[Cecil Terwilliger]

What We Learned: At least you’re not an Edmonton Oilers fan

We're all going through a pretty tough time right now. Preseason games are already canceled league-wide, and even if you don't like preseason games — glorified AHL games featuring two players you've heard of — what the lack of those games portends is at least significant.

But even if this affects you more deeply than other fans -- such as if you're a season-ticket holder or had one of your planned handful of trips to the rink slated for early October -- you can lean back in your chair right now and be thankful that your team isn't actively trying to wage a psychological war on you.

That is, if you're a fan of any team but the Edmonton Oilers.

In case you've not heard, the Oilers are going through a bit of a situation right now. The Edmonton City Council was all set to help owner Darryl Katz fund the construction of a new arena, which is probably needed because Rexall Place is a decrepit hellhole, as well as a business district designed to revitalize the city's downtown area.Now Katz wants more money because of… well, I'm pretty sure there's a good reason.

First Katz started making noise about how if the city doesn't give him the money, they might not be able to build the arena at all. That quickly devolved into his more or less threatening to move the team to who-knows-where and take with it all the promise that its current young roster plainly holds. Larry Brooks was right when he called it a shakedown.

Oilers fans are getting edgy. The prospect of the team moving out of a hockey-crazy market like Edmonton seems slim, especially with so few viable relocation options currently anywhere in the US or Canada. Plus, what with all the warring over revenues at the league level, it seems more likely that Gary Bettman would try to force Katz to sell the team rather than let him just move it to Kansas City or wherever.

Nonetheless, this hasn't stopped the Oilers themselves from trying to leverage that ill feeling among its fanbase into pressure on the city council itself. The situation may have come to a head on Saturday night, when the team's official Twitter feed retweeted a story from John MacKinnon, who seems to think the whole thing has gotten a bit silly if nothing else.
The text of that tweet?

"Oilers not locked into [Edmonton]. [Arena] deal fail would mean loss of NHL club."

In it, MacKinnon said that for local residents, ponying up the extra money Katz wants is probably a preferable outcome to losing the team altogether.

That the Oilers' official feed retweeted the story says a lot: That this is the kind of depth to which the organization is willing to stoop to get what it wants, and perhaps that the Journal, which has been a hype man for Katz not unlike the Mouth of Sauron these past several months, is going to function as a propagandist for the duration of the war.

This is deplorable stuff from the Oilers and Katz, essentially telling the fans that if they don't start leaning on their city council members, and by extension fund the arena deal with money out of their own pockets, then they will lose their team. The move is cartoonish in its cynical villainy, holding a city's love of a bad hockey team hostage to bilk taxpayers out of $25 million more than they'd already committed to the project. The way things are going Katz is about a week away from building a giant machine to block out the sun.

He's within his rights to do it, I guess, but he doesn't have to be such a [expletive] about it.

http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nhl-pu...6562--nhl.html

I added the emphasis on my favorite parts. Especially the last highlighted line comparing Katz to Mr Burns.