The Cool Post Pt. I: The Edmonton Oilers

While I don’t believe in GOAT debates, I’m totally open to a conversation involving cool. So in lieu of the artificially derived contaminant that lords over the sports talk crowd, Imma dish up some coolness instead; as in coolest teams, players and maybe even coaches. And for the sake of brevity, I’ll devote each episode of this thing to a different cat or club.

I’ll bon this voyage by giving a nod to the world’s most overlooked sport, hockey. It might get treated like an unfinished basement stateside, but as far as I’m concerned, playoff hockey is the penthouse of postseason sports.

So without further ado, let’s drop the puck!

As my first entry in the Cool Cats Club, I’m going with the 1984 Stanley Cup champion Edmonton Oilers. Back then I was rooting for the New York Islanders in a finals rematch after they swept Wayne Gretzky’s boys the year before. And when New York routed the Oilers in Game 2 to even the series, it looked like a good bet the Isles might match those great Canadiens teams of the ’50s with a fifth straight Stanley, but nope. Edmonton would win the next three games by a combined score of 19-6 to clinch their first world championship.

They don’t make postseasons like that anymore, considering that the finals participants had 13(!) future Hall of Famers on their respective rosters. The ’84 Oilers contributed seven of them; Jarri Kurri, Paul Coffey, Mark Messier, Glenn Anderson, Kevin Lowe, Grant Fuhr and Wayne Gretzky. These days, that’s a hell of a division.

This collection of ice cold killers would go on to win five Cups in six seasons and if not for a heartbreaking Game 7 loss to the Calgary Flames right in the middle of that run, who knows? In that game, Oilers defenseman Steve Smith scored into his own net to give the Flames the series so really, the only team that could beat the Oilers during that time? Was the Oilers.

What that ’84 club possessed as a team was- to borrow from the poet George Costanza- akin to discovering plutonium by accident. They were young and experienced, with Lowe, Messier and Gretzky having cut their teeth on a second division Oilers club that split from the World Hockey Association to join the NHL five years earlier. Messier and Gretzky were teenagers on that team, two of the hockey world’s best kept secrets playing in the middle of nowhere. But not for long.

Personally, I think the fact they weren’t Broadway or LA made them even cooler. The province of Alberta may as well have been a beach on Mars for all us kids knew, and when they closed out New York in Game 5 at Northlands Coliseum, our friend Danny spoke for many of us when he exclaimed . . .

Where the FUCK is Edmonton?!

Many of us, but not me. I was digging this dynamic squad out of some witness protection program locale just fine. I hated them plenty, but in that sportingly affirmative sense where hat tips are a language all their own. The young Oilers were lightning quick and impossible to nail to the glass, as if they were playing pinball while the rest of the league was playing pong. In a sport where every goal was weighted to a prayer, they changed the church rules and scored in sinfully descriptive torrents. It was like the first time you read Kerouac, got lost in a Van Gogh or listened to Prince. It was the understanding that you were in the middle of a brilliant storm and you didn’t want an umbrella.

That first title team also happened to provide a brilliant example as to the sport’s expanding footprint, with Jarri Kurri becoming the first Finnish born player, Grant Fuhr the first black player and Jaroslav Pouzar the first Czech born player to raise the Cup. I didn’t concern myself with any of that at the time because it didn’t matter at the time.

I knew cool when I saw it.

Lindsey Stirling- Crystallize