In a nice gesture on Feb. 14, a handful of Edmonton Oilers and their head coach Tom Renney spent part of the afternoon watching hockey.
In a nice gesture on Feb. 14, a handful of Edmonton Oilers and their head coach Tom Renney spent part of the afternoon watching hockey.
They took a short drive just outside of Edmonton to Sherwood Park to take a closer look at the action that goes along with the World’s Longest Hockey Game.
It started on Friday and runs for 10 days. The goal is to raise $1 million for cancer research.
It comes at a time for Edmonton where it may just feel like the middle of the World's Longest Season after a real downer of a weekend.
The Oilers lost another two games but it looked more like they lost their way of the future. I think Shawn Horcoff put it best when he suggested that effort and intensity are not a skill and they are not things that were in abundance on Saturday and Sunday.
Taking on Ottawa, who had lost 11 in a row to start the weekend, looked like the perfect opponent; someone the Oilers could beat and maybe even bad enough to regain some lost confidence. It didn’t happen.
Then came Anaheim, a much better team but the expectation was that after Saturday the Oilers would have a much better effort. It wasn't to be as less than a minute in they were down a goal and could only muster 12 shots, one off tying a franchise low.
These are difficult times for everyone in the organization as losing has become an unwanted habit.
It's easy to preach patience but it's much harder to practice it. Better times are ahead but for now Edmonton has to live life at the bottom. Who knows?
Maybe watching those at the World's Longest Game may inspire another group of hockey players to continue their commitment to a cause of a different kind.
