The McDavid Tapestry: Would You Change the Past?

Q: “So if you had to do it all over again?”

Jean-Luc Picard: “Things would be different.”

Over the last ten years–which I will dub the “Facepalm Era”–Oiler fans have witnessed a steady stream of regrettable transactions by their favourite team’s management.

• Gave $9 million to Nikita Nikitin. *facepalm*
• Continued feeding minutes to Justin Schultz even though it was obvious he didn’t deserve those minutes. *facepalm*
• Didn’t sign draft pick Eric Gustafsson, who has been a second pairing defenceman for the Blackhawks this season. *facepalm*
• Signed over-the-hill goalie Nikolai Khabibulin to a 4-year, $15 million contract. *facepalm*
• Traded short-handed sniper Tobias Rieder for Kale Kessy. *facepalm*
• Couldn’t get along with Sheldon Souray. In a decade when the Oilers desperately needed actual NHL defenceman, they waived one. *facepalm*
• Let Jeff Petry hit free agency without making much of an effort to sign him to an extension. *facepalm*
• Signed Cam Barker. Any amount of money was too much. *facepalm*
• Traded Lubo Visnovsky for the crippled Ryan Whitney. *facepalm*
• Gave up on Devan Dubnyk, who ended up being a Vezina Trophy candidate the following season. *facepalm*

We could continue, but we’ll stop there…for the sake of our sanity.

Wouldn’t you like to go back and change some or all of those bad decisions? In the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Tapestry,”Captain Jean-Luc Picard was given such an opportunity.

Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes the episode’s plot:

During a diplomatic mission, Captain Picard is shot by terrorists and dies. He awakes to find himself in an otherwordly realm, where he is greeted by Q. Q explains that the energy blast that hit Picard destroyed his artificial heart, and that a natural heart would have survived. Picard lost his original heart during his cadet years when he was stabbed through the chest during a bar brawl, an event that he regrets and led to him becoming the disciplined and restrained man he is today. When Picard remarks that he would do things differently if he could relive that moment, Q sends Picard back in time to two days before the brawl, where he meets with fellow cadets and friends Corey Zweller and Marta Batanides. They are surprised by the personality changes in Picard.

Zweller is cheated by a group of Nausicaans at a bar game, and he plans his revenge by rigging the next match. When the Nausicaans lose, they are enraged and goad Zweller. But instead of joining the fight as he did before, Picard holds Zweller back, averting tragedy but humiliating his friend. Picard then is returned to the present by Q. Instead of being the captain, Picard is now a junior lieutenant in the astrophysics department of the Enterprise. In this new life, he has led an unremarkable career doing routine work. Picard consults Commander Riker and Counselor Troi, who explain that his aversion to risk means he never distinguishes himself.

Picard confronts Q, who tells him that although the bout with the Nausicaan nearly cost him his life, it also gave him a sense of his mortality. It taught him that life was too precious to squander by playing it safe. Picard realizes that his attempts to suppress and ignore the consequences of his indiscretions have resulted in him losing a part of himself. Picard then declares that he would rather die as captain of the Enterprise than live as a nobody. Q sends him back to the bar fight and events unfold as they did originally, with Picard being stabbed through the heart and laughing as he collapses to the floor. In the present, Picard awakens in sickbay, a captain again.

Picard learned that sometimes it’s best not to change the past–even past events we look back on with regret. At the end of the episode, Picard tells Riker,

There were many things in my youth that I’m not proud of. They were loose threads, untidy parts of myself that I wanted to remove. But when I pulled on one of those threads, I unraveled the tapestry of my life.

There are many “loose threads” that Oiler fans would like to remove.

Let’s remove the loose thread of the Rieder trade. If Rieder had never been traded to the Coyotes, he wouldn’t have scored those 2 short-handed goals against the Oilers on December 2, 2014. And if he hadn’t scored those 2 goals, the Oilers might have won that game. And if the Oilers had won that game, maybe the season would have turned out better. But if that’s true, the Oilers would have changed their odds of winning the 2015 Draft Lottery. And, of course, that probably means no Connor McDavid.

The same is true with all the other loose threads of the Facepalm Era. With every loose thread we remove, there is the danger that we unravel the McDavid tapestry.

So if you had to do it all over again?