Edmonton Disease

It would figure that my favourite hockey team is one that has never won anything.  I became a Canucks fan for life in 1982. I was living in Seattle at the time and the cable system included BCTV and CBC British Columbia, which meant a steady diet of Canucks games on Wednesday and Saturday nights. The Canucks were a maddening, underachieving team that year who got insanely hot at the end of the season and benefited from some of the most improbable upsets in NHL history to make a run all the way to the Stanley Cup finals, where they got waxed 4-0 by the juggernaut, 4-time champion New York Islanders. But they fought the Isles pretty good and were unlucky to win the first game of the series. They showed themselves well and I was hooked for good.

Which means I’ve now waited 30 years for them to hoist the cup and it still hasn’t happened. Sigh. Why do I do this to myself?

When I moved back to the eastside of the state of Washington, I kept my Canuck allegiance through the 1980s even though the state’s drysiders were much more inclined to follow the two teams in Alberta. And understandably so for several reasons – the Spokane TV stations went up into Alberta; the city had much more of a connection to the Canadian cities on the plains than the stylish, cosmopolitan metropolis on the B.C. coast; and the surprisingly sophisticated Eastern Washington fan base (Spokane has always been a great minor league hockey town) knew a good product when they saw it and unlike the Canucks, the two teams in Alberta were actually good.

Which is a gross understatement – the Edmonton Oilers of the 1980s were probably the greatest assemblage of hockey talent in history, winning 5 Stanley Cups, and about the only team in the league who could keep up with them and play them even was the Calgary Flames. If I had to pick one to begrudgingly support come playoff time, it was the Flames because I hated the Edmonton Oilers, mainly because Gretzky toyed with the Canucks for the entirety of his career, racking up more points vs. Vancouver than against every other team. The Canucks were completely hapless in those days, in the midst of 17 consecutive losing seasons, more known for their zany mustard-coloured jerseys than anything they did on the ice, and Gretzky would skate circles around them and make them all look like buffoons.

I mention all of this because tomorrow night the Canucks are playing the Edmonton Oilers and I will likely tune in. My my, how the tables have turned over time. The Canucks still can’t win the big prize, but they’re consistently one of the top clubs in the sport and they are also a moneymaking machine, routinely listed at or near the top of the financial table among a sport with some persistently-struggling franchises. Their insanely loyal, cheesehead-style fan base not only sells out every home game but often travels en masse, filling up thousands of otherwise empty seats in arenas in the NHL’s Sun Belt climes like Anaheim and Phoenix. The Edmonton Oilers, meanwhile, are showing some improvement this year, having assembled a good collection of talent through one of North America sport’s time-testing strategies for doing so – being terrible for half a decade, and simply having so many high draft picks that you can’t help but amass some good players after a while. Other than 2006, when the Oilers reached the Stanley Cup finals after one of those fluky sort of runs you see in the NHL playoffs, the franchise has withered and dried up over 20+ years. Gretzky took his game to the bright lights of L.A. in 1988, but the team still had enough talent to win a Cup in 1990. Since then, however, it’s been pretty destitute up on the prairie, and the franchise has given birth to a very important concept that we must explore here in IN PLAY LOSE, a concept that an astute Canadian sportswriter whom I cannot recall the name of labeled “Edmonton disease.”

It was much, much easier back in the 1980s to maintain a powerhouse franchise in the NHL, and in a lot of the other sports as well, as player movement was still tightly controlled by the clubs. But with new collective bargaining agreements and the growth of free agency in sports, it’s become far more difficult to do so. In three of the major professional sports in North America, there are salary caps in place which set minimum and maximum amounts franchises can spend on players. The leagues like to spin this as a way to promote competitive balance in the league, holding up Major League Baseball and the big European soccer clubs as an example, wherein the Yankees and Man United and Réal Madrid can supposedly just spend their way to winning championships. This argument is, of course, nonsense. It is a smokescreen. The fact is that salary caps are put in place to make sports franchises more profitable, and to protect owners from themselves. These are a bunch of bazillionaire egomaniacs we’re talking about here who own professional sports franchises, and given the chance to plunk down $100 million on a player, they would do so in a heartbeat if they thought it would give them a chance to win.

Now players can benefit from salary caps as well – if a CBA states the players are entitled to 55% of the gross revenues of the league, for example, and the gross revenues of the sport’s franchises goes up, then their salaries go up as well. Indeed, the average salaries have skyrocketed across professional sports in the past three decades. And free agency allows for greater player movement after a certain number of years, thus eliminating team control and creating some interesting challenges for clubs – after your club has spent 5 years accruing talent to be competitive and win, you some how have to figure out how to pay for it and keep a team together.

And yet with salary caps come limitations on how much clubs can spend on players. Caps are there to hem in ownership. Over time, the net result of this is that the offers for available free agent players are basically the same across the board. Clubs may have finagled some extra $$$ here and there which they can throw at a player, but basically a free agent in the NFL or the NBA or the NHL is going to get similar sized offers. If dollars aren’t the only issue, then other factors can come into play, such as quality of life. Hence Edmonton disease, which is a principle based on a very simple question: if you, an NHL player, has a choice between playing in New York or L.A. or Edmonton, then why would you stay in Edmonton?

Edmonton disease actually runs most rampant in the NBA, an entity in which glitz and promotion has long been forth by the league as being far more important than the actual product on the court. The NBA is a marketing machine, selling their superstars and the most glamorous of franchises. The list of glamour boys shifts a bit here and there from time, but the NBA’s love list includes the Knicks, Celtics, 76ers, Bulls, Lakers, Suns, the Heat and Magic down in Florida, and these days you can toss in a couple more franchises – the Brooklyn Nets and the L.A. Clippers – who’ve done little more to deserve it than be located in Brooklyn and L.A., a pair of franchises which have been so utterly incompetently run over the years that, had they not been located in big markets, they almost certainly would’ve been relocated. (It should be pointed out, in fact, that sheer incompetence can negate inherent quality-of-life advantages. As an example, I give you the Golden State Warriors. But after defying the laws of averages, probability, and quite possibly the laws of physics in being so bad for so long, they now have some terrific young players and grand future plans, so maybe there is hope for the W’s after all.)

So, OK, budding NBA superstar. You’ve plied your trade for 6 years with ... let’s just pick a franchise here for sake of argument ... with the Indiana Pacers, who would love to keep you and can offer you $75,000,000 over the next 5 years. But so can the Brooklyn Nets, and wouldn’t you love to sell your own personal brand in a big media market like New York City. And the Phoenix Suns can offer you $75,000,000 as well, and you’ve been going to every year in the dead of winter and it’s 80° and you can get out on the golf course on your day off in Arizona. You’d love to live there in the sun, wouldn’t you? Jeez, you have it pretty good there in Indianapolis, to be sure, but it’s awfully cold and you’re a young guy and there’s a lot more to do in a place like New York or Phoenix.

And if you’re the Indiana Pacers, of course, you’re realizing that it’s going to be very, very difficult to keep your budding NBA superstar. You may, in fact, be able to offer him more money than anyone else (a caveat in the NBA which can have some drastic long-term consequences, of course, since overspending to keep your free agents will eventually mean having to pay less to the rank-and-file), but there are other factors at play which you cannot hope to compete with. And this is not to slag on Indianapolis or Edmonton, both of which I’m sure are nice cities. But where your franchise is located becomes a prime selling point, and a place like Edmonton can never, ever hope to compete.

And when you look at the NBA, for example, there are a number of franchises which seem completely, utterly hopeless. The NBA used to like the idea of being the only game in town, and enjoyed setting up shop in places like Sacramento and Charlotte where they could control the entertainment market place. But those are the exact franchises which, ultimately, struggle to compete. A pecking order is established and player movement invariably follows that order. If you’re at the bottom of that order, you’d best enjoy whatever success your team may have, because it isn’t likely to last very long.

(Some would go so far as to suggest that in the NBA, the league offices actively root for some franchises to succeed at the expense of others, and go so far as to rig the game in the favour of those franchises and their superstar players. One particular owner, Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, went so far as to yell something like “YOUR GAME IS FUCKING RIGGED!” at NBA Commissioner David Stern during the first Miami-Dallas NBA final and amass a pretty substantial fine for during so. I wish to believe that isn’t the case, but we will touch on those conspiracy theories at another time, when we delve deeper into the plights of the Seattle SuperSonics and the Sacramento Kings.)

You can vaccinate your franchise against Edmonton disease to a certain extent, but you need some help. Perhaps the greatest example of this in pro sports is the San Antonio Spurs. A large reason for their success is dumb luck, of course – the Spurs happened to be terrible and have the first pick in the draft twice when David Robinson and Tim Duncan were available. Not only did they dumb luck their way into two great big men, but they were two quality individuals with team-first professionalism and a far greater interest in winning than personal spoils. The Utah Jazz, Detroit Pistons and Houston Rockets have done much the same thing, putting together long track records of success and generally being lauded for their professionalism. After all, players want to make money, but players also want to win championships, and they’ll gravitate to places where that latter aim can be realized. The Spurs have also been light years ahead of the rest of the NBA in the use of so-called Moneyball concepts – savvy spending on players deemed suitable for their system through advanced statistical analysis. Their former assistant GM, Sam Presti, has taken his laptop with him to his job as GM in Oklahoma City, where he appears to have also lucked himself into getting to build a franchise around Kevin Durant, who is the exact sort of loyal, committed superstar you need to build around if you’re running a franchise far from the bright lights of New York and Hollywood and your club is going to stay competitive.

In all sports, the single most important thing your franchise can do is hire a competent GM, because the GM’s job, first and foremost, is to procure talent, and do so at times when your franchise may face some inherent disadvantages. The teams which are successful, year after year, are usually the best run and smartest run. This is especially true in the NFL, which for years has used tools like the schedule to actually attempt to foster competitive balance, and yet the Patriots and Steelers and Packers are always vying for the super bowl while the Arizona Cardinals are always 5-11 and the Detroit Lions are doing things like this:

Worst play in NFL history, committed by the worst team in NFL history.

The point here is that some sports franchises will find themselves at severe disadvantages when it comes to the acquisition of talent – and, perhaps more importantly, the act of keeping that talent around. Now, the patterns for how Edmonton disease strikes are not the same in every sport. Vancouver was infamously labeled ‘Siberia’ during the woebegone days of the NBA’s Grizzlies, yet it’s a choice destination for hockey players – loyal fan base, the team is always good, it’s a chance to come home to Canada and yet not need a snow blower to get out of your driveway in the morning. Guys will gladly sign on to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers or the Penguins, two perennial powerhouses, yet no one in their right mind would be crazy enough to sign on to play for the Pirates. Yes, the Pirates are a baseball team, and baseball has no salary cap, which means that teams can spend as much as they want on wage bills. But the same rules apply, and a franchise such as the Pittsburgh Pirates, which hasn’t had a winning season in over 20 years, is always going to be picking from the leftovers.

This was made painfully obvious this offseason in baseball for one particular franchise, the Seattle Mariners. (And after watching that unwatchable club for most of my childhood, you can damn well bet there will be more on them in the future.) The Mariners are, by any definition, one of the worst franchises in the history of professional sports. They play in a northern, cold-weather city, and play in a ballpark that is a hitters’ graveyard. They are desperately in need of an infusion of offense into a franchise whose offense has been historically bad in recent years, and offered up 4 years and $100,000,000 to Josh Hamilton – who then received 5 years and $125,000,000 from the California Los Angeles Angels of Yorba Linda Anaheim. Now, the Mariners could’ve come back and offered 5/$125m as well, but Hamilton’s agent would’ve likely just dialed up the Angels and said “give us 130 and we have a deal.” The Mariners were simply there to drive up the price tag, but were never a serious threat to sign the best available player on the market.

The Mariners then reached a deal with Arizona to swap for the Snakes’ outfielder Justin Upton, who then promptly vetoed the trade – turns out he has a no-trade clause in his contract that specifically lists he cannot be traded to the Mariners! This is done by his agent, in part, to up his trade value – the Mariners very clearly being a team which would want to trade for him – and after finding out what the M’s were willing to deal to get him (which was A LOT – 4 players including some of the gems from their farm system), Upton had a better sense of his market value.

But this does nothing to help the Mariners, a franchise desperately stricken by a grave case of Edmonton disease. They still need hitters and cannot seem to land one. But when you’re an awful team in an awful ballpark where hitters go to die, you’re going to have this happen. In recent years, there has been clamoring among the Seattle press and the fan base for the owners to “spend more money” as if that’s a foolproof way to success. But in order to buy, you also need someone who is willing to sell. To anyone who wants to argue the Mariners have been unsuccessful because they’ve been cheap, I would ask the question, “why do you think anybody would ever want to play for the Mariners?”

Now these patterns can change over time, of course, but the notion that there is a level playing field is ludicrous. Sports is fundamentally a marketplace, and some buyers and sellers are at inherent disadvantages. This is true in all agorae, in fact, be it cities vying for pro sport glory or convention biz or tourism dollars or what have you. Some cities are at a disadvantage, simply because of their size or location. Others have a stigma attached to them over time – witness poor Cleveland, who couldn’t even keep native son LeBron James from taking his talents to South Beach. And after almost every dimwitted trade in the NFL, NBA or NHL, the GM who got bamboozled will say “this frees up salary cap space,” which is the limpest excuse of them all, because what good is it when there is nothing to spend it on?

And in the case of the Edmonton Oilers, you’re left with a once-proud franchise with permanently limited resources, an inability to keep talent intact and attract willing new talent. They’re perpetually rumoured to be picking up stakes and moving elsewhere, which is a travesty for the fans, who love the game but don’t want to put up with forking over a whole lot of money for a terrible product. (Owners can only get away with that particular dynamic in Chicago.) Now, since I grew up hating the Oilers, I would like to say that I enjoy seeing them suffer. But the franchise is a shell of what it used to be, so the days of Gretzky and Messier and Kurri and Fuhr are just old stories at this point, ghosts from the past. They’ll inevitably show, during the course of the game with the Canucks on Monday night, all of those championship banners from the 1980s fluttering in the rafters of the whatever-the-hell-it-is-now-named-but-was-once-called Northlands Coliseum. Banners which, 2+ decades on, are starting to look a bit tattered and frayed.