It’s Remembrance Day and I think it’s appropriate to say a little something about it. However, at the same time, I don’t know how appropriate it is to conflate sports and war, Hockey heroism and real Heroism. Hockey is not war. It is a luxury. It is an escape.
Both of my Grandfathers served in Canada’s armed forces in Korea. They never spoke to me about that time in their lives. Only before and after. Perhaps it was too painful. Perhaps they thought I was too young to understand (They both died before I finished Junior High). My Great Grandfather served in WWII. He was dead two decades before I was even born. What they really went through. What they saw. How they truly felt about it. I won’t ever know these things.
Experience with hearing my own family’s stories about war makes the phrase “Lest we forget… a complicated one. It was clear that there were certain things my grandparents wanted me to never know about. There were things they wish they could forget but couldn’t, and decades later still haunted them. There were important things that are certainly now forgotten, dead and buried.
My wife’s grandfather lied about his age to join the army in time to fight in WWII. He was scarcely older than my son is today but he knew how to ride a motorcycle and read a map. That made him qualified to be a bike messenger. He refused to talk about his time in the war to my wife and father in-law until in the final years of his life. There were things he didn’t have to say because when she was staying over at Grandpa’s house as a child she would wake up in the middle of the night to the sounds of his screams. Nightmares of lost friends gone for forty years.
We were visiting one day and sitting around the living room he just started speaking about being alone with his bike near the front lines. The first thing he would ditch would be extra ammunition and rations. The most important things to keep were the tools for his bike. Without that he would be dead. He spoke for what felt like an eternity but was probably no more than 10 minutes. Nobody said a word. We just let him speak. It was unprompted. There was almost no follow up. We just knew that we were hearing stories he probably had never told before.
We learned more about Frank’s military service after his passing. Unbeknownst to anyone, he left the front lines and became a hand-to-hand combat instructor. More questions came up with that revelation. They were questions that again will go unanswered forever. How did nobody know? It’s a simple answer: He didn’t want anybody to know.
Lest we forget? We have already forgotten so much. My own family’s service in the armed forces is heavily redacted. It’s no different than most other families. All I can say for certain is I will never forget the pain in the eyes of an old man who still carried the wounds of his service to the country with him 60 years later. I will never forget that he made the choice to enter Hell on Earth in service of people he had never met, to fight in a country he had never set foot in before, and to stop an evil half a world away.
Anyway, that’s the stuff I’m thinking about on Remembrance Day. I’ll be happy to watch McDavid fly and for a few hours just get away. I can’t wait to share stupid GIFs and yell at my TV when Eberle misses a glorious chance or when Pouliot shoots another puck in his net.
LINEUP
Matt Hendricks is getting closer to joining the team, but even that seems a ways off. He skated with the team, but McLellan said it was more of a rehab skate than anything else.
Maroon McDavid Eberle Pouliot RNH Puljujarvi Lucic Draisaitl Pitlick Lander Letestu Slepyshev
Klefbom Larsson Sekera Benning Nurse Gryba
Talbot Gustavsson
OILERS KEYS TO THE GAME
1) Seguin Advantage. At this point in time the Oilers have a more efficient Power Play than the Dallas Stars. Dallas is ranked 18th with 17.5% and Edmonton is up to 9th with 20.0%. However, the Stars leading scorers are still very dependent on the PP to get their points. Tyler Seguin has 4 points 5v5 this year. He has 7 points 5v4. Compare that with McDavid who has 10 5v5 points and 5 5v4 points. The Stars don’t have anyone with more than 4 points 5v5. It will be imperative for the Oilers to keep the Stars at even strength. It’s clear the scoring advantage is theirs in that game state and it prevents the Stars best players from using their best skills.
2) The Korpse Bride. There are certain players who just look good to the eye but are actually secret agents. They submarine the teams they play for despite even sometimes picking up some positive counting numbers individually. Lauri Korpikoski is one of those players. He is consistently at the bottom of the team in CF% and CFRelTM, which means when he’s on the ice his team is spending more time defending than attacking both in total and relative to his linemates. He did that in Edmonton. He’s at it again in Dallas. He’s even picking up PP time, where he recently scored a very nice looking goal. He’s rocking a 103.6 PDO so goals are going in, but fundamentally there is something wrong. He’ll play roughly 15 minutes against his former club tonight.
3) Scheduled Loss Night. Normally we talk about Scheduled Losses in the context of the Oilers about to be trounced, but this time the pressure is on Dallas. This will be their 3rd game in 4 nights and the 2nd half of a back-to-back. They played against the Flames and won last night and on Tuesday they were shelled by the Jets. We will likely see Niemi and his .892 save percentage play against the Oilers tonight. Edmonton is well rested, albeit injured, but it’s time to start punishing teams in these situations. Earlier this year the Oilers won on a night like this where THEY were supposed to lose. It’s a different world, Oiler fans. It’s a different world.
Puck drops tonight at 7PM Mountain Time on Sportsnet West. Game On!
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