Snow finally fell in Edmonton last night, blanketing a city that knew it was coming sooner or later. It is an eventuality here, like giant Vs of south-flying Canada geese, winter nights that begin at about 4:30 p.m., and a hockey team that finishes 30th — but leads the National Hockey League in moral victories.
It is truly a case of cruel and unusual punishment that a group of hockey fans this dedicated — who bleed blue and orange the way a Northern Albertan does through another long, cold winter — has been at the bottom of the heap for as long as Oilers fans have.
This season marks the tenth consecutive year without an Oilers playoff berth, a new NHL record for futility that brands this as the least successful organization in the history of a league born in 1917.
What else are you going to do on a snowy, blowy Monday night in Edmonton but watch the Oilers and hope? Yet this has been — save for one glorious run in 2006 — a team that hasn't had a prayer of winning a Stanley Cup since about 1992.
The bar that has been set and re-set is now at limbo level here, and as the Oilers opened a five-game Eastern swing Monday night in Washington, they somehow managed to sneak under it once more. It is truly an art, the plethora of ways this team has invented to measure success — without earning that traditional marker, the two points at the end of the effort.
"I thought Edmonton was the better club tonight," Washington Capitals head coach Barry Trotz told reporters in D.C., after Dmitry Orlov executed the perfect, top-corner slap shot with 6:32 remaining for the only goal in a 1-0 Capitals win. "They're quick on the puck, and they're making things happen. They got way more quality scoring chances than we created.
"(They're) missing McDavid… They've really got some structure in their game. If you turn pucks over in the neutral zone, they're going to come at you real quick the other way. They're going to have an exciting team," he recited. "I thought we were the lesser club."
It's absolutely true: As former GM Craig MacTavish once said, the Oilers truly are "visually better." They have structure. They don't quit. They can hang in a tough, hard-fought road battle like Monday's without coughing up the catastrophic mistake that has decided so many games in this team's recent past.
A month ago to the day, Edmonton was dominated 7-4 at home to these same Capitals. Monday night, the best player on the ice by a country mile was Caps goalie Brayden Holtby, and the Oilers — with an offence that is middle-of-the-pack in the NHL — simply couldn't get one past him.
"We don't get the points but I think we've improved from a month ago," McLellan told reporters after the game. "We certainly have defensively, and offensively we created enough to come away with a win. We just didn't get it done."
There are a ton of positives here. Really, there are. All you have to do is compare today's team to the insufferable one that Oilers fans have had inflicted on them for the past seven or eight years.
From goaltending, to defensive play, to the maturation of Taylor Hall's game, to the arrival of Leon Draisaitl and Darnell Nurse. But in a town that has measured success from the bottom of the standings for so long, the fact the playoffs are long out of sight on Nov. 24 is as predictable and sickening occurrence as (for many) lifting that snow shovel off the hook on the garage wall on Tuesday morning.
So, McLellan's job is to somehow erase the past six or seven seasons, where the Oilers spun their wheels like a morning commuter, and get everyone to focus on the fact that real, true progress is being made.
Progress that is almost tangible.
"If anybody leaves the rink with their heads hanging down I'm going to kick them in the butt," McLellan said Monday. "We've used the term 'moral victory' more than once this year. The points are very, very important in the standings, but the growth and the development of the team is just as important. We lost the points but grew as a team."
"Do you ever grow tired of moral victories?" Veteran reporter Jim Matheson of the Edmonton Journal asked McLellan.
"I'm tired of not putting points in the bank, but I'm satisfied with progress. We're getting better."
Justin Schultz is expected to return to the Oilers' blue-line by the week's end, and with Nurse becoming a top-four defenceman, it is expected that Griffin Reinhart will be sent to the minors to make room. They'd rather move former captain Andrew Ference out, but his no-movement clause forbids that.
And soon, Connor McDavid will return. In Edmonton, that'll be about as good as it gets this winter.
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