You know for sure that bag isn’t full of good managerial decisions
Edmonton Oilers president of hockey operations Kevin Lowe is a lot of things.
He’d be quick to remind you that he is a multiple-time NHL All-Star and only slightly less frequent Stanley Cup champion from his time with the team that won so many game in the 1980s.
He’s also an indisputably bad NHL general manager who only got his job because of who he is and what he did for the franchise in the past. He’s the executive on whose watch perhaps the ugliest stretch of futility seen league-wide since the Pittsburgh Penguins of the early 2000s.
And so imagine the absolute balls it must take to stick with the Oilers’ long-time tradition of being a good old boys club in naming his new general manager, and meeting all skepticism leveled at him and his decision — the latest on a long list of those that have been questionable at their absolute best, dating back to right around when he took the Edmonton GMing job, and seems destined to expand in perpetuity like the universe itself — by saying, “I think I know a little bit about winning, if there’s ever a concern.”
The fact of the matter is that, unless Lowe means he knows about what it takes to win in the NHL is roughly on par with the rest of ours, the room should have exploded in paroxysms laughter and knee-slapping. What it takes to win in the NHL is good players, and the Oilers haven’t had that lying about — save for that time they traded next to nothing for Chris Pronger somehow — in a good decade at least. Read the rest of this entry »
