HOCKEY: In the Box with Brent & Craig
Do They Know It’s Christmas?
Three more games, three more losses have the Oilers, leaving their fans and Brent & Craig pretty rocked before the holidays. What the hell is happening? Why can’t they score? Will your columnists beat the 27 times they said the F word last week?
Read on – presented by Home & OPENING VERY SOON Away YEG.
Dec 9
Bruins 3
Oilers 2
Craig Douglas
At least the effort was there? This one had a resemblance to the games from the good months of this season (I.e. not fucking December) and you could almost believe the Oil were going to pull it off and end the losing streak at a dismal (but doable) three games. It was certainly better than the preceding couple of games where they blew it early and often. So an A for effort (more like a B-, but that’s not how the expression goes) but another fucking F for the result. The Oil weren’t massively outplayed like they were against Minnesota, they didn’t fail to show up at all like they did when they lost to LA, they didn’t embarrass themselves losing to an expansion team the way they did when they started his fucking streak against the Krakens. They ran into a goalie playing way above his head (Ullmark sucks) and just kind of never got that third goal and ran out of time before they could tie it up and at least absorb a sad loser point. At least the same thing won’t happen just 48 hours later, right? Fuck!
Brent Oliver
I watched this whole thing as an Oilers fan, hockey fan, and fan of my starting goalie in the Dungarees fantasy hockey league, Linus Ullmark. I decided to bench him for the game because I wanted a reason to cheer against him that wouldn’t hurt my chances of that sweet sweet cash prize at the end of the season. Well, he stood on his fucking head and made me fucking love and hate him – much like my relationship to this goddamn local fucking sports team. The Oilers played well enough to win, but didn’t. Why? Who the fuck knows. I’m gonna point the finger at coaching, but during this losing streak – the two best players in the world have been held off the scoresheet at an alarming fucking clip, so everyone is to blame.
Dec 11
Hurricanes 3
Oilers 1
Craig Douglas
After last week when I discovered that the Minnesota broadcast had my favorite out of market announcers. It stands to reason that this week I would find my least favorite ones: Mike Maniscalco and Tripp Tracy. You suck. These two fucking goofballs would not stop debating the merits of Sebastian Aho and Connor McDavid, because Aho was drafted 35th overall in 2015. You know that classic debate that no one in the world is having except for these two tossers. If they’d just mentioned it once because they wanted to point out that both are good players who entered the league at around the same time, that would be fine and I’d have forgotten about it seconds later, but they kept at it, displaying various stats and side by side comparisons over and over again until they looked like complete idiots. Aho is a great player and absolutely no one is trying to say that he isn’t, but no one in the world is sitting around playing a game of which player would you rather have between the two. They topped it off by saying that Aho was “definitely the best 2015 draft pick during this game so far”. Which, maybe? Maybe Aho was better than McDavid for about half an hour that one time. Maybe.
When they weren’t doing that, they weren’t much better, continually praising their players mugging the hell out of Oiler forwards in their end of the ice as “another great defensive play”. Anyways, they completely sucked and I’m talking about them because I don’t want to talk about another game where the Oil fell behind early, couldn’t come up with a dagger when they needed it, got outplayed wildly in the goaltending department, and pissed away another game on this fucking home stand. Remember that two game stretch against Vegas and Pittsburgh where they scored first in both games and didn’t have to play from behind the whole fucking time? The last time they got any fucking points? Me too, friends, me too.
Brent Oliver
I have a very nice friend who runs a very nice couple of bars downtown, take me to this piece of shit hockey game. I even managed to make it on Hockey Night in Canada for sarcastically chiding the refs! Anyways..
From the perspective live in the building, the Oilers got zero breaks. Carolina is a very good defensive team, and when they get the chance to score – they normally do (see, Aho). The Oil also got zero favours from the stripes having McDavid and Hyman be pulled down or tackled at least 3 times that I could see, resulting in zero power plays. I’m beginning to believe all the conspiracy theories out there that the refs have been told not to call things on our skilled players to keep their point totals down – which makes zero fucking sense. Don’t you think a league that has this incredible talent would want to showcase it? Like, seriously guys. Get it to-fucking-gether.
Finally, I think I will always hate the Carolina Hurricanes. Whether is was 2006, their dumb name, their dumb jerseys, the fact they used to be the Hartford Fucking Whalers, Rod Fuck You Brind’amour with his stupid face and dumb last name… but I will always love Ethan Bear. The one silver lining was this hockey hero to indigenous communities was greeted like a returning hero including a very long standing ovation during a commercial break. He being on that trash team makes me hate them even more.
Dec 14
Maple Leafs 5
Oilers 1
Craig Douglas
Another game, another loss, and another instance of being unable to get a puck past a really good goalie. Hmmmmm, maybe the Oilers should have gotten one of those really good goalies to play in their net. Even as a life long Leafs fan, I was still hoping for the Oil to score the first goal, just for their fucking nonexistent morale, and then I just hoped that the game would go in to loser point time and max out the points for my two favorite teams. When they were awarded a power play less than two minutes in things were looking okay, but then Kassian took an unsurprising penalty (what the fuck was he doing on the ice during a power play?) and pissed away that prime opportunity. The rest of the game was a heaping helping of the same old story: the team looked disinterested and defeated and no one seemed to give even half a fuck that they were getting destroyed in front of their home crowd, the bottom six played like shit and leaked opportunities against and goals against despite scoring the teams only goal, marking the first time in nine games that they contributed any offense besides being offensive to watch, and Koskinen let in five goals on a mere 25 shots. They actually played pretty well for stretches in the earlier parts of the game, and they can be partially excused since they were missing Hyman, McLeod, Russell, etc. however, in no way did this look like a desperate team that was mired in a miserable losing streak, they just looked very meh and the end result reflects the fuck out of that.
The Connor McDavid Player Of The Week Award
It sure would be nice if even one of the players on this team would do something worthy of this (stupid, made up) award even once. The (stupid, made up) award continues to reside in a (stupid, made up) roadside ditch for another week.
Predicsh
12/16 vs Columbus – The beatings will continue until morale improves.
Final score: Blue Jackets 4 Oilers 2
12/18 at Seattle – I refuse to envision any scenario where the Oilers lose to the Krakens again before at least 2024.
Final score: Oilers 3 Krakens 1
12/20 at Anaheim – Finally scoring first and winning a game against Seattle gives them a small boost before the long and grueling road trip ruins their season.
Final score: Oilers 4 Mighty Dicks 2
Well the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. And since we’ve no place to go – WIN SOME FUCKING GAMES.
See you next week – In The Box.
