Writers Gonna Write
Posted 9:57 AM ET | Comments 2
Perhaps a rambling blog, so the TLDR first: If everyone's an expert, no one is.
I think bloggers, commentators and TSN analysts who have been writing about the Oilers recently are a bit like conspiracy theorists: you'd tend to believe them if they were saying things that were even remotely similar. Instead, some think the CIA is using KFC for mind control others contend the FBI is doing it, and others still have figured the CIA to brainwash us with Sirius satellite radio TM.
With the Oilers, you don't hear many of these guys And perhaps even worse than with conspiracy theorists, they pretend like they're saying things that are remotely compatible. You ever notice that everyone pretends that the problems in Edmonton are
A) wholly evident to anyone who's paying attention (I've been guilty of this) and
B) can be boiled down to bite-sized nugget(s)?
I'll explain why that is.
So first, a grand proportion of the commentators see the Oilers very infrequently. On the nationally televised games scale, the Oilers are frankly not a good enough sell for consistent Canadian or American air time so this is understandable. Seeing a team infrequently is not completely at odds with not being in the know about what’s wrong with them, but air time is scarce to convey these points. It’s not a leisurely 2 hour call-in show. So the message gets condensed, for the benefit of the fans who don’t normally watch them, and the veneer of It’s-All-So-Simple-ism pervades in an attempt to reassure the audience they’re not getting the short story, they're getting the whole story. "There's a lot of things that need improving on the Oilers, and some are improving on their own but maybe not, but some need immediate attention but to be honest the things we think need that attention didn't seem apparent to me last year so it's tough to know whether they'd just be being reactionary but sometimes being reactionary is a good thing when you've been bad for this long or whatever" doesn't make for great television.
And of course there are those who really don’t have a pulse on what’s going on, so this scrunching is doubly damaging to the quality of the analysis. I watch and listen to american feeds quite often as an East coast oilers fan, and I must say this crunch to provide definitive expertise doesn't seem to be as strong with them. Often, they speak from what they know: the Oilers are young, the Oilers are bad, and the Oilers can look phenomenal in track meets if the other team tries to be too run-and-gun. Then, they watch the game and comment based on that. Some Canadian commentators on the other hand seem to know by watching that Jeff Petry doesn't eat good pre-game meals and Yakupov only spent 38 minutes on the exercise bike yesterday. You can see it in his Corsi!
Last, I wanted to spell out the two narratives and what they’re trying to accomplish. If you’re looking to pontificate about the Oilers, make sure it’s either ABOUT THE PLAYERS or ABOUT MANAGEMENT. Either way, the rant, whether verbal or written, should always start with “with so much talented accumulated over the last X years, why can’t the Oilers seem to take the next step?”
If you’re writing about the players, you’re doing so because a lot of time has past - 4, 7, 12 years, pick a number and that’s how long the Oilers have been rebuilding - and these guys are talented. That forms an easy parallel to a bunch of less-talented try-hards in Calgary, a city which happens to be in the same province as Edmonton. Wow, this is really shaping up! What if Calgary has only been rebuilding for 1 year, and they’re guys are slightly older? What if they haven’t turned over coaching responsibilities a couple times? It’s an easy article to write - it writes itself - and we’ve heard it a number of times: the players on this professional hockey team are talented but petulant and poor leaders because there are players on a professional hockey team 300km away that are less talented but have had more success this season.
Bonus: If you write about the draft a lot, you’re doing it in part because these guys you vouched for made you look like a fool. You were in Hall’s corner, backing his compete level. You called Eberle a steal for his ability to step up in big games. You claimed Nuge was a no-brainer whose defensive talent was what the team needed, and whether you remember it or not Ken Campbell, you said Yakupov was too talented to pass up on. Your product is your opinions, and they damaged the market for your product.
If you’re writing about Management, this one’s even easier: Everyone who used to play for the Oilers + Steve Tambellini is an amorphous blob, and different drafts are different.
Let’s face it: timeframes are confusing, and if we acknowledge that Kevin Lowe has been here continuously and used to play hockey with the guy who’s here now, then 3 years of Lowe courting the big fish at all costs, 4 years of Tambellini grabbing reclamation projects, firing coaches and relying on youth, and 9 month of MacT cleaning the rain gutters and courting toughness can all be amalgamated into one endeavour. There’s a benefit to this, and it’s that it adds a desperation level that undercuts that the spoils of even 7 years of rebuilding are all about of sub-25 year old players. Indeed, putting the Hall as the face of a 7-year rebuild is a bit of strategery to suggest the old adage that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, when in fact the Oilers actually did different things over and over again and got the same results.
This narrative has a comparison bonus too: Look at Pittsburgh! Just Loo- are you even looking!?! Look at Chicago. Look at Boston and Detroit..
The Oilers are fat cats that wiped their mouths with first round draft picks. They casually glanced at the top prospects and took the name next to the #1 in the rankings. Teams like Boston and Detroit, ye downtrodden original sixers of nary a dozen consecutive playoff appearances had to pick at the table scraps to find talent.
And even amongst their fellow One-Percenters of the hockey world Chicago and Pittsburgh (Drop Washington, the story is getting too complicated), they’ve failed to surround their prospect-vessel with enough units of leadership. As if one Toews is essentially a Hall, and one Bill Guerin is essentially a Ryan Smyth. And don’t forget that at approximately 541 days into the rebuild, Pittsburgh’s REBUILD-SUCCESS coefficient was 0.61. Chicago’s was 0.82. Edmonton’s: 0.58. By 717 days, Edmonton dropped to 0.54! Look, I’m not deaf to the fact that there’s truth in these narratives, but they’re more compelling than they are thoughtful.
Very very recently, there’s a hybrid approach called “they picked the wrong players”. That both blames management and asserts that these players don’t have what it takes to make the best of a bad situation. And the response is often trotted out: for the Oilers being where they were, Hall-Nuge is essentially on par with hindsight’s best pairing Seguin-Landeskog (remember Skinner-Larsson?), and what you’re really talking about is Yakupov Vs. Murray. And since Yakupov lead rookies in scoring last year and Murray didn’t play an NHL game, what you’re really talking about is that the failure of the rebuild has come at a consequence of Yakupov’s failure to outperform Murray over this 70 game stretch. So that’s a bright future of internet, microwave-ready expertise. A brighter future at least than the Oilers have (and everyone knows why).
I think bloggers, commentators and TSN analysts who have been writing about the Oilers recently are a bit like conspiracy theorists: you'd tend to believe them if they were saying things that were even remotely similar. Instead, some think the CIA is using KFC for mind control others contend the FBI is doing it, and others still have figured the CIA to brainwash us with Sirius satellite radio TM.
With the Oilers, you don't hear many of these guys And perhaps even worse than with conspiracy theorists, they pretend like they're saying things that are remotely compatible. You ever notice that everyone pretends that the problems in Edmonton are
A) wholly evident to anyone who's paying attention (I've been guilty of this) and
B) can be boiled down to bite-sized nugget(s)?
I'll explain why that is.
So first, a grand proportion of the commentators see the Oilers very infrequently. On the nationally televised games scale, the Oilers are frankly not a good enough sell for consistent Canadian or American air time so this is understandable. Seeing a team infrequently is not completely at odds with not being in the know about what’s wrong with them, but air time is scarce to convey these points. It’s not a leisurely 2 hour call-in show. So the message gets condensed, for the benefit of the fans who don’t normally watch them, and the veneer of It’s-All-So-Simple-ism pervades in an attempt to reassure the audience they’re not getting the short story, they're getting the whole story. "There's a lot of things that need improving on the Oilers, and some are improving on their own but maybe not, but some need immediate attention but to be honest the things we think need that attention didn't seem apparent to me last year so it's tough to know whether they'd just be being reactionary but sometimes being reactionary is a good thing when you've been bad for this long or whatever" doesn't make for great television.
And of course there are those who really don’t have a pulse on what’s going on, so this scrunching is doubly damaging to the quality of the analysis. I watch and listen to american feeds quite often as an East coast oilers fan, and I must say this crunch to provide definitive expertise doesn't seem to be as strong with them. Often, they speak from what they know: the Oilers are young, the Oilers are bad, and the Oilers can look phenomenal in track meets if the other team tries to be too run-and-gun. Then, they watch the game and comment based on that. Some Canadian commentators on the other hand seem to know by watching that Jeff Petry doesn't eat good pre-game meals and Yakupov only spent 38 minutes on the exercise bike yesterday. You can see it in his Corsi!
Last, I wanted to spell out the two narratives and what they’re trying to accomplish. If you’re looking to pontificate about the Oilers, make sure it’s either ABOUT THE PLAYERS or ABOUT MANAGEMENT. Either way, the rant, whether verbal or written, should always start with “with so much talented accumulated over the last X years, why can’t the Oilers seem to take the next step?”
If you’re writing about the players, you’re doing so because a lot of time has past - 4, 7, 12 years, pick a number and that’s how long the Oilers have been rebuilding - and these guys are talented. That forms an easy parallel to a bunch of less-talented try-hards in Calgary, a city which happens to be in the same province as Edmonton. Wow, this is really shaping up! What if Calgary has only been rebuilding for 1 year, and they’re guys are slightly older? What if they haven’t turned over coaching responsibilities a couple times? It’s an easy article to write - it writes itself - and we’ve heard it a number of times: the players on this professional hockey team are talented but petulant and poor leaders because there are players on a professional hockey team 300km away that are less talented but have had more success this season.
Bonus: If you write about the draft a lot, you’re doing it in part because these guys you vouched for made you look like a fool. You were in Hall’s corner, backing his compete level. You called Eberle a steal for his ability to step up in big games. You claimed Nuge was a no-brainer whose defensive talent was what the team needed, and whether you remember it or not Ken Campbell, you said Yakupov was too talented to pass up on. Your product is your opinions, and they damaged the market for your product.
If you’re writing about Management, this one’s even easier: Everyone who used to play for the Oilers + Steve Tambellini is an amorphous blob, and different drafts are different.
Let’s face it: timeframes are confusing, and if we acknowledge that Kevin Lowe has been here continuously and used to play hockey with the guy who’s here now, then 3 years of Lowe courting the big fish at all costs, 4 years of Tambellini grabbing reclamation projects, firing coaches and relying on youth, and 9 month of MacT cleaning the rain gutters and courting toughness can all be amalgamated into one endeavour. There’s a benefit to this, and it’s that it adds a desperation level that undercuts that the spoils of even 7 years of rebuilding are all about of sub-25 year old players. Indeed, putting the Hall as the face of a 7-year rebuild is a bit of strategery to suggest the old adage that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”, when in fact the Oilers actually did different things over and over again and got the same results.
This narrative has a comparison bonus too: Look at Pittsburgh! Just Loo- are you even looking!?! Look at Chicago. Look at Boston and Detroit..
The Oilers are fat cats that wiped their mouths with first round draft picks. They casually glanced at the top prospects and took the name next to the #1 in the rankings. Teams like Boston and Detroit, ye downtrodden original sixers of nary a dozen consecutive playoff appearances had to pick at the table scraps to find talent.
And even amongst their fellow One-Percenters of the hockey world Chicago and Pittsburgh (Drop Washington, the story is getting too complicated), they’ve failed to surround their prospect-vessel with enough units of leadership. As if one Toews is essentially a Hall, and one Bill Guerin is essentially a Ryan Smyth. And don’t forget that at approximately 541 days into the rebuild, Pittsburgh’s REBUILD-SUCCESS coefficient was 0.61. Chicago’s was 0.82. Edmonton’s: 0.58. By 717 days, Edmonton dropped to 0.54! Look, I’m not deaf to the fact that there’s truth in these narratives, but they’re more compelling than they are thoughtful.
Very very recently, there’s a hybrid approach called “they picked the wrong players”. That both blames management and asserts that these players don’t have what it takes to make the best of a bad situation. And the response is often trotted out: for the Oilers being where they were, Hall-Nuge is essentially on par with hindsight’s best pairing Seguin-Landeskog (remember Skinner-Larsson?), and what you’re really talking about is Yakupov Vs. Murray. And since Yakupov lead rookies in scoring last year and Murray didn’t play an NHL game, what you’re really talking about is that the failure of the rebuild has come at a consequence of Yakupov’s failure to outperform Murray over this 70 game stretch. So that’s a bright future of internet, microwave-ready expertise. A brighter future at least than the Oilers have (and everyone knows why).
Mad writing, brotha.
Wow... That was quite the read! Nicely done, bud!