"SSSSSMMMMMYYYYYTTTTTTHHHHH"

— Rocky (in the alternate version of the film, which is about Ryan Smyth coming home to Edmonton)

Good gravy. Can anything with the Oilers be straight forward anymore?

As Sunday dawns, most everyone is calling for Tambo to be publicly pantsed in Churchill Square as a result of what is the apparent bungling of the Ryan Smyth-Gilbert Brule trade. The fact that we read some rare "good work Tambellini" tweets shows how badly many of us wanted this deal to go through and how much street cred Tambo could score if he can still bring back the Mulletian One.

Times are getting hard for the beleaguered Oilers Brass and this episode of the Circus isn’t going to help.

 

Having consulted 3 people in the know* this is not so much a case of Tambo and Company botching the job for the umpteenth time. Rather it is a case of a pack of overzealous media sharks circling at the Draft looking to beat their contemporaries to the punch and jumping the gun.

Unfortunately they jumped the gun by about 4,500 kms announcing the trade all over hells half acre on TV, Radio and the Interwebz devicez.

 

With every reporter under the sun in a 900 way gun fight in Minneapolis this weekend, it should be no surprise that every major media outlet reported the trade as fact. Twitteronians pointed out many instances of it being reported as news:

Unfortunately this exposed a stampeding fan base to a deal that was not done. Tambo was thrown under the bus by the MSM for a deal that was clearly far from complete.

 "Same old shiz – just a different day" – Ace Hood in Hustle Hard

Seriously? Another effed up transaction for the Oilers? It’s easy as an Oilers fan to be out for blood right now. We are sharpening our good stabbing knives at Wanye Manor as we speak. But we need to remember that there are a gillion trades that get close to completion only to fall apart at the last second. If we knew about 2% of the deals that fall to pieces in the 11th hour there wouldn’t be a GM in the league with a job for more than a couple of weeks.

So stow that in your brain banana while you consider hating on Tambellini or Brule right now. It is certainly a strange situation but these sorts of things go on behind closed doors all the live long day. We just don’t get to hear about them.

Having said all of that – offer up a different player to LA instead of Brule. It’s clear their expectations for the player coming back in the deal falls somewhere between "player with a pulse" and "player with a pulse that can be faked long enough to buy him out."

Westridge Elementary Celebrates Canucks Spirit Day from Westridge Elementary on Vimeo.

In hating hard on the Canucks – something we pride ourselves on having done ‘quite effing well thank you very much‘- we can sometimes overlook the fact that there are a great many fantastic folks that follow the team who are devastated by the Cup loss and even more so by the subsequent riots in Vancouver.

Good folks. Hard core fans who have stood by the team for years and gnash their teeth at the bandwagon jumpers who piled on and then rioted their way into international news. And kids too, like the Westridge Elementary school in the video above.

Cam Davie had a nice piece on this video being made over at CanucksArmy. Sometimes it is easy to throw the baby out with the bath water and hate all Canucks fans equally. At least that is what we were told when we went to the Antique Analogies Store for the comparison we just made.

Bottom line: Don’t forget the good fans when you rag on Vancouver. They have hard a tough go.

Speaking of the good fans -.get ready for this too. Imaginary Nation Central Command Hive is buzzing to get this to market as we speak.