Why the Edmonton Oilers can’t be evaluated based only on championships | Reframing sports debate

Why the Edmonton Oilers can’t be evaluated based only on championships | Reframing sports debate

You’re tired of the talking heads mindlessly boliviating day after day after day in the off season. On today’s edition of Lockdown Oilers, a very frank conversation. What matters when we’re talking about hockey in terms of players and success? You are Locked On Oilers, your daily podcast on the Edmonton Oilers, part of the Locked On Network. Your team every day. Hello everyone and welcome to this Wednesday edition of Locked on Oilers. I am your host Nick Zerars. I just finished my third and this upcoming fall will be my fourth NHL season as a host on the Lockdown Podcast Network. And I want to thank everyone that is making lockdown Oilers their first listen of the day here in the dead of summer where there’s not a whole lot going on in the hockey world. And today’s edition of Lockdown Oilers is brought to you by our friends over at FanDuel. Right now, new FanDuel customers can get $150 in bonus bets if your first $5 bet wins. So, on today’s show, we’re going to have a very overarching and wide framing conversation about the state of media, what matters in our conversations, and I’ll take you behind the curtain and walk you through how I think about these things. And as always when we’re talking about these big philosophical discussions, I don’t want to tell you what to think. I’m going to try and lay out as much information as I can for you and you make the action actionable decision. You know, that’s my goal. I I very naively still kind of believe that’s the end goal of media, at least responsible media, is you give your audience as much actionable information based on the best available version of the truth and you build your credibility and when you’re wrong, you take accountability. You admit you’re wrong. You issue a correction. You fact check yourself. You show accountability because that’s an integral part of this and that’s where we can start this conversation in our opening segment. So to start things out, we are watching a massive shift in the media and economic landscape over the last 10 to 15 years. The widespread adaptation of social media and obviously you know this, I know this, the secret to why social media is free is you are the product. The the genius of Facebook, of Twitter, of Instagram, of Tik Tok, is you are selling yourself. The company that owns that application, that website, they’re not paying you a salary. You are posting content and you are doing it because you want to be famous, you have good ideas, you’re crazy, whatever it is. You know, everybody’s on social. You’re bored at work. Everybody’s on social for different reasons, trying to accentuate different things. But as we have watched a class separation emerge on these various platforms and how people recognize that there are paths to certain career opportunities based on social media growth where you have people who have normal day jobs that you would get a W2 for. You go to an office, you work your 40 hours, your 9 to5, you get your health insurance. If you have a decent job, you get a 401k match. Social media and influencer culture and content creator culture tells you you can be your own boss. You can work as much or as little as you want, but if you make it, you have credibility. Who you are as a person, that is your personal brand. And there’s no better encapsulation of the state of the world right now that you aren’t a person anymore. You are a potential brand partner for a partner. You know, you you do well enough on social media. Brands will send you free stuff. They’ll give you their product for free. So, you’ll put it in one of your videos. And well, is that advertising? Is that just it? And that’s where you start to get into this. And I started on this end of the spectrum in this conversation because I my notes are actually more about the legacy media side of things because that’s the secret sauce here is when you understand that the legacy media entities. So down here in the United States, your New York Times, your CN, obviously those are international brands, but in the United States, CNN, the New York Times, and the Sports Media World, ESPN to a lesser extent, but Fox Sports has a fleeting operation on television. And then up in Canada, of course, Sportsnet, TSN, and all the affiliate brands where you have the offshoots, the lifestyle brands like Bard Down, Steve Dangle, etc. All of those entities have obligations to pre create content on a routine basis. This show we have a professional obligation to produce episodes on a certain number of per month per week etc. to meet advertising requirements. In the sports media world, when you watch TV, uh whether it’s a game, whether it’s just programming, the sports centric analysis programming, you are getting commercials. The more people that watch these shows, the more they can sell the advertising space for. Now, these shows that are on during the day, everyone’s at work. At first take is not doing incredible numbers, but Stephen A. Smith, who I I point the finger at as being the biggest culprit of this dumbing down and this contentification of journalism. He’s the one who recognized that I don’t need to be smart. I don’t need to be right. I don’t even need to be entertaining. I just need to be loud. I need to get attention. And I need to make myself the biggest possible story I can. And that’s why you have Stephen A. Smith getting into these debates with professional athletes as if they’re on equal footing. Like when Kevin Durant called him wrong for some sort some news, he said instead of Stephen A. Smith admitting I had maybe got bad information, he told Kevin Durant, “You don’t want to make an enemy out of me like he was in the mob or something.” Which is crazy to me. But the reason I start here and why I think the context and the background is useful for this episode, we all operate in that world now where even if you’re a legacy journalist, you know, if you’re Larry Brooks at the New York Post who’s been writing about hockey for 40 years now, you still have to do video podcasts, you still have to film short form videos that someone else edits and puts together for social media. If you’re a legacy media person at the New York Times, you are encouraged. Work on your brand. Make Tik Toks. Make Instagram reels in your free time. Let people get to know you. And if they like you, maybe they’ll subscribe to the newspaper. And we exist in a world now where everything is for sale, including you, including your humanity. If you are willing to post it online and enough people resonate with it or like it, you can make a living selling yourself. And that’s really the ethical conundrum of our day and why, you know, Stephen A. Smith got caught playing solitire during the NBA finals cuz he doesn’t care about sports anymore. And that’s the dirty secret here of these people with the biggest platforms in sports, the Pat McAfei of the world. Pat McAfee doesn’t care about football. He only cares about himself and talking about football because of the connections he has. He’s able to make a living doing that, which is, you know, that’s the goal. That’s the dream to do what you do as little work as possible to make as much money as possible. I would love to stand in a room and yell about football with no real point of view or perspective, but I didn’t play in the NFL. I wasn’t a punter. I don’t have a mercurial or sometimes outright obnoxious personality in that respect. But now, because we need to have takes about everything. Everyone needs to have a take about everything at all times cuz that’s the currency of today. If you don’t have an opinion about something, you you by definition don’t matter. If you’re not maintaining a presence where these conversations are being had, you are not in the conversation. You don’t have a chance. You don’t have a chance to go viral. You don’t have a chance to escape the 9to-5 grind. And that’s why Stephen A. Smith goes on TV and says things even he doesn’t believe. It’s why he doesn’t do research. It’s why he gets handed a note sheet at the start of a show and he’ll argue whatever points are in front of him and that’s it. There’s no rhyme or reason. And I start here and attacking individual people because what we operate in now is what I call ring culture where if you don’t win a championship, you do not matter. Your legacy has a tinge of skepticism. You are viewed as being less talented or less good than your contemporaries because you did not win in a team sport. And as we all know in team sports, one guy cannot do enough. And we’re going to get to in a minute the sliding scale of one guy and how much one guy can make a difference in our next segment. And then our final segment we’ll talk about something else. But just think about that there are genuinely people out there right now who are listening to this episode who are going to say in the comments, “Well, Conor McDavid hasn’t won a Stanley Cup, so he can’t be an all-time great.” Do you hear yourself? This is a team sport. Look, if this is golf, if this is tennis, if this is an Olympic sport, okay, yes, you can say tennis player X is not an all-time great because they’ve never won Wimbledon, they’ve never won a French Open. Same thing with golf. You know, if you never win a major, you never win two, three majors, you can’t be an all-time great, you never won anything. Team sports are fundamentally different. And especially in hockey where the superstars are expected to do so much because they are the great in efficiency. You end up in these very weird conversations where people act like winning is the only metric to evaluate players. Speaking of winning, we are going to take our first break on today’s edition of Locked on Oilers. And when we come back, I’m going to make the kind of crazy argument that I don’t even necessarily wholly believe, but I do to some degree that no, winning is not everything. Coming up next on today’s edition of Locked on Oilers. Summer sports are in full swing and whether you’re all about baseball and delights, golf on the green, the WNBA, or highstakes soccer, FanDuel is the best way to make every game even more exciting. You’re already following the action. Why not spice things up and make it more thrilling? With FanDuel, you can get in on the game while your friends are getting sunburnt out at the beach. FanDuel makes it so easy to stay in the action, whether it’s before the game starts or after action begins with live betting. If you’re like me and you’re going to a game, I’m I went to the mech game last night. You got to get a little something in the game to make it all the more exciting. Whether you’re placing a same game parlay or riding out, sweating it out in the bottom of the ninth, FanDuel makes it feel like you’re part of the action. And if you’re new to FanDuel, there’s never been a better time to sign up because new customers can bet just $5 and you’ll get $150 in bonus bets if your first bet wins. Open the FanDuel app today or visit fanuel.com to get started. Thank you to everyone who is hanging out on this Wednesday edition of Locked on Oilers. So, programming note, I will be going on vacation next Wednesday, the 13th through the following Wednesday. There will be content during that period of time. If there is any significant news of consequence, I will do my best to record probably a short because I won’t have my full my full suite of software to edit a long form video, you know, the 30-inute episode we usually do. So, I will do my best to have a short for you should Conor McDavid agree to his extension, should the Oilers contract from the NHL, should Steuart Skinner magically learn how to play goalie, I’ll do my best to get something for you. But my goal is to give you guys these types of conversations. And there’s no better time for these overarching philosophical conversations than in the summer cuz this is a natural period of reflection when you operate on the hockey calendar. When you work September to June, July and August are your January and December. You know, those are your new year period where you’re going to start to think, okay, I did this last year. Where do I want to be? And I I had a really good conversation with one of my friends over the weekend. We were talking about this in the context of the New York Rangers. So, the Rangers missed the playoffs last year after entering the season as the fourth best odds to win the Stanley Cup. And one of the conversation points we had was, well, if all 32 teams are trying to win and only one team wins the Stanley Cup at the end of the year, do the other 31 teams by definition mean they had a failing season? And I think the answer is no. I think there are sometimes losing the Stanley Cup is a failure of not winning the Stanley Cup is a failure of a season. Like for example, in the context of the Oilers last year, not winning the Stanley Cup, that is a failing season. They had as much leverage as they possibly could. They got back there for the second year in a row. They got there faster and more convincingly this this time than they did last year. And because of that, it puts you in an awkward position where we have to find ways to attract value in our perception of these things. There’s a baseline understanding that the end goal is to win. And I’ll give you my criteria, my personal feelings in the next segment because I do think it matters when I’m having this conversation. But for example, you look at say the Washington Capitals, Montreal Canadians, Ottawa Senators. All three of those teams obviously did not win the Stanley Cup last year. I think you would be very dumb and shortsighted to say the Canadians and Senators had failing seasons because they didn’t win the championship. Ditto the Washington Capitals. I think when you are a team that is in that ascending period like Ottawa, like Montreal, making the playoffs, giving a good team a scare in the first round, that’s a pretty successful season. Of course, you’d like to go to the second round, you’d like to win, you’d like to win the whole thing. But when you are talking about evaluation, you know, your criteria, you know, if you’re doing a performance review, the Senators and the Canadians both took real steps. The Senators made the playoffs for the first time in seven years. The Canadians made the playoffs for the first time since they lost the Stanley Cup final. That is real progress. That is something that feels like progress. If you’re the Oilers not winning the Stanley Cup last year, that’s a failure. The Dallas Stars, Colorado Avalanche, those are failures. The Hurricanes, the Lightning, those are teams that are highly leveraged to win right now. They do not have long runways. You know, Montreal arguably has a pretty nice upward trajectory to go from here. You know, they made the nice two trades. They brought in Noah Dobson. They traded Logan Molyu for another player. And they they put themselves in an interesting position now where I feel like Montreal has more room to go on that upward slope before they eventually plateau. And when we’re talking about it in this context, this big conversation in team sports, there is a sliding scale. And the smart people I like to read call this the link theory. You can either be a strong link sport or a weak link sport. In a strong link sport, the best player is so impactful that they drive the outcomes. In a weakling sport, the weak link sticking out amongst better players of Ben’s better teams, that’s ultimately what decides these games. Hockey, at least if you like to believe what math says, is a weak link sport. That a more talented team is going to pick apart your worst players. And that’s not necessarily like your players aren’t as good as the other team. That’s like there is a gap here. That’s why, you know, the weak third pair defenseman in the second or third rounds of the playoffs looks out of their depth. You know, that’s why when you put the Carolina Hurricanes against the Panthers in the conference final and you had Jackson Blake out there against Brad Marshand, it didn’t look so good because hockey is a weak link sport. That’s in direct contrast to basketball where if you just get LeBron and Luca Donuch on your team, you probably make the playoffs if everyone’s healthy. You need two stars in basketball. you only going to use, you know, in basketball you have a 15 person roster but only 12 dressed for a given game. Most of the time you’re going to run an 8 to nineman rotation in the regular season. In the playoffs that’s probably seven or eight man rotation. And there are just fewer opportunities for guys to make impacts. You know, football I go back and forth on whether it’s a strong or a weakling sport. I think it’s more of a weakling sport. I think the most textbook example of that of course being the Super Bowl a couple years ago when the Chiefs played Tampa Bay in Tampa Bay. I think that was what spring 2020 where or 2021 where Tom Brady and the Bucks destroyed the Chiefs because Mahomes was running for his life between two backup tackles and Mahomes is the best quarterback in the world more likely than not. But with two really bad defense offensive tackles there was nothing he could do. This is a very I think football is a weakling sport. You think about Drew Brees all those years he was throwing for 4500 5,000 yards on the Saints and they would win six or seven games because the defense was so bad because the special teams was so bad. And we get to hockey. Hockey is undoubtedly a weakling sport and you can poke at it a million different ways. If we’re talking about the Oilers, whether that’s their bottom six, whether that’s Steuart Skinner, whether that’s their third defensive pair, the more you poke those guys over time with a real talent gap the way Florida has, it becomes harder to win. And look, the last real point I want to get in here before we move on. What do we care about? What do we value? I personally, and I’m not going to get ahead of myself because that’s what next segment’s about. But if winning cannot be the beall endall because only one team wins the championship at the end of the season, that means we need to change the language we use. That means we need to reframe our perspectives on what we care about to some degree. Because right now we exist in a win or you’re a loser conversation. And look, yes, technically speaking, if you lost the game, you are a loser. But you can’t tell me Josh Allen had a bad season last year. You can tell me Lamar had a bad season last year cuz their teams didn’t win the Super Bowl. Those guys were out of their minds. Lamar should have won the MVP for the third time. Josh Allen should have won the MVP two years ago. You have those guys. You have Joe Burrow on the Bengals who the Bengals were awful last year but Burrow tried his darnest to get them in the playoffs. And that’s the way I think about this because there needs to be something in the attempt. The attempt needs to be worth something because most of our lives, most of our days, and I talked about this yesterday, most of our lives is about the process. It’s not about the end result. It is about the process. How did we get here? Did we give our best, most honest, integral effort? And if we gave everything we had and we still lose, you got to live with that. That is the type of thing that will drive you insane. You know, Coach Taylor very, very famously in Friday Night Lights, every man is going to have a day he’s going to lose. And it’s important as you as a person that you don’t lose yourself when you lose because that’s where you run into real moral problems. And obviously, you know, moral versus ethical versus print, all these are theoretical. These are all on a sliding scale. Everyone’s values are different. Speaking of everyone’s values being different, coming up next, I’m going to walk you through how I think about this and maybe how you could think about this, too, if you’re so inclined, right after this. Thank you to everyone who is hanging out here on this Wednesday edition of Locked on Oilers as we are walking through some of the things I think about because frankly in the off season you spend a lot of time reflecting and you know I’m not on the Oilers. I don’t work for the team, but I spent a lot of time thinking about what what went wrong, where were the missed opportunities, and is a team going to the Stanley Cup final two years in a row and losing both times to the same team, you know, can that be considered part of the process? Is that a positive thing? And look, obviously not. You know there moral victories equ needs to be effort. There needs to be reward in the effort. There needs to be dignity in trying because if you don’t try, you’re a loser. You are always better off trying and get losing than not trying at all. And I start my framing there because if a team genuinely gives everything it has and there is nothing else it can do, you don’t feel good about that. But I can accept that. You know, when the Oilers kind of got worn down as this series was going along this past year, I didn’t have that same feeling I did last year. You know, last year 2024, I genuinely felt they were going to win game seven. I really in my heart going into that game did. This year going into game six, I felt that it was going to take a superhuman performance from Connor or Leon to drag them to a game seven because they just didn’t have the juice. They did not have the power play. They did not have the penalty kill. They were not playing well enough to justify me feeling confident. And of course, you don’t need to feel confident. Teams win games they’re not supposed to. That’s the variance. That’s the randomness. That’s just the nature of life. Sometimes weird things happen. the more variables you introduce, the more opportunities there are for weird things to happen. And as we unpack this, and I’m going to start there, that there needs to be dignity and there needs to be respect for the attempt. So, if you’re a good team and you genuinely gave it all you had and you still lost, okay, I felt the Oilers this year genuinely were tapped out. They did not have the horses to win this year. I think last year it was a lot closer and I think Florida was probably a more talented team overall, but the Oilers high-end talent was performing at such a high level that it was able to compensate for that talent disparity. And I think there’s I think there’s nothing wrong with that. And I have gone back and forth on this a lot in my life, especially as I’ve gotten older, because you start to gain more perspective for just the scale and the scope of these things. Because growing up as a kid, I was very much if you don’t win the championship, you lost. You didn’t have a good year. Because you don’t understand what that means. You don’t understand how hard that is. The more perspective you gain. So like I think about the Mets, my baseball team. I I went to the game last night. I think about the Mets. The Mets have been in existence more than 60 years. They’ve made the playoffs like seven times in 60 years. And just making the playoffs for the Mets, that’s a big deal. That feels like an accomplishment because of the scale of the history. You have a nice little run, kind of improbable last year. You get to the NLCS, you feel, oh, we we’re kind of in this with the Dodgers and the Dodgers eventually pull away. I think about it in terms of the Giants, who the Gi the New York Football Giants won two Super Bowls by the time I was 14 years old. And I thought, okay, football’s easy. And the Giants have spent the last 10 years very much demonstrating that football is not easy. That in fact football is impossibly hard. And you need so many things to break right to be a good football team. And I bring up those comparisons because now I think about all of the time, the money, the emotions, all of the hours I spend in front of the TV, at the rink, at the stadium, at the arena, and just how much I care. And that can’t not be worth something if they don’t win. You know, we do five episodes a week during the regular season. all of the hundreds of hours I have spent doing Oilers content for the locked on Oilers feed. There needs to be meaning in the attempt. And I think it’s really important that we allow ourselves the perspective and frankly the kindness that sometimes we’re just going to be wrong. Sometimes we are just going to mess up. And that is part of this process. You know, if you set ban your entire life avoiding friction, you’re going to run into a lot of problems being a yes man, trying to just make everyone happy because you need to be able to stand on your own two feet and feel good about what you’re doing. And look, sometimes you can’t. Sometimes there are things that aren’t justifiable. Sometimes your team makes a decision that really hurts your feelings. Whether it’s the type of player they bring in not being particularly good, if they’ve got off the ice issues, they’ve got scandals and those make you uncomfortable. That’s different. When we are talking about strictly, I’m going to watch 82 regular season games and then I’m hopefully going to watch 20some playoff games. I am going to get something out of this. And for me, I’ll give you a good example. Over the last year and change, watching Evan Bousard make the leap from offense first defenseman to one of the best defenseman in the entire NHL. As much as the Florida fans love to pop in and say, “He’s not even better than Gus Forsling.” Yes, he is. Yes, he is. In today’s NHL, you need offense first guys. And look, Forsling has the benefit of playing with Seth Jones and having two or three two really good defensive pairs below him in the depth chart and playing in front of Sergey Babski. You need to have perspective and watching Evan Buchard’s emergence has been a real treat for me. watching Vasili Pod Coulson this year find his game at the NHL level and look he had nine goals this year and that was a careerhigh and that was exciting and I was genuinely invested in in Vasil Pod Coulson by the end of the Stanley Cup final that I felt okay this guy proved himself at the NHL level this is a guy that Chris Knobblock and Leon Dryidle trust in important situations and he can be counted on that is a solution that is progress and look progress is not linear yes the Oilers did not win the Stanley Cup last year, but you got proof Pod Coulson could hang. Brett Koulak playing the best hockey of his life in his early 30s, the most minutes he’s ever played on an average nightly basis at this point in his career. You think about just those perspectives. You think about it on maybe a smaller scale, someone along the lines of a Kaspari Kappan proving he could still hang at the NHL level, getting himself another contract to stay in the league another year based on the season he had as an Oiler. You think about Leon being a heart trophy candidate after the playoffs he had last year where he really struggled in the Stanley Cup final because of the injuries he was dealing with. And you come out of that with the perspective you have now of okay Leon has shown his bonafides. This is one of the five best players of his era. You come out of this year where Connor having, you know, 100 points was kind of a let down and you know he’s going to come back even more driven because that’s the way the greats are. And that to me is what matters. If you are that competitive, if you are that serious, the reason we rever Michael Jordan, the reason we rever Tom Brady, Kobe Bryant, those guys were singular in their determination to win. It helped that they were on very good teams as well. And that’ll do it for today’s edition of Locked On Oilers. Be sure to check out Locked On Oilers wherever you get your podcast or over on YouTube and check out Locked On NHL. locked on NHL game night breaking down all 32 teams ahead of the 2025 2026 NHL season. I will talk to you guys tomorrow. Until then, let’s go Boilers.

On this episode of Locked On Oilers, host Nick Zararis takes a deep dive into what success truly means in hockey and why “championship or bust” thinking doesn’t tell the whole story. Using examples from teams like the Edmonton Oilers, New York Rangers, Ottawa Senators, and Montreal Canadiens, we discuss why progress, development, and effort matter just as much as championships.

We also explore how Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl, and Evan Bouchard define success for the Edmonton Oilers beyond Stanley Cups, plus why players like Vasily Podkolzin and Brett Kulak represent growth that can’t be measured solely in wins.

0:00 Intro: The state of sports media today

5:47 Stephen A. Smith and the contentification of journalism

17:39 Hockey as a weak link sport

23:46 Finding meaning in the attempt, not just winning

28:50 Outro: Internship and affiliation agreements

Why the Edmonton Oilers can’t be evaluated based only on championships | Reframing sports debate

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