Compete level is standing in the way of any rivalry between the Canucks and Oilers.
EDMONTON — Truth be told, the Vancouver Canucks and Edmonton Oilers have never had much of a rivalry.
When the Oilers were winning Cups in the 80’s, they would beat Thomas Gradin, Doug Lidster and the rest of the Halloween costume Canucks by five most nights.
Then, when Vancouver got good in the 90s, Edmonton was making their transition from the Glory Years to the Gory Years. The Canucks had Trevor Linden and Kirk McLean and the Oilers answered with Roman Oksiuta and Freddy Brathwaite.
One day this is going to be a hell of a rivalry.
On Sunday night, the Canucks reminded us just how far the Oilers have to go to make it one.
If this 2-1 game was a clinic, then "we were the patients," admitted Oilers head coach Tom Renney.
Wherever it is that the Canucks are right now as an organization, it has been a long hard road to get there. They are legitimate Stanley Cup contenders, no more no less and even that iffy label has taken a mountain of work to attain.
In short, the Canucks were these Oilers once.
"We weren’t this good though, I’ll tell you that," said a charitable Henrik Sedin, after a slick two-point night. "I think they’re close — they’re not that far off. It takes time for a young player to learn what it takes to play a 60-minute NHL game. You can’t make any mistakes. It’s a lot of mental."
The Sedins drove Edmonton mental all right, killing them with their patented cycle game.
Watching the Sedins work the puck down low, with two or three Oilers chasing wildly in their wake, reminded a sportswriter of that old joke about the two bulls standing up on the hill, looking down on the herd of cows.
The Oilers wanted to run down there and get one. The Sedins’ swagger suggested they’d just walk on down and get them all.
"You can see some parts of their game, with so many young guys in their lineup, there are going to be mistakes," Henrik said. "They are a young team, so they tend to overplay a lot. They tend to go two or three guys on one of us when we’ve got the puck, and they look at the puck more than other teams do maybe."
"They’re an exciting team to watch and they’re going to have a bright future, but they some mistakes where you can tell that they’re young."
Back in 2000-01, when the twins arrived in Vancouver, the Canucks were an average team. They had missed the playoff for the fourth consecutive season and would go on to win just a single playoff round in the first five seasons of the Sedins’ careers.
Edmonton has missed the playoffs for four straight years and we’re betting it will be five come April. There are going to be nights like this in a rebuild, when a good team walks into your barn and kicks you around.
At the top of Edmonton’s to-do list of things to learn sits one word: "Compete," said Renney. "If I was disappointed in one thing tonight, I was disappointed, it was in our compete level."
"We have to compete way harder than that," said defenceman Ryan Whitney, who listed his own name first on that list."
For the second consecutive game, the Oilers had one shot on net in the third period. But they also chased the puck all night long because over a period of years, the Canucks have built a stable of three centres that rival any other teams in the league.
Only Pittsburgh, when Jordan Staal is healthy, alongside Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin, has a better Top 3 than Henrik, Ryan Kesler and Manny Malhotra.
Up the middle is where Edmonton is weakest.
On Sunday, the best face off team in the league had the puck all night along against 28th ranked Edmonton.
On the back end, the Canucks have slowly built a formidable group, picking up two huge additions only recently in Dam Hamhuis and Keith Ballard.
The Oilers have one D-man — Whitney — who could crack Vancouver’s top two pairings.
Between the face off circle and Edmonton’s back end versus the Sedins’ cycle, this is a horrific matchup for the Oilers.
And it will be for a while yet.
"Those are two guys you can’t chase the puck against. If one guys moves it you’ve got to finish him," Whitney said of the twins. "And I think if you asked them they’d say they could play a lot better."
Renney agreed that the Canucks weren’t at their best. "We had a chance to beat a very good team tonight."
A chance?
Sure.
With 12 shots on net, we’d call it a chance in hell.
