Hi everyone, my name is Zach Laing, and I’m the managing editor of Oilersnation and news director of The Nation Network. Today, we have an important announcement to share about the future of the company.

Some of you may be familiar with the network, but for those who aren’t, we have expansive coverage of the National Hockey League, featuring coverage of the Vancouver Canucks, Calgary Flames, and Toronto Maple Leafs, as well as the MLB’s Toronto Blue Jays and the NBA’s Toronto Raptors, under the TNN brand.

The Nation Network has further reach too, with properties like HockeyFights and our flagship national brand, Daily Faceoff. Originally started as a fantasy hockey resource site with tools, line combinations, and starting goaltenders, the “DFO” team has grown over the years, and now features a world-class group of news writers, bringing high-level analysis, editorial, and up-to-the-minute news.

Today, The Nation Network is here to announce that, beginning today, we will be transitioning the names of our hockey team sites to verticals under the Daily Faceoff brand.

“We are very excited about this next chapter because of what it unlocks for our business,” said Jay Downton, co-founder and president of The Nation Network. “By taking this step, we will be able to unlock more content for our fans, provide greater opportunities for our teammates, and ultimately drive the next step for TNN and Daily Faceoff as a hockey platform.

“This evolution to our hockey sites will help us unlock stronger connections to both the teams and the league, and we look forward to continuing to empower our trusted teams to create high-quality local content for Oilers fans.”

The Oilersnation YouTube channel and social media accounts have already begun being switched over to the new name and branding, and over the next few months, you’ll see changes on the website as well, culminating in a full change to Daily Faceoff Edmonton in January 2027.

But fear not — nothing is going to change here. In fact, we hope that this new name will unlock even more doors for us here at The Nation Network to bring even better coverage to you, the reader. Baggedmilk will still have his Monday mailbags, Michael Menzies will continue his Sunday Scrambles, Jason Gregor’s musings won’t be going anywhere, and we’ll continue to provide the best coverage of the Edmonton Oilers you can find on the internet. None of our past articles will go away, either, so you can continue to look back at some of the classics.

On a personal note, as someone who has written at Oilersnation for 10 years now, the change is undoubtedly bittersweet, but I’m excited to see what the future holds. That’s a sentiment that seems to be shared with my colleagues, and given ON is the site that started it all in the network, I sat down with our fearless leader, Jay Downton, last week, to bring you all a more in-depth discussion about the name change.

Zach Laing: Alright, Jay, the time has come for the name change. From your perspective, tell me a little bit about what led to it, and what the name change entails.

Jay Downton: Well, jokingly enough, we’ve turned 18, and we’re becoming adults, so maybe we have to operate as an adult, and not so much as the wild childs that we’ve been for so long. But joking aside, as we kind of reverse engineer what TNN can be, given the opportunity that’s in front of it, it just made a lot of sense to start actually treating the sports under TNN as a brand and giving it a brand identity. Constantly hear when we’re going and talking to partners, the confusion that we create of what is The Nation Network? How does DailyFaceoff fit with that? How does, you know, Flames Nation fit with that? So, you know, it creates a lot of brand confusion when we’re talking to people. Also, when you’re talking to the audience, they don’t know what’s connected to what, that Daily Faceoff’s connected to that, or this is connected to that. It just kind of helps try to bring and glue things together, which, if we want to unlock the next step, this is something that allows us to do that. And also allows the Daily Faceoff brand, which has always been our league-wide brand, to properly have its true light in the sun of being a hockey brand.

We’re never going to change the tone of who we are, you know. You know, in Edmonton, an Oilers fan is a member of Oilersnation. That’s not dying. That’s who we talk to. That is how this was born. Same as a Flames fan — that is Flames Nation. That is the fandom, and that’s who we ultimately serve. Nothing tone-wise is changing from this. We’re going to attack our regional brands with the authenticity that has allowed us to get to where we are. That’s never going to change. But now everything’s in one house, and it’s amazing.

ZL: Talk about the house that Oilersnation is falling under with Daily Faceoff. What led it to being Daily Faceoff as the one that Oilersnation will, and all of the other Nation sites, fall underneath?

JD: So we went through the exercise of “well, let’s just create an own identity for every market.” And then you go through all that, and some of them just don’t fit well; it feels like you’re forcing it. And then, you know, you get to a point of “Hey, this, I can kind of live with this,” but then you go and put it all together, and you’re like, “this is confusing.” It’s been a very emotional experience because I’ve just been so hung up on this structure just because that’s all we knew. But the fact that now we can just, from a brand perspective, connect Edmonton to this really strong hockey brand and then create our own sub-brand within it that is a content vehicle that serves Oilersnation, just like it’ll serve CanucksArmy or serve Flamesnation in terms of fans of teams. It just kind of sits well. Edmonton’s been a beast for us. Oilersnation’s been a beast for us and will continue to be. It’s the foundation of the house now. It’ll help feed this super important brand for hockey as opposed to being this disjointed thing.

It makes expansion a lot easier because, you know, we own the Daily Faceoff name, right? We own that. No one can put up a guardrail in another market as they can right now and block us from going into another regional market. The other thing is it’s going to open doors for us as a business from a content perspective; our ultimate stakeholder is the community, is the audience, right? We are members of that, and we want to make sure there’s content there that represents us in each of the markets, and also from a league-wide perspective. And this is now going to allow us to get better access to things. It’s going to kind of break down some of the barriers that we’ve constantly faced under the kind of the old structure.

ZL: 18 years of Oilersnation. Did you ever think, in your wildest dreams, that the company would be where it is today?

JD: Honestly, no. I’ve said this before, but the V1 business plan for the Nation was for Wanye and I, was to be something that could make our car payments, buy our season tickets, and pay for our golf memberships. If it did that, this was a home run project. As it started and started unlocking things, you’re like, “Holy crap, this could be more.” But what’s more? Then you redefine what your new definition of more is. You get there, holy cow, actually this could be more. Oh, this could be more, this could be more. And then you know, you are in a situation now where your mission statement is to be the number one digital sports media brand in Canada, which is crazy, especially given kind of the landscape from 2007 to now. The opportunity is actually real, it’s there, and it’s because, you know, we started something 18 years ago with low expectations, but it was designed to represent the audience and the fan. And we thought there was a connection there and room on the shelf or something like this and then kind of just their reaction is what, you know, created this kind of crazy flywheel to get us where we are today. So yeah, it’s impossible to imagine it is where it is.

ZL: Last one. There’s going to be a party in September, a funeral, however you want to put it. What does that mean to you to have this kind of final send-off to Oilersnation as it’s been known? What can the Nation Citizens expect?

JD: There’s been a lot of internal discussion about calling it a funeral, but it wouldn’t be The Nation if we tried to soften it or whatnot. Let’s have fun with it and go over the top and have a goddamn funeral. I think what you can expect is for us to reaffirm we’re not changing who we are, but it’s also a moment of celebration. We’ve made so many friends along the way with this community, right? We go to watch parties, we go to games, we go on Nation Vacations, and you just meet all these wonderful people. If there’s anything that this event’s for, it’s an event for us to all get in a room together, and just tell stories, looking back at these crazy times we had, then just reaffirm that we’ll do this again in 18 years. Let’s just kind of pause and freeze this moment in time, and let’s bring in these people that have been a big part of the community.

Zach Laing is Oilersnation’s managing editor and The Nation Network’s news director. He can be followed on X at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach.laing@bettercollective.com.