The Five Stages Of Grief, As Experienced By An Oilers Fan Every Spring

It happens every year, and every year it feels like the first time.

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There is a form of suffering that belongs exclusively to the Edmonton Oilers fan, one distinct from the suffering of fans of bad teams, because bad teams are expected to lose and losing is therefore survivable, even comfortable in its predictability. The Oilers are not a bad team.

The Oilers are a team with the greatest player on earth, a generational winger playing beside him, and teammates that look, on paper, like they should be enough, but that's precisely what makes the spring so devastating. It's one thing to lose with nothing and another thing entirely to lose with Connor McDavid.

Three Free Agents Who Would Make The Oilers Tougher To Play AgainstThe Edmonton Oilers have spent the better part of a decade being the most talented team in the building on any given night and still finding ways to lose series they should win. It's a problem that more talent alone is unlikely to fix, which is why the most interesting free-agent question surrounding this organization isn't which scorer they add, but whether they finally decide to make themselves harder to play against.

And yet here we are again.

Psychologists will tell you that grief moves in stages, that there is a recognizable shape to loss and that understanding it is the first step toward healing. They did not have the Edmonton Oilers in mind when they developed this framework, but the shoe fits so perfectly it might as well have been made for us.

Denial

The series isn't over. It's 3-1, yes, but the Oilers have been here before, and anybody who watched 2024 knows that a 3-1 deficit means nothing, and McDavid hasn't even really gotten going yet, and Stuart Skinner looks like he's finding his game, and honestly the other team is playing above their heads and there is absolutely no way this ends the same way it ended last year.

It ends the same way it ended last year.

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This stage typically lasts between 72 hours and the entirety of the following regular season, depending on the individual fan's psychological resilience and proximity to sports radio; either of those can help or make everything significantly worse, depending on the host.

Anger

This one has a long list of targets and the order rotates annually.

Some years it's the goaltender, who let in a soft one in Game 5 that nobody will ever fully forgive even if he wins a Stanley Cup somewhere else a decade from now. Some years it's the defence, who gave up the zone entry that led to the goal that changed the momentum in the third period of the game that turned the series. Some years it's the coach, who pulled the goalie too early or too late or used the wrong line at the wrong time, and some years it's the general manager, who did or did not make the trade that everyone on Twitter agreed was obviously necessary three weeks before the deadline.

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Every year, without fail, it is also the referees.

This stage is the most energizing of the five and the one most likely to result in a strongly worded post on a message board that the author will be mildly embarrassed by in September.

Bargaining

Okay. So if the Oilers trade Nurse and sign two physical forwards and maybe a different goalie and McDavid finally gets his extension sorted and Draisaitl has a healthy offseason and Babcock actually gets through to the group and they address the power play issues from the second unit and maybe they catch an easier bracket next spring, then next year is actually different, and this rebuild of what is technically not a rebuild is going to work, and there is a real argument that this team is one or two moves away.

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There is always an argument that this team is one or two moves away.

This stage is the most dangerous because it is the most fun: running on pure speculation, Twitter, and the first week of free agency, all of which are extremely good at making you believe that this time the moves will actually be the right ones.

Depression

McDavid is 29.

That's the whole stage. That's the entire thing. He is 29 years old, and he has two Stanley Cup appearances and zero rings, and the window that everyone spent five years calling wide open has started, just barely but unmistakably, to show its edges. And every spring that ends that way is one fewer spring left, and at some point the math stops being theoretical and starts being real, and that point feels closer than it did last year.

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This stage tends to arrive around mid-June, usually during a Stanley Cup Final involving a team whose best player is objectively less good than Connor McDavid, and it sits in the chest like something heavy and specific until training camp opens and the optimism cycle restarts.

Acceptance

The Oilers are what they are—one of the most compelling and maddening teams in the sport, a franchise that produces more feelings per game than almost any other, that has taken years off the lives of the people who love them and given back nothing in the way of cups and everything in the way of something to talk about. Next year the same thing will happen in roughly the same order, and we will watch every game anyway, because what is the alternative?

There is no alternative.

Season tickets renewed. See you in October.

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