Another week, another article chock full of history of everyone’s favourite hockey team that wears orange and blue in the Edmonton area!
From first goals to jersey retirements to the returns of icons, October usually has been a pretty historic month for the franchise.
October 18th, 2005
Paul Coffey would see his #7 go up into the Rexall Place rafters and would be only the 2nd Oiler to have his number retired. Where do you really begin with him as an Oiler? 48 goals in 85-86? Two Norris Trophies? Three straight 100 point seasons? He truly re invented what a puck moving defenceman could do and further showed that on the Oilers of the 1980s it was impossible to have less than 30 points in a season if you were on the roster.
The jersey retirement would be the highlight of the night as the Oilers would fall 4-3 in OT to the then Wayne Gretzky coached Phoenix Coyotes.
October 19th, 1979
The Edmonton Oilers have over 600 regular season wins to their team history but you have to start somewhere, and at Northlands they’d knock off their WHA brethren in the form of the Quebec Nordiques 6-3. BJ McDonald would lead the Oilers offense with a hat trick (he’d finish the season with 46 goals, the only 40 goal campign of his career) while and Doug Hicks and Brett Callighen with two goals of his own would round out the rest of the scoring for Edmonton.
Eddie Mio would be the winning netminder in this one and would be one of six goalies to step in between the pipes for the newcomers to the NHL. (The only goalie who didn’t record a win for the Oiler was Bob Dupis who went 0-1).
October 19th, 1988
October 19th is pretty big in team history. Ten years to the day after their first win as an NHL team, they’d take on their former face of the franchise for the first time since entering the league. When the LA Kings rolled into Edmonton, their new captain was a familiar face in the form of one Wayne Douglas Gretzky.
As the whole sports world knows by now in the offseason he’d been traded to the Kings, something that rocked the planet and now silver and black were his colours. When he returned to Edmonton to ovation was so loud it seemed as if he’d never left when he came out for the pre game skate. The Great One wouldn’t score but he’d have two assists in the game as his old boys would get the last laugh win an 8-6 win and two goals from new captain Mark Messier.
October 20th, 2007
Remember rebuild 1.0? There was still so much hope that it wouldn’t last very long and the youth core of it included Sam Gagner, Andrew Cogliano, Robert Nilsson and Magnus Paarjarvi. Gagner who’d last the longest as an Oiler among that group would record the first goal of his NHL career in a 4-1 loss to Calgary. Can we get a time machine and tell him that in a few years he’d tie a Gretzky Oilers franchise record? I’d really love to hear about his reaction.
October 22nd, 1980
The Flames and Oilers played their first game against each other on October 26th, 1979 with the Flames winning 7-3 but it wasn’t a battle of Alberta. Why? They didn’t call Calgary home until 1980-81 after relocating from Atlanta after seven seasons of moderate but not spectacular success as the NHL’s first attempt at a sun belt franchise.
When the Flames relocated to Calgary it meant that the Oilers could establish a local rival and the first ever meeting between two Alberta NHL teams Edmonton would get a 5-3 win at home. Little did anyone know though at that first game that these two would basically hog all the Cup success for the majority of the 1980s; the most prized trophy in professional sports didn’t leave the province of Alberta from 1987 to 1990.
Little known fact: From 1980 to 1990 in Edmonton, if you met someone on the street who was either wearing Flames gear or said they were from Calgary you had to fight them or else face a hefty fine or jail time. Tense times in the province.
Up Next
Coming next week we’ll examine one of the worst starts to a season in Oilers history, the first time a opposing team forgot about Drai, the Kingston Cannonball’s first run and the plan to create Rogers Place becoming a reality.
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