The Oilers are an undersized team that, at last look on April 3, didn’t go to the areas they needed to go to win hockey games, and as a result, coasted into a third straight early summer vacation. No wonder Mike Comrie wanted to bury the hatchet: Right now, the Edmonton Oilers fit like a glove.
Comrie is an undersized forward with a questionable heart, and he has never once made the players around him better. This is why, until today, Comrie was an unrestricted free agent, flirting with a ticket to Siberia, when he should have been a 29-year-old entering the prime of his career. It’s the last part of that sentence that surely has many Oiler fans thinking that this is a good move, and that Comrie’s best days are ahead. Perhaps they are.
But let’s put down the pre-camp Kool-Aid and whatever amnesia-enducing substance that my good friend Gene Principe has stockpiled in his basement and take a moment to understand what the Oilers acquired on Thursday. The Oilers are getting a me-first, injury-prone crybaby who has a grand total of 50 goals over the past three seasons after spitting in their face in one of the most bitter contract disputes in team history. I’ll bet they can’t wait for those habits to rub off on Sam Gagner.
What the Oilers need right now is size up front. Badly. Code effin red. At 5-foot-10, 185 pounds, Comrie does not fill that need. What the Oilers need right now are diggers, not coasters, and the only thing Mike Comrie’s dug in the past six years is Hilary Duff.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Comrie turns it around this year and pots 35. Then what? Another contract negotiation with the Oilers? The team that started his career, and then incomprehensibly peeled it up off the mat.
Then and ONLY then will we really see if “our little baby’s all growns up.”