Connor McDavid didn’t exactly sugarcoat Edmonton’s season after the Oilers were bounced last spring. He called it what a lot of fans had already been saying for months.
“We were an average team all year,” McDavid said. “An average team with high expectations. We just never found it.”
That was the problem in a nutshell. The Oilers spent the year looking like a team that could be better, but too often never actually being it.
They struggled to put together complete games, gave away passes, periods and games, and went through most of the schedule trying to win three straight. Edmonton came into the season with another long playoff run in mind and finished with only two winning streaks of at least three games.
McDavid also pointed to the mindset that can creep in after back-to-back trips to the Stanley Cup Final.
“I don't want to say we took it for granted, or (there was) complacency,” McDavid said. “You know, you go to a Cup Final two years in a row, you feel pretty good about your group.
That when it matters you're going to be able to turn it on. And who knows?
Without injuries, maybe we could have.”
That kind of self-assessment lines up almost perfectly with what Oilers fans were saying all season long. They wanted a team with McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, Evan Bouchard, Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins to play a full 60 minutes.
They wanted effort they could count on night after night. They wanted Edmonton to start looking like a winning team before the playoffs showed up.
That’s not a crazy ask, especially when the cost of being there is so steep. An Oilers ticket can run a fan hundreds of dollars before parking, food and drinks even enter the picture. People paying that kind of money have every right to expect players making millions to deliver more than the same old stop-and-start act.
“The league's too good - teams are too good - to not go through the checkpoints that you have to go through in a season,” McDavid said.
Edmonton didn’t clear those checkpoints nearly often enough. The team had trouble stacking wins, and when the playoffs arrived, it still hadn’t fully defined the style it wanted to lean on.
Draisaitl has come to the same conclusion, and he didn’t mince words about what last season lacked.
“We just have to understand that this is where you build your game for games (85) and on,” Draisaitl said. “Winning environments.
Winning streaks. Knowing exactly what the perfect game for you as a team looks like.
You have to create that over the (84) games, and I don't think we did that at all last season. I don't think we ever really figured out what our ‘A’ game really was.
“That's going to be our No. 1 task in the regular season.”
That’s the part that drove people in Edmonton nuts: the streaks never came early, the starts were often slow, and the effort level didn’t always match the roster. The Oilers kept getting chances to clean it up and never found a fix that stuck. Night after night, the same concerns kept coming back.
Now Mike Babcock has inherited a group that knows exactly what the complaints were.
“He's just so clear,” Draisaitl said of Babcock. “He knows what this team needs, and he doesn't shy away from telling you straight to your face.
He's a real man about it, and we're all men in here. We all want to win; we're all here for the same reason.
I think he's going to be great for us.”
Babcock’s role is going to revolve around accountability, because the expectations are already there. The talent is already there, too. What has to follow is the way McDavid and Draisaitl are now describing it - the daily standard, the foundation, the kind of habits that hold up over 84 games.
“Everything’s great in June. ‘Yeah, I’m going to do this.
Yeah, I’m going to do that.’ Wait till we go to camp, and we have to do that,” Babcock said on CHED 880.
“They’re going to get to know me, I’m going to get to know them, and we’re going to try to make each other better.
“The bottom line is, until I’m out there with them every day - until I watch them - I’m not going to know,” he continued. “We have a plan. We know exactly what we’re going to do, but we’re ready to adjust a little bit at the start as well, and then build a foundation of just trying to get better every single day.
“Making each other accountable, and having a great time doing it.”
That’s the language the fan base wanted all along: 60 minutes, winning streaks, consistency, accountability. It was coming from the stands before it started coming from the stars and the coach.
Now the Oilers are saying it too.
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