No, no, no. It wasn’t supposed to go like this at all. There was a coaching change. Penner was on fire and Comrie got tricked into playing here by Kay-Z for a kazoo and a shiny bag of tokens to Galaxyland. Now we are trapped in a City on the verge of being torn apart by H1N1 infected zombies and the Oil are minutes from being declared “crappy” by all except our precious last few folk to depart the bandwagon each year. Oh, and winter can’t be more than 11 minutes away if it hasn’t already arrived since we last looked out the window.

Nothing left to do but throw up a gang sign, take a picture of ourselves and throw it up on the Nation for all to see how much this season is affecting our current state of mind.

Thursday: Check.

Poker: Check.

Oilers Game: Check.

Beer of choice: Old Vienna.

Crushed: Check.

Winner of Poker: Wanye.

Second place/First Loser: Young Cheezy.

Half of the room no longer giving a crap about the Oilers: Check.

We can’t quite put our finger on it right now, but something seems wrong with the Edmonton Oilers Ice Hockey Squadron/League of Quasi-Ordinary Gentlemen. Wasn’t it a few short weeks ago everything looked splendid? How has the team fallen so far so fast to the point that one guy at poker was heard to remark “if the Oil are going to be this crappy maybe we should turn down the game and turn up some poker music.”

This type of talk is just emotional nonsensery in our mind, so we turned to the Department of Science at Wanye Enterprises and asked for a quick recap of the season to date, using empirical evidence and the like. The boys in the lab came up with this:

The fact that the last 11 straight games have been on PPV may actually be a blessing for the Oilers, who can hope that a great many of their fans are too weakened by this raging swine flu pandemic/epidemic to have been able to activate their Shaw on Demand devices. In this state of near transmogriphication into H1N1 Zombies, perhaps a great swath of the OilersNation hasn’t had to bear witness to this unexplicably shitanusly© terrible team.

What is the deal here exactly? Is this illness related? We put it to the newly reborn Nation Poll and 46% of us think that the teams woes stem from illness not hockey skillery. As sick as the team is, thank the Gods of hockey the Oil weren’t immunized against anything, or at the very least Kay-Z had everyone report to a clinic located 12 miles underground where they were either given the least effective flu shots in the history of medical science or this illness is the side effect of a super syrum that will lead to exponential muscle growth over the next 3 months.

Either way, we have that little panicky feeling in the pit of our stomach already. It’s way too early for that emotion to be rearing it’s ugly head.

No matter what nice things are being said about bygones being bygones, boys being boys, head injuries being head injuries, Iginla’s hit on Souray being accidental and Big Sexy not looking for revenge you can forget about it. We had an interesting chat yesterday with one of our 3.4 actual sources that know anything and this is a transcript of how we remember the conversation going down:

Wanye: How is Souray feeling?

Source Dude: Not bad, I guess it sorta comes and goes at times but overall he is feeling better.

Wanye: That blows. He took a pretty nasty hit.

Source Dude: Yep and he is chomping at the bit to beat the shit out of Iginla when they meet up.

Wanye: Really? I thought I heard that he wasn’t pissed about it/that it was an accident or something.

Source Dude: Let me tell you something “Wanye.” Souray is probably one of three people in the NHL I am afraid of. He has absolutely no mercy and won’t let someone put him out for weeks on end without revenge. It might not happen his first game back against Calgary, but at some point in the near future you can count on those two fighting and Souray is going to man handle him.

Wanye: Do you think you could get him to sign my face so I could turn it into a tattoo?

Source Dude: I don’t know why I even answer your calls sometimes.

So at a time in the season where there doesn’t seem to be much to get excited about, we can at least look forward to Big Sexy’s return to the lineup and a 5 alarm beat down in the future for one Jarome Iginla.

Other than that though….UGH