64 in 51

After last night’s win against the Sharks, the Edmonton Oilers head into the All-Star Break with 64 points in 51 games. I repeat. The Oilers have 64 points in 51 games. I don’t know what to do with my hands.

With the Oilers finally patching up the holes and turning their sinking ship around after a decade of darkness, it’s almost surreal to look back and see just how bad this team has been over that span of time. To put it bluntly, the Oilers have been awful at nearly everything apart from winning draft lotteries. Nothing drives home that point quite like having the Oilers pass their points total from previous years with 31 games left on the schedule. Take a moment to think about the amazing mismanagement that it must have taken to make that happen. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

My friends, that’s the kind of sadness that even Freud himself wouldn’t even be able to wrap his mind around. 

Much like when a dog leaves a steamy turd inside your house, I plan on rubbing your nose in Oilers failure a little bit (don’t actually do that to your dog btw) to prove a point. As I mentioned above, the Edmonton Oilers surpassed their points totals from three of the past 10 seasons with last night’s win over the Sharks, and that fact alone is both disturbing and sad. It doesn’t make sense that there are still 31 games left in the season and we’ve already cleared the high watermark from as recent as two years ago.

Check out the numbers:

Frankly, I don’t know how the hell we’ve been able to watch hockey over these past few years considering the Oilers haven’t even been in the ballpark of competitive. I know how many of you are here with us each and every night, and, I think, that support from your fellow citizens is one of the only reasons we haven’t all lost our minds. Being 20 games under .500 is madness, and the Oilers should consider themselves lucky that the NHL doesn’t relegate the worst of the worst.

With all of the crap and shitacular® hockey that we’ve had to live through over the past decade, it would make sense that we don’t know how to handle this recent turn of events. Not only are the Oilers playing a competitive brand of hockey for the first time in ages, they’re also challenging for the division lead and marching their way towards the playoffs for the first time since 2006. That’s a lot of change for a fan base that watched another 29th place finish a year ago and I think we should all take some time to appreciate the journey. 

While we don’t yet know how the season will turn out, I’m saying that we should still relish the scenes from the movie that’s playing out before our eyes. It goes without saying that this change of pace from the Groundhog’s Day of sadness is worth being happy about. I don’t care if fans from other franchises think we’re annoying on Twitter, or that the only reason we are where we are is because we won the lottery, because we’ve earned the right to take shots back at everyone that used the Oilers as a decade-long punchline.

We deserve to finally watch a good hockey team, and that includes chirping each and every person that doubted that this would ever happen. It’s been a long time coming, my friends, and I plan on being insufferable once the Oilers finally clinch. Frankly, the rest of the league deserves it.