It's that time of the year again in Edmonton.
The time when hockey-mad Albertans of the blue-and-orange persuasion wander aimlessly through the streets of a long-dormant "City of Champions" wondering what went wrong this time.
On the heels of their beloved hockey team's loss to the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference Semifinal, marking the fifth consecutive playoff exit without a sniff of a Stanley Cup in an era when the best player on Earth (and maybe second-best, too) has dressed in an Oilers sweater.
The math is easy to compute. But difficult to look at.
Five playoff appearances plus four series wins equal a 22-27 win-loss record across 49 games.
The remainder? No hoists. No victory laps. No celebratory parades. No banner raisings.
And nothing to do from now until next spring but convince themselves it might end differently then.
The habitual optimists in the crowd will no doubt point to the continued presence of Connor McDavid and both his soon-to be increasing haul of scoring titles, MVPs and Ted Lindsay Awards, and the fact that he's already the only player to sweep the trio in a single season multiple times.
If "McJesus" is with us, after all, who then can be against us.
He did so after the 2016-17 and 2020-21 seasons, too, and joins Evgeni Malkin, Sidney Crosby, Patrick Kane, Nikita Kucherov and teammate Leon Draisaitl as the only players to manage it even once.
But it doesn't take an eagle-eyed cynic to point out another glaring fact about that list.
The first four players have combined for 11 Cups. The last two, in spite of a dozen Art Ross, Hart Memorial and Lindsay trophies between them, have zero.
And it's hard to imagine a season in which it'll be easier to plot a championship course than this one.
The Oilers were second behind the Golden Knights in the Pacific during the season but were the league's best team following a trade-deadline acquisition of defenseman Mattias Ekholm and arrived to the second-round series having beaten Vegas three times in four games, with the lone loss coming in OT.
They had three players—McDavid, Draisaitl and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins—with at least 100 points and four with at least 30 goals (add Zach Hyman), dismissing the longtime knock that it was a two-man show, not to mention a power play that was the best in NHL history.
On the back end, Stuart Skinner won 29 games as a first-year full-timer, claiming the No. 1 spot from free agent Jack Campbell and breaking a record for Edmonton rookie goalie wins that had been established by Hall of Famer—and five-time Cup winner—Grant Fuhr.
Once the playoffs started, it got even better.
Both the Presidents' Trophy winner (Boston) and defending Cup champion (Colorado) were ousted in the first round of play, leaving the Oilers as the presumptive last favorite standing once they got past the pesky Los Angeles Kings in six games and into the final eight.
After all, they were a combined 2-1 against Dallas—which won the other Western semi—and 3-1 against Carolina and Florida, who'll begin competing for the Eastern Conference title later this week.
So all that stood between Edmonton and its first title since 1990 were a few "Hail Connor's," right?
Wrong.
McDavid followed up a preposterous regular season with a pedestrian (by comparison) playoff, posting seven points across the Oilers' six losses and taking a historical backseat to Draisaitl, whose 13 goals in two series got him two-thirds of the way to the league's record (19) for an entire playoff season.
Sound familiar? It should.
McDavid's Ross/Hart/Lindsay run through 2016-17 ended in a second-round loss to Anaheim in a series Edmonton began with two wins. Draisaitl's dominance in 2019-20 was snuffed by a qualifying-round loss to 12th-seeded Chicago. And McDavid's repeat sweep the following year mattered little when the Oilers were bounced by a Winnipeg team they'd beaten seven times in nine pre-playoff games.
In fact, the more No. 97's springtime track record is examined, the more familiar it looks.
And the more it begs the requisite post-handshake question:
Does he need to go elsewhere to win? Maybe.
Because given his level of virtuosity and the increasing frequency of his postseason flameouts, McDavid's story is beginning to sound more and more like the ones told about NBA star Kevin Durant.
For those unaware, Durant is a 6'10" forward who's played 15 seasons and won four scoring titles, an MVP award, a Rookie of the Year and been selected to 13 All-Star teams.
And in compiling a list of the 50 greatest players of the last 50 years for Fox Sports, analyst Nick Wright suggested that while Durant wasn't the greatest scorer or shooter in NBA history, "he might be the most complete offering of both."
But if you ask experts about Durant's career, it's a good bet the word disappointment comes up, too.
Exactly 13 of his 15 seasons—nearly all of which where he was his team's No. 1 option—have ended without a championship ring for the now-34-year-old, whose most recent run with the Phoenix Suns came to a close Thursday night with a 25-point home loss in a second-round elimination game.
He's reached the final round just once as his team's top banana, losing in 2012 to the Miami Heat, and hasn't come close to a ring outside of the two he snagged in three years with the Golden State Warriors, a powerhouse he joined as a free agent a season after they won an NBA-record 73 games.
Durant left Golden State for Brooklyn in 2019, was traded to Phoenix in February and has gone 13-14 in 27 playoff games across three seasons while winning two series. Meanwhile, two years after his exit, and with many of the same players who'd won prior to his arrival, Golden State raised another banner.
A great player? Certainly.
A championship leader on his own? Perhaps not.
Translating back to hockey, don't forget that while Wayne Gretzky won four Cups across nine magical seasons in Alberta, he won zero in 11 seasons elsewhere. And though Mark Messier was typically no better than a second mention during his time as No. 99's teammate, he won both a title and an MVP in Edmonton two years after Gretzky was traded and earned ring No. 6 with the New York Rangers in 1994.
So what does that mean for McDavid? It's unclear.
There's no way a franchise that already dealt Gretzky is going to make the same mistake, so his first chance to take his Cup-clamoring talents elsewhere presumably comes after the 2025-26 season when the eight-year, $100 million contract extension he signed in 2017 will have run its course.
That'll coincide with the ends of deals for teammates Ekholm and Evander Kane and essentially close the window of opportunity in Edmonton, which was pressed hard against the salary cap after a series of signings by GM Ken Holland that left the Oilers with eight players earning $5 million or more annually.
Officially, it'll be July 1, 2026.
And if you're looking for a quick T-shirt buck, call it "Connorgeddon."
It'd also mean (by then) 11 seasons without a Cup hoist for McDavid, far exceeding the number it took Malkin (three), Crosby (four), Gretzky (five), Kucherov (seven) and Mario Lemieux (seven) to get their first champagne sips. In fact, by the time they'd reached 11, the quintet had 13 Cups between them.
It's hard to envision how the landscape will have changed in intervening years and where McDavid's best opportunity to jell with a winning-ready unit might reside—incidentally, he was born 30 minutes from the Air Canada Center in Toronto and less than two hours from the KeyBank Center in Buffalo—but it's easy to figure why it'll be awfully heavy on the minds of Albertans in the meantime.
But remember, Oil Country. It's only a game.
And sleep tight, Connorgeddon is still 1,144 days away.
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