JACK CUSANO
"Now that was funny," said Edmonton Oilers' defenceman Ryan Whitney, coming off the ice after the morning skate ahead of tonight's game against the Calgary Flames - and who could argue with a nice dose of slapstick? A little while earlier, as he exited the ice at the Scotiabank Saddledome, Whitney had unscrewed all the tops of the water bottles on the Oilers bench. Moments later, Sam Gagner came over for a drink and - kerplash, water all the way down the front of his jersey.
"I know who did it," said Gagner, mock seriously in the dressing room afterwards. Just watching the byplay between players, it made you realize: If you thought the Oilers' dressing room would be all doom and gloom on the heels of four consecutive losses, well, you'd have been wrong.
No one was happy about this recent string of defeats, but it hasn't overridden the optimism present in the early going. Gagner was making that exact point: That as things started to go off the rails for the Oilers last season, the dressing room was not a fun place to be: "The attitude was sombre," said Gagner. "It wasn't fun to come to the rink and because of it, we let ourselves get into even more of a slide. That's what we want to stop this year; we want to make sure everything's positive, but at the same time, we can't led things slide again. We need to be urgent."
True enough. Patience is a virtue, until you lose four NHL games in a row, in which case, patience becomes harder to manage. The blush of the back-to-back victories to open the year has faded; rookie Taylor Hall is still looking to score his first NHL goal; and their most recent outing, a 6-1 shellacking at the hands of the San Jose Sharks was close to embarrassing. Hall was talking today about staying the course and being patient and knowing it'll come eventually. Apparently, he and Jordan Eberle went furniture shopping at IKEA the other day and had a little trouble assembling the stuff. Hall noted that his chairs didn't look the same as the ones on the box. Just two kids, trying to sort out their lives in the NHL - and it probably isn't a great surprise to anyone that it's an uneven learning curve.
Whitney, who is playing above 26 minutes for the Oilers, has some experience with that. As a youngster, he came up in the Pittsburgh Penguins' organization around the same time as Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Jordan Staal and Marc-Andre Fleury, so he's knows something about the psychology of patience ... and how long it lasts.
"It's one of those things," said Whitney, "where the fans go, 'it's a rebuild technically so we'll be patient.' Then all of a sudden, as anyone does, you get emotional when you get involved in a team sport and now it's 'well, we gotta win.' So it's a good point. As patient as we're being, you can't lose five or six games in a row. I mean, you gotta get going."