I have been a huge advocate for this line of questioning for a long time, ten years ago on these boards I was showing people the (infinitesmal) odds of this happening in a fair competition, and those odds have become even more unbelievably small. Under the rough assumption that every year a quarter of the league is Canadian franchises, there is a 75% chance of the cup NOT going to a Canadian franchise every year. But multiply .75 by itself 26 times and the odds become almost ridiculously small. I'm not into conspiracy theories but something is going on here. And it's clear that it would have to have something to do with the league's highly profitable southern expansion under Bettman. I think that salary/tax stuff plus a total lack of incentive for success on the part of Canadian owners has a lot to do with it. Players have massive incentives to move south, and Canadian owners have zero incentives to improve (whereas Vegas, TB etc had massive incentives to improve and be amazing fast, they couldn't count on revenues and had to compete with other sports).
Honestly? Hockey needs to look long-term and try to get a tiered system going like in soccer. Once you expand past 36 teams you break the league up, and only the top tier competes for the Stanley cup. Top 4 teams from the bottom tier are promoted every year, bottom 4 teams from the top tier are relegated down every year. Awful franchises couldn't count on the revenue stream and would have a real incentive to become at least somewhat good. Reward innovation and success, punish complacency. Otherwise I fear we are looking at a situation which is basically permanent.
I agree with this post.
What amazes me about Canadian hockey fans is how passive people are about the fact that Canadian franchises haven't won for nearly 30 years. I still hear people saying utter brainwashed nonsense like, "WE HAVE TO 'GROW' THE GAME!" What? No, f*** that, we don't. We have to demand that our teams win.
It's doubly painful for long-term Oilers' fans who saw the most dominant athlete in North American pro-sports -- the lynchpin of a Dynasty, at that -- sent to California, resulting in acceleration of the "growth" of the game, as if we should care about that.
Try to imagine, if, in the future, Major League Baseball expanded so that 2/3 of the teams were in Central and South America. And then imagine if a US-based franchise didn't win the World Series for thirty years. Would US sports fans just take that sitting down? Like hell, they would. They'd all be up in arms, and something drastic would happen to either create a US-only League or create a better opportunity for US-based teams to win.
Finally, this season, there's a better-than-average chance for a Canadian-based club to progress back to the Finals, anyway, thanks to the Pandemic. But why the hell hasn't there been a Canadian-only division before? It's the most logical thing to please all factors. It hasn't happened because Canadian sports fans are timid, passive wimps. The NHL org knows Canadian franchises and fans are easy money, and laughs all the way to the bank.
(Rant over.)
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Now, onto the Oilers' organizational problems. I don't agree with all of Draivsaitl's points, but I'm sure some of them are accurate, and yes, clearly there have been big problems with the Oilers' org for many, many years.
The usual things, like big-headed managers appointed for no good reason, croney-ism, and stubborn-ness are big parts of it all. I'm also sure that the difficulty of making Edmonton an attractive place for NHL players to play in is part of the problem. What ex-dynasty members like Lowe and MacTavish needed to have pride in was the FRANCHISE and the FANS, not themselves. But Kevin Lowe, in particular, seems to have rested on his Cup-winning pedigree (to which he was a significant, but not particularly essential, member) to self-justify his own arrogance. Faced with young players coming in who didn't know about Edmonton and might have been unsure about a small-market Canadian franchise, the Oilers' post-millennial org greeted them with: "WE ARE AWESOME EX-PLAYERS WHO KNOW EVERYTHING, SO LISTEN TO US, SON, AND YOU MIGHT LEARN SOMETHING."
In fact, if you talk to players -- like Doug Weight, an American -- who thrived in Edmonton, they'll tell you they loved the fans and the hockey-passion of the city. They got wrapped up in how BIG the team was in the small community, and thrived on the "small us vs. big everyone else" role.
One of the most beautiful things about the Oilers' Dynasty era in the mid-1980s was that it was a giant middle-finger to the Eastern power-centers of the NHL who desperately didn't want Vancouver, and esp. Edmonton, Quebec, and Winnipeg, to join the League. The Oilers were the first western-based franchise to win a Stanley Cup between 1925 and 1984, and their (very fast) ascension to the top coincided with clubs like Toronto, New York, and Detroit hitting the bottom. The beauty of playing in Edmonton, for the Oilers, is that it's a small kingdom of noble people fighting the evil Galactic Empires of the NHL itself and the Eastern cities.
Kevin Lowe (perhaps because he's from Quebec?) doesn't seem to understand this, and thought his role was to tell young players what to do, when the very teaching he had been brought up in, from Glen Sather, was the exact opposite. Sather was expert at motivating players and letting them see their own potential, whereas the millennial-era Oilers' org seems to be more about cults of personality centered around a few individuals who want to put their stamp on things. MacTavish, who had previously done great things as a player and then a coach, fell into this trap when he was (for no apparent reason) elevated to GM and decided he had to prove himself by putting his big-boy pants on and firing Krueger (to hire Eakins!).
Ironically, Glen Sather's great success occurred when a singular owner (Pocklington) had total control of the club. To give Pocklington his credit, however, he found the right person to run the hockey club and he kept out of the way of the hockey stuff entirely, until salaries started becoming a prevalent issue from 1987 onward. (Pocklington then single-handedly destroyed the franchise's rosy-status by dealing Gretzky for a bag of pucks and some cash to pay for his sausage factory.)
And make no mistake -- this franchise has STILL NOT RECOVERED from the Gretzky sale.
