It wasn’t always the easiest road, but I stuck by him right up until the end. Ales Hemsky has been a favourite of mine essentially my entire Adult life. We are the same age, actually he’s 1 month younger than me to the day, and this used to enter my mind a lot. While I was a University student living out of a shoebox sized room he was playing hockey for the Oilers making millions of dollars. It’s just one of those things that sometimes factors into why we gravitate towards some players and not others. It certainly didn’t hurt that he was a dynamo with the puck and in his prime darn near a point per game player.
But he was frequently injured and in some cases missed long tracks of time because of it. In his peak years he couldn’t buy a teammate who could skate with him and be there to put the puck in the net at anything close to the same rate at which he was feeding them the puck in scoring areas. It was a bit of a curse, I’d say, because I think he unfairly took on the reputation that he was hard to play with. He wasn’t hard to play with, it was hard to be a 1st line NHL player and he was the Oilers only one for a lot of years. Those other plugs didn’t struggle because Ales is hard to play with, they struggled because they weren’t good enough. It’s not like Patrick O’Sullivan left the Oilers and the shackles of playing with Hemsky and all of a sudden he flourished into the player he was always born to be.
Still though, I wont deny that his point production did start to dip and that other younger players came who were destined to eat at his offensive minutes. They did. The Oilers have Eberle and Yakupov on the right side. The future, I think, is in good hands. That still doesn’t make up for the fact that it feels slightly embarrassing to have lost Hemsky, who can still skate like the wind and is a zone entry wizard, for a 3rd and 5th round pick. Yesterday that was the market and it wasn’t just the Oilers who were burned by it (Hello Islanders), but the Oilers ARE a worse team today than they were yesterday.
Ales Hemsky had the ability to bring you out of your seat on any given shift. He possessed a kind of magic that others just don’t have. If you deny that then you are one of the reasons they say “Oilers Fans deserve The Oilers…. He was one of my favourites. The Sens picked up one heck of a player for almost nothing. He will be missed.
LINEUPS
Edmonton’s lineup is pretty clearly defined right now but as some have already pointed out, maybe that’s not so great. The top 6 is set and the bottom 6 is set, but who is pushing? Who is hungry to take Yakupov’s ice time away from him? Who is making a case for PP time? Nobody. The Oilers are in danger of having a pretty complacent lineup (scary for a club that has been out of the playoffs for almost a decade). Lost in the fact that the Oilers have sent away Bryzgalov, Schultz, and Hemsky is the fact that with that they’ve sent away 1968 games of experience from this lineup and added exactly 0.
Hall RNH Yak Perron Gagner Eberle Hendricks Gordon Jones Gazdic Smyth Joensuu
Ference Schultz Marincin Petry Fraser Larsen
Scrivens
OILERS KEYS TO THE GAME
1) Back To Business. Deadline is over and the people here are Oilers. It’s time to focus on the final 20 games.
2) Are You Experienced? As mentioned above, the Oilers lost almost 2000 games of experience in the 24 hours before the Trade Deadline and added none. This defense is actually going backwards and the 3rd line cant really on Hemsky to skate the puck out. This is do or die time for a few people’s NHL careers.
3) Nuge Is Grounded. RNH has had 1 point in his last 7 games and hasn’t scored since January. That has to be eating at him. By eye he’s still getting chances but they need to start going in for him, at least for the sake of his sanity. He’s a huge part of the success story the Oilers want to write, but he needs to get going.
Puck drops tonight at 7:38pm Mountain Time on Sportsnet. Game On!
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