The sweater may be vintage, but the team’s play certainly isn't.

BY MARK SPECTOR
sportsnet.ca

EDMONTON -- After years of poor drafting, an admitted over-estimation of their talent, and several bad contracts handed out by former general manage Kevin Lowe, you might say all of the Edmonton Oilers’ bills are coming due this season.

But bills are, um, kind of a touchy subject around this group right now, after that New Year’s Eve debacle at the Calgary restaurant. And the team has, of course, “moved on” from that night, one of the great team-building efforts of our time.

As it turns out, sportsnet.ca has learned, the Oilers players -- tired of hearing management blamed for the worst team this town has seen since the Oilers entered the NHL in 1979 -- stepped up to deflect the spotlight, becoming the all-time cheapskates in organizational history. Thus taking that mud-stained Oil Drop and trenching even a little bit deeper into the mire.

Look -- we’ve all been part of a bad bill before. And, yes, NHL players can become targets in a situation like this one.

But the end result was 20 millionaires didn’t suck it up. Men who get more stuff for free in a year than anyone reading this column does in a lifetime, refused on principle to come up with less than $1,000 apiece for them and their spouse/girlfriend on New Year’s Eve. Instead, they created an incident that stained a once proud organization’s reputation from coast to coast.

Another dent in a train wreck of a season -- in Calgary, no less. Like the story of the Oilers dine-and-dash wouldn’t have legs in that city? Sheesh.

Within days, team owner Daryl Katz had canceled a planned golf trip to Palm Springs for the players and their wives. The Oilers say the two incidents had nothing to do with each other, but we can only hope that isn’t true.

Now, the players will stay in minus-20 Edmonton for a mini-training camp instead of teeing it up in the sunshine. And their wives will sip Tim Horton’s coffee instead of Cosmopolitans by the pool.

Hello-o, Lauren Pronger!

“There was a plan, a good one by our management and ownership, to give our players a little bit of a break (from Jan. 8-11), which seemed pretty smart in August,” head coach Pat Quinn said. “But it doesn’t feel, as a coach, very smart right now.

“I was the guy who convinced others that we needed this (practice) time,” said Quinn. “So we’re going to run a little camp here. We have this window, it’s the only one we have all year. We can’t (practise) during the Olympic break and by then it might be too late, anyway. This is a very important four days for us.”

At this “little camp,” we’ll assume the coaches will be handing out the tips: “Eighteen per cent for groups of eight or more, men!”

Truly, this New Year marks rock bottom for the Oilers.

As of Tuesday morning they were dead last in the Western Conference and 29th in the 30-team National Hockey League. Their Springfield farm team is 28th in the 29-team American Hockey League. Their Stockton farm team is tied for 19th in the 20-team East Coast Hockey League.

Yes, they have some high-end prospects at the world junior tournament, though the farm system would not even grade out at “average.”

Management, at least, realizes this season is more about Taylor Hall than the spring ball. Asked on the radio show “Oilers Lunch” whether the club would seek to acquire players to help a lineup that has lost Ales Hemsky for the season and goalie Nikolai Khabibulin for perhaps as long, Lowe ensured the listeners, “Absolutely not.”

Before the season was half over, the Oilers had surpassed the number of man games lost to injury in the entire 2008-09 season. And clearly many teams would be felled by losing their best player (Hemsky) and the No. 1 goalie in a fell swoop -- let alone a club that probably would have missed the playoffs even with that pair in the lineup.

So they’ll lie in the weeds until the March trade deadline, where GM Steve Tambellini will try his best to unload captain Ethan Moreau, pray someone will take defenceman Steve Staios at a $2.7 million cap hit, and put Sheldon Souray on the table as well.

The verdict is in: This isn’t Next Year Country. It’s Next Years Country.

Edmonton is officially the Toronto Maple Leafs west.

The only difference is, the Leafs don’t have alligator arms when the waiter brings the tab.