oilers Fan – Part 4
In this edition of my “History of an Oilers Fan” summer series, I focus on the 2006 cup run, to the present. If you need to catch up, check out part 1, part 2, and part 3.
2006 was hands down, the most exciting playoff run of my life! I had a couple of buddies at work who were die hard Oilers fans like me, and we watched most of the games that spring together. It was amazing to have gone so long without any post season success and all of a sudden find your team in the finals for the first time in 16 years! Half my life had gone by since they knocked of the Bruins to win their 5th Stanley Cup. Man, did my wallet and my liver take a shit kicking during those playoff months! Knocking off Detroit in the first round was unreal, yet I don’t think anyone could have predicted how far we would go. Down 2 games to 0 vs San Jose in round 2? No problem. In fact we won the next 4 straight and then the first 3 games vs the Ducks in round 3! 7 straight Playoff wins, unbelievable. Game 1, Stanley Cup Finals. We take the lead, we have everything under control and then…. It all ends. Rollie goes down injured. Conklin comes in to replace him and lays an egg, our forwards loose their confidence. We end up dropping both games in Carolina before grabbing game 3 back in edmonton, only to loose game 4 and be faced with the near impossible task of coming from a 3 games to 1 series deficit. We all know what happened, we clawed and fought our way back to tie the series and force a game 7. My highlight of the entire
playoff run? Game 5 vs Carolina, overtime, shorthanded: Pisani strips Sillman of the puck the offensive zone, and wires one top shelf past Cam Ward to win and keep the Oil alive! I jumped about 5 feet in the air, and my buddies claim to this day I left a dent in the floor of the sports bar we were at! I was so jacked up for game 7, I could picture team captain “Gator” Jason Smith hoisting Lord Stanley’s cup. I replayed the thought in my head all day at work. I couldn’t focus, it was like Christmas morning as a little kid, except better. Of course we would go on to loose a heart breaker that evening, perhaps a game that we were never even really in. And of course I along with all Oilers fans were crushed and disappointed. Adding insult to injury was Pronger asking to be traded following an incredible playoff drive that gave Oilers fans hope for the future. Pronger’s inevitable trade would set the team back at least a year or 2 and I don’t they have still fully recovered from that. Ryan Smyth, would be traded the following year at the deadline changing the face of the franchise yet again.
The next 3 seasons following ‘06 were filled with hope, disappointment, frustration, anger and disbelief at how close we came, and how far we had fallen in such a short time. It was like we had gone back to the pre-lockout struggles of not being able to compete with the elite teams but without the excuse of being a small market team. In the summer of 2008 Daryl Katz purchased the Oilers and attempted to make a huge splash by landing a big free agent. They led the Oilers faithful the believe that they were on the cusp of signing Marian Hossa to a huge contract. Of course the unwillingness of free agents to sign in Oil Country has been well documented and is perhaps more a subject for it’s own post here. The Oilers, under the ownership of Daryl Katz, will be more competitive from a dollars and cents standpoint. The EIG era had run it’s course in Edmonton and it was the right time for a change.
The 2008/2009 season was perhaps as frustrating as any I have endured as an Oilers fan. I was living in Mexico for the entire season. Televised games were readily available at many bars around the town I lived, so I had many opportunities to watch my Oilers. One bar owner, from Calgary, would always give me a hard time when I asked him to put on the Edmonton games. Normally I would listen to either the 630 ched radio broadcast or try to get a live video stream online. Regardless of how I did it, I rarely missed a game. When the Oilers fell apart in late March 2009, I didn’t know what to think. We had a playoff spot secured only a couple weeks before, and we let it slip away. It was obvious to me that this team was in disarray.
Following another non playoff season, the third in as many years, MacT took the first bullet. GM Steve Tambellini promised change, and his desire to get bigger and harder to play against. It doesn’t look as though he accomplished his goal this summer, but with Pat Quinn and Tom Renney coming in as Coach and Associate Coach there is room for some optimism. Is it enough to avoid a 4th straight season with no playoffs? I don’t think many Oilers fans would stand for that, mind you I probably said the exact same thing last summer about a 3rd straight season with no playoffs!
first round exit and the odd 2nd round exit was hard to take. In 1994 when the Vancouver Canucks took a run to the finals only to meet Mark Messier and the Rangers, I was finally back in a city with some hockey excitement! One night I was at my grade 12 grad party at a downtown Vancouver hotel during the finals. A group of use were heading up the escalator to the ball room for our grad dinner and who was on his way down on the opposite side? “Iron” Mike “freekin’” Keenan! As people started to notice him they all started heckling him. Me on the other hand just could never get into the Canucks. I guess it was bitterness between division rivals and the fact that they had been doing better than the Oilers lately. I began praising Keenan on the escalator to the dismay of all my fellow grad class members! I didn’t care though. It was cool. I just couldn’t bring myself to accept the fact that the Canucks were in game 7 of the Stanley Cup final. I watched, biting my tongue many of the games. Sometimes even pretending to be happy when they scored or won. When the Rangers put the final nail in the coffin in that game 7 I could finally relax. The canucks did not win the cup, thank GAWD! I just couldn’t have dealt with that. Unlike when Gretzky was in the finals with L.A., I actually wanted Messier to win. Maybe it was because it was better than having to listen to all the Canucks fans for the next year, or maybe it was because I felt like all those ex-Oilers on the Rangers team winning was almost like a 6th Oilers cup. For whatever reason it was, I’m glad Messier, Lowe, MacTavish, Graves, and all the others got another cup ring.
was a ball of nerves everyday. Junior High was a place where everyone was under the microscope for everything, and there were a number of hockey fans in my school some even Canucks fans. I was at a friends house one evening and the round one of the Jets vs Oilers was on. I think it was game 5 because I remember the Oilers were down 3 games to 1 in the series and Don Cherry was saying that Edmonton was going to come back to win the series and they were going to go on to win the cup. I don’t know how he called that, but I’m glad he did. We did come back to beat the Jets in 7 games, then swept Gretzky and his Kings. There was this guy at school who would wear his Blackhawks jersey every game day in the playoffs, and I was ragging on him a bit one day during the 3rd round series between the Oilers and the Hawks. Nothing major, but he obviously took it too personally. He tackled me in the hallway, put me in a head lock and told me not to make fun of him or his hockey team. He was way bigger than me so I decided that it would be in my best interest to agree! We actually later became casual friends, so obviously the damage wasn’t too severe. However once we disposed of Chicago I had to deal with the many Boston Bruins fans that ran rampant in my school. Where the hell did they all come from? I mean, there were more Bruins Jersey’s, hats, and shirts than Oilers and Edmonton is only a short 1 and a half hour flight away? Me and my Oiler buddy watched and cheered every game of that playoff run. It was the first of the 5 Stanley Cups wins that I was really engulfed in, and watched every moment of. The Oilers didn’t just beat the Bruins. We destroyed them for the second time in 3 years in the Cup finals! It was awesome. I went to school a few days later sporting my new Oilers 5 Stanley Cup shirt. All the Bruins fans hated me, yet they kept pretty quite about it. It was a great feeling.
friends house doing whatever 8 year olds do. Everyone else was inside glued to their t.v.’s and soon enough so were my friend and I. I can’t recall much of the game but I remember the count down to end the third period, and everyone was counting along. I remember all the cars on 106th street leaning on their horns for hours following the game. I remember at school the next day the announcement the principle made over the p.a. congratulating our beloved hockey team. In fact at my elementary school they used to read out the previous nights hockey scores over the p.a. every morning, I thought that was pretty cool and a great reflection of how big hockey was to the city.