Happy Canada Day

While there’s zero doubt that this is unlike any July 1st that we’ve ever had on the website, I still wanted to spend a few minutes to wish all of you a safe and happy Canada Day.

For as long as I’ve been working at Oilersnation, my July 1sts have been spent mostly thinking about free agency over anything else. Sometimes I’d be lucky enough to be at the lake, but most years, I’d be hanging out with my laptop, running the live blog, and waiting for something to happen. For us, it’s incredibly important to get news items such as signings up on the site as quickly as possible, not only for you folks to have something to read but also for the Google News robots to pick us up and feature the articles on their news page. For any hockey website, I’d be willing to bet that the NHL Draft and free agency day mark two of the biggest traffic days of the year, and to slide through June and now July 1st without either of them happening like normal has been a strange and confusing change of pace. It’s like, I know I need to write something for today but who knows what that is exactly supposed to be? And with so many other big things happening in the world, how much do sports even matter anyway?

So, instead of being able to post my usual live blog as a place where we can all argue about which free agents the Oilers did or didn’t get signed and make fun of the other GMs for spending too much money, I wanted to instead use the time to share my gratitude for everyone that’s reading this now and continues to check out the site on a regular basis. Thank you for being here now, and thank you for being with us since the NHL shut down back on March 12th. As you can imagine, the lack of hockey (and sports in general) over the last three and a half months has made blogging about the Oilers a lot trickier than it usually is, but the fact that you incredible people keep coming back to look for content makes all of the effort worth it. While we still have no idea when or if life will get anywhere close to being back to normal, we do know that we’re going to keep talking about the team and keep you up to date with what’s going on no matter what that means (yesterday, I got to write about Hunter being on Robot Chicken).

From all of us here at the Nation, I hope each and every one of you has a safe and happy Canada Day. Thank you for spending a few minutes of your day with us — we appreciate it more than you’d imagine. Have a great day off, everyone.