Shoutout to my friends in the northeast corner of the province, blanketed by a dump of snow on Friday, putting a big wet damper on the May long weekend. 

So it goes for many Albertans, invited to ignore hockey for a while with the idea of summer around the corner, only to be thronged violently back into January dreariness. Top it off with the week that was in Oilersnation, and oh baby, you’ve got quite the start to the off-season. 

However, in the capital region, the sun finally came to play Saturday night, chilly as it may be. Better days ahead, I’m sure. The Edmonton Oilers would certainly hope so, trying to put another ham-handed chapter in the Daryl Katz era behind them.

This week’s feature: Butch Cassidy and the Permission Leak.

Knoblauch flits in the wind for 36 hours, and the Oilers create headline fodder for not just Edmonton, but the hockey world at large. 

To me, it’s not that the Oilers fired Knoblauch – I’m on board if you can get Bruce Cassidy – it’s how they fired him. I felt the same about the season as a whole. It wasn’t that the Oilers lost to the Ducks, but how they lost, and how they looked all season. 

We know it’s not unusual to sniff around for another coach while your current coach is in place. But my goodness, it’s just so Oilers to get caught. Can’t you do the sneaky bit right? 

Then again, why is there a sneaky bit in the first place? As Jason Gregor points out, quite rightly, off-season sneakiness is strange. 

In-season? It makes total sense that you want to fire and hire in the same press release, a kickstart-my-heart coaching jolt for instant wins. You want a steady hand at the wheel immediately. 

Look no further than what happened to Cassidy a month and a half ago, who watches the Vegas Golden Knights like the rest of us, going to the Western Conference final. 

But the off-season? How many days were there really between the Oilers asking the Golden Knights for permission and the Seravalli report coming out? A report, by the way, that was much more focused on the Oilers than it was on the Los Angeles Kings, for example, who were under their own shroud of secrecy and contradictory reporting, too. 

If Seravalli said publicly last Thursday, May 7, that “coaching changes are likely” and five days later, on Tuesday, May 12, the delayed Cassidy yay or nays are public, is that when the Oilers initially asked?

It all underlines a strange secrecy.

My hunch

The reason for the delay, says Bowman, is that he wanted to do the deed face-to-face.

Admirable. Yet, absolutely bungled.

Despite this idea of doing right by your coach, who did help the Oilers get one coinflip away from the Stanley Cup, they look sloppy and unserious instead. The........

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