Chicago 3, Edmonton 2, Reality 1, Oilers 0!
The Edmonton Oilers’ countdown to the playoffs is over, and it was a thriller to the end! Connor McDavid, Edmonton’s hot-handed hub-city hero, "heads" home head held high, with 9 points (5g, 4a, 9pts, +1) in just four qualifier games. Sadly though, for fans of the Edmonton Oilers, all the numbers in the world won’t add up to a shot at the Stanley Cup, as the Chicago Blackhawks took the series with a 3-2 win in game 4.
The series’ outcome left the Oilers brass perturbed at the prospect of watching the rest of the Western Conference playoffs play out in their own arena without any Oilers’ representation whatsoever. Unable to sleep following the game, Oilers Head Coach, Dave Tippett; General Manager and Director of Hockey Operations, Ken Holland; Director of Salary Cap Management, Bill Scott; and alternate governors for Oiler Entertainment Group, Wayne Gretzky, and Kevin Lowe convened a four-hour meeting to dissect the corpse of the 2019-2020 season, and vivisect their lingering hopes for obtaining play-off berth through some sort of lawsuit. In a bid to reassure their fans that everything would be okay, the Oilers released a transcript of the meeting, unedited, unredacted and reproduced below, in full:
00:00:00 - - 03:56:58 All: …
03:56:59: Holland: “F*** it. Soooo…Blame it on Covid and same thing next year? All in favour?”
03:57:03: All: “Aye!”
03:59:01: Tippett: “Wait. Shouldn’t we address the fact that the team with the leagues’ two highest scoring forwards finished 12th in points percentage and only fifth in its own conference?”
03:59:58: Gretzky and Lowe: “Scott?”
03:59:59: Scott: “Wrong attitude, Tippett. Wrong attitude. Quinn, Renney, Krueger, Eakins, Nelson, McLellan, and Hitchcock say ‘Hi.’”
04:00:00: Holland: “You guys want to go check out that drive-in beer garden? I hear the Bevilacqua sisters are good to go!”
While the Oilers’ decision to stay the course and ride the horse that got them here seems to have convinced their fans that doing nothing new is the sure fire way to turn things around, Vegas odds makers were less optimistic. Going into next season, and every season, Reality is expected to continue to dominate the Oilers playoff hopes, weighing in as the hefty 1000 – 0 favourite. Said “Smooth” Edward Armes, “Sometimes the Oilers are just bad; sometimes a pandemic results in a post-season where the fifth place team can be eliminated by the twelfth place team. One day maybe the Oilers will play well but global warming melts all of the ice. Doesn’t matter. The Oilers just don’t make the playoffs.”
Despite dealing with their personal grief, the McDavid faithful took a moment to express gratitude and concern for their valiant captain. Said McDavid Superfan, Monica Ashante, “He
should walk with his head held high! He has six years left on his eight-year deal and he needs to know we love him here. It
breaks my heart to think that right now, he must be burying his head in his hands.”
Less sympathetic was Blackhawk’s forward Dominik Kubalik who scored the series-winning goal. “That eight-year deal is all on him. He deserves every minute of it. After all, the only way you can hold your head high and bury it in your hands is with a double face-palm.”
The Oilers are next inaction.