Monotony of Success – Part 1: Why can’t the Oilers start their season on the right foot?
Typically, in the Sunday Scramble, I take a ripped-from-the-headlines approach to the hot topics across the hockey world. But this week I’ve been thinking about history and how it applies to this version of the Edmonton Oilers.Can we really expect this team to start well? They never seem to do so anyway, but what about the context of back-to-back trips to the Stanley Cup Final? How does that go for teams? I was thinking about this while watching the Oilers get shelled by the Avalanche earlier this month, and wondered out loud if we were expecting too much. This led me down the rabbit hole of looking at teams in similar positions. I wanted to calibrate my expectations compared to great teams of the past.Ken Dryden’s book The Game describes a problem he referred to as the “strange monotony of success at the highest level.” The chalice-winning success of those 1970s Montréal Canadiens created an environment where the joy of victories became ever more fleeting, and every loss seemed like a failure. Now, many things have changed in the game since the 1970s, stylistically, expansion, parity, etc, that make Stanley Cups more difficult to win in the Year of Our Lord 2025. And this edition of the Edmonton Oilers seems bitten by this same bug of monotony through the quarter point, where the trials and tribulations of the early season don’t hold your attention, knowing greater challenges lie ahead. It’s even more frustrating for these players because they’ve come so close.After........