Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Eternal Optimists vs. Bitter Pessimists



The Oilers made the official announcement of making Ralph Krueger the new head coach. Term is a three year deal, standard stuff for most new coaches. Krueger represents a lot of things for a lot of Oilers' fans. Either he's a master innovator that helped a beleaguered special teams and can coach defense or offense, or he's a tired, old retread that represents everything that is wrong with the current Oilers infrastructure. As usual, the answer lies somewhere in between. I don't believe a Stanley Cup is lurking just around the corner with Krueger at the helm, but I also believe the list was short for head coaching applicants considering the current plight of the Oilers. It's one of those "could have been better, could have been worse" type hirings, one that has become a mantra under the Daryl Katz regime. My personal choice was Marc Crawford. I believe he would have brought back some much needed accountibility to this organization. Considering it took this long to promote an associate coach leads me to believe they were looking elsewhere but came up short, leading them to double back to Krueger.

I'm gonna write a little something about the optimists and the pessimists of Oilerdom, because right now, they are both getting on nerves.

Pessimists seem to be prancing around preaching that the sky is falling, and the team will never be any good again. I could see how the average fan would get annoyed by this. Pessimists need to let the fans be fans. Let them cheer their faces off at anything that they deem to be positive. The Oilers need all the support they can get right now if they have any hope of getting out of the basement.

Optimists are certainly getting on my nerves because it seems the Oilers can do wrong, therefore affects the accountibility. The Oilers brass should be having their asses held to the fire and not sitting on their hands selling hope. Edmonton's MSM and bloggers alike are enablers in all of this handing out cups of kool-aid over and over again, rarely a critical word spoken or written. There needs to be some kind of voice of reason in all of this. Fans can cheer as loud as they want, but I'm not taking any hockey advice from those that don't feel the slightest bit of shame for the last 3-20 years of mediocrity.

Essentially its a battle between fans and wannabe GMs. Both have their place here as they give balance to whats needed for the Oilers to go forward. But one is not more important than the other, and one's opinion is not more important the other. Debate is fine, but to have one side try and crush the other side is fruitless and pointless. Ultimately, we'll need both sides to come together in harmony to see this team rise again.

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