[browna]

In this day and age especially, you have to sell magazines with "burning hot takes" and with an element of taking a wild card and hoping they fluke out, in order to pretend they know what they were talking about and gain some credibility.

For well over a decade, the experts and want to be experts have been picking the Oilers in preseason.

First it was assumed they'd get back to the SCF in 2007 or 2008 because they overpaid everyone on the 2006 team to stay.

When that failed, it was going to be Quinn and Renney leading them, along with Khabibhulin.

Then it was going to because they on paper they had all these top draft picks that couldn't lose like Hall.

Then it was because they surely couldn't be bad two or three years in a row with guys like Hall Yakoupov and Ebele.

Then they got McDavid, so substitute his name in there as far as on paper talent and desperate hope, and the cycle starts again.

They then won a playoff round so start the cycle again.

Now it's been how many years, picked because on paper they look good and pumped up by offseason organization media campaigning to pull media members to be nice to them.

The Oilers get picked by these idiots who are again thinking they cant surely be this bad year after year. And picked for the aforementioned hope that they may fluke out and do well, so that said publication gets credit for calling something no one else does even if it's now going on 13 seasons and one playoff appearance.