June 16, 2025 by Ryan Lotsberg

“We don’t do it the easy way. We’ve always taken it and made it the hard way.”

I can’t think of any truer words that have been spoken about the Edmonton Oilers than those words that came from Corey Perry on Monday.

We can go a long way back with this analogy. The Oilers came about as the result of some determination by original owner Bill Hunter. Hunter owned and managed the Edmonton Oil Kings, and he wanted to bring professional hockey to Edmonton. His attempts at NHL ownership in the 1960s were rebuffed. Along with some business partners, he decided to start his own professional hockey league called the World Hockey Association (WHA), which began play in 1972.

The Houston Aeros folded prior to the WHA’s final season in 1978-79, leaving the league with seven teams. Just eight games into the season, Indianapolis Racers owner Nick Skalbania decided to fold the team. The Racers had a seventeen-year old phenom that would go on to become the greatest hockey player of all-time. Legend has it that Wayne Gretzky was informally promised to the Winnipeg Jets, but the Jets didn’t want to take the risk on the skinny seventeen-year old phenom.

The other option was Edmonton, who was owned by Peter Pocklington at the time. Pocklington was a good friend of Skalbania, who sold him the team in 1976. Skalbania had just bought the team from Hunter earlier in 1976. There’s a famous story about Gretzky being won in a backgammon game between the two friends, but Skalbania denies that Gretzky was ever put forth as a part of the stakes in a backgammon game. Regardless, the Oilers the only other option for Gretzky. Once the Jets pulled out, Gretzky became an Oiler. The Oilers were one of the four teams that were adopted by the NHL for the 1979-80 season after the WHA folded, and they stumbled into landing Gretzky.

Pocklington traded (or more properly put, “sold”) Gretzky to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988 because of the impending raise due to the Great One. That decision sparked a downward spiral of the team on and off the ice. Pocklington sold the Oilers to a group of local investors in 1998 so he could pay back debt owed to the Alberta Treasury Branch. The Oilers were on the brink of being relocated had that group of investors not stepped up and saved the team.

Later came the Decade of Darkness after an improbable run to the 2006 Stanley Cup Final. Eleven players left the Oilers in the summer of 2006. They spent a few years trying to cling to the hopes delivered by the 2006 playoff run, but they ultimately got so bad that they picked first overall in four out of six years from 2010-2015. The Oilers got lucky by winning the 2015 NHL Draft Lottery with the third best odds. Their prize was the next great phenom: Connor McDavid.

It took Gretzky’s Oilers six seasons to win a Stanley Cup. It took Sidney Crosby’s Pittsburgh Penguins four seasons to win one. McDavid’s Oilers have a chance to win one in his tenth season. The Decade of Darkness Oilers had a massive hole to climb out of after landing the next best player in the world. It took them several years to do it, which was mostly due to some ill-advised roster moves by management.

It’s fair to say that most of the suffering of the Oilers franchise has been caused by their own doing; but with a lot of hard work, a little bit of determination, and a touch of luck, they have always found a way to figure it out.

They have continued that trend over the last two seasons. The Oilers started last season 3-9-1 before making a coaching change. Their odds of making the playoffs became long, but they rattled off multiple eight-game winning streaks and a historic sixteen-game winning streak to get them comfortably into the playoffs. They found themselves down 3-2 in the second round against the Pacific Division Champion Vancouver Canucks, and they won the series. They were down 2-1 in the Western Conference Final to the Dallas Stars, and they won the series. They got down 0-3 in the 2024 Stanley Cup Final, and they forced a Game 7 that didn’t go their way.

This season, they had another slow start where they lost their first three games while scoring only three goals. The Oilers faced a rash of injuries at the end of the regular season, including injuries to many of their top players. Nobody was sure how healthy the Oilers would be for the 2025 playoffs, and it showed when they fell behind 2-0 to the Kings in the first round. After that, they went 12-2 and advanced to the Stanley Cup Final for the second consecutive year.

They have had seven come from behind wins this spring, including four multi-goal comeback wins. That doesn’t even include Game 1 of the first round where the Oilers came back from 0-4 to tie the game only to lose on a stinker of a goal with 42 seconds left. Two of those comeback wins have come in this Stanley Cup Final, including a historic comeback from an 0-3 first period deficit in Game 4.

Related: Callouts, Standouts, and Shoutouts: Cardiac Oilers strike again in Game 4 of the SCF

The Oilers had a chance to make their lives easier in this Stanley Cup Final by winning Game 5 at home, but they laid an egg. Now they have to go to Florida and win a road game with the Stanley Cup in the building to keep their championship hopes alive. 

They just have to make it hard on themselves, don’t they?

McDavid echoed that sentiment while addressing the media on Monday. “For whatever reason, our group doesn’t like to make it easy on ourselves”.

Perry and the Oilers understand the gravity of the situation. “Our backs are against the wall. After a disappointing game all around, you have to bounce back. It’s the playoffs. If you don’t, everything’s over and you go home for the summer; so you’ve got to be able to flush it, move on, and be ready for the next one. We know what’s at stake. We know where we are.”

When Gene Principe asked Leon Draisaitl about the team’s resilience after scoring the overtime winner to cap that Game 4 comeback, Draisaitl said “That’s what we do. We’re a resilient group. We’re never going to quit no matter what.”

I don’t know what will happen in Game 6 on Tuesday night, but we know the Oilers are comfortable with their backs against the wall. After McDavid mentioned how the Oilers like to make things hard on themselves, he continued to say that “…we’ve put ourselves in another difficult spot. It’s our job to work our way out of it, and I would expect that tomorrow.”

It just wouldn’t be the Oilers if they made things easy on themselves, and that’s kind of fitting for this franchise. The “Oilers” moniker is a nod to the oil patch and those that work in the oil field, which is synonymous with Alberta. “Edmonton was a blue-collar, hard-working town, and I wanted to give the team a name fans could identify with,” Hunter wrote in his autobiography. 

Clearly, the hearts of Oilers fans haven’t gone through enough yet. For now, Oil Country has to wait with bated breath in hopes they will get to see more hockey later this week. It will take a lot of hard work, a little bit of determination, and a touch of luck; but this Oilers team can figure it out.