If the Oilers want to be a real playoff contender, they need a clear diagnosis of what’s broken

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Let’s say your car won’t start, so you have it towed to a mechanic.

After a few hours, you phone the mechanic and ask if it’s running. He tells you, “No, it’s not.”

It’s not?

“No. But it’s a good car. A great car, actually. It should run.”

Yes, but what’s wrong with it?

“Nothing. It’s got some amazing parts. It should purr right along.”

But it’s not. “Like I said, it should.”

So you have the car towed to the next mechanic. But he tells you the same thing. So does the mechanic after that. Eventually, you would accept that what you need isn’t a new mechanic. It’s a new car.

This analogy is the Edmonton Oilers, over-simplified.

Every year you look at their roster, jammed with some of the game’s top talent, and think, ‘These are premium parts. Other teams would kill for these parts’. And every year, once the team is taken out onto the highway, it conks out.

The latest petit mort is a four-game sweep by the Winnipeg Jets. Given the amount of overtime they played, you could actually say the Oilers lost five in a row.

Edmonton has enjoyed the combined services of Connor McDavid and Leon Draisatl for the past six seasons. They are, respectively, the best player in the world and one of the half-dozen best. That once-in-a-generation pairing has resulted in a total of one playoff round won.

During the same period, the Carolina Hurricanes — featuring household names such as The Guy with the Same Name as the Other Guy and The One with the Moustache — have won three rounds.

Two things should be clear by now. Something is wrong with the Edmonton Oilers, and that something is not as simple as ‘They need better players’. They have better players. They have better players than just about anyone else in the NHL. And that still can’t make the car run.

At this point, the Oilers should collectively have some sense of what’s wrong. Instead, you get this sort of thing:

“It was a weird series,” McDavid told reporters afterward.

“Just shows what a fine line it is,” said Darnell Nurse.

“Couple of bounces here or there,” said Tyson Barrie.

Whether or not that’s true, it is an unhelpful way to frame the issue. If this is all down to chance, why bother changing anything? This is why craps players don’t practice throwing dice.

Coach Dave Tippett went all in on the learning opportunity theme: “Hopefully, this pushes our guys to get better, to take another step.”

‘Hopefully’?! Isn’t pushing people to get pucks in deeper part of your job? Actually, isn’t that your whole job? And your methodology is getting the boys together in a sharing circle to meditate on it?

Between them, professional sports coaches and Silicon Valley tech bosses have convinced the rest of us that failing is a magical achievement that guarantees success. “Fail fast” and all that nonsense.

You know what those two groups of people have in common? They get paid a great deal of money to screw things up. The less you are paid, the less likely you are to enjoy that same luxury. I believe that is the definition of capitalism.

What happened isn’t Tippett’s fault because he doesn’t wear pads to work, but it is his responsibility. In this analogy, he is the mechanic. He’s supposed to understand cars.

It’s one thing if he can’t fix whatever is wrong with the Oilers. It’s another entirely if he is incapable of explaining what’s broken.

No one in the Oilers set-up has ever ventured a public guess at why their whole is so much worse than the sum of their parts. Clearly, they have no clue. It’s gotten so bad they can’t even bring themselves to make grand gestures - fire the coach, swing a short-sighted trade - any more. They’ve given up trying to do repairs.

The strategy now appears to be banging the team’s head into the same wall over and over again until McDavid is the saddest-looking Hall of Famer in history.

This is not an exhortation to trade McDavid, because no one is ever going to do that. Even talking about trading McDavid is the professional equivalent of jumping into the lion enclosure at the zoo. Sure, you might survive, but even if you do, everyone’s still going to treat you like you’re a little off.

If McDavid wants out of Edmonton, it’s on him to make that happen. He should do that. He’d be doing everyone involved a favour.

But nothing has to happen. As long as they have the best player in the known galaxy, the Oilers can continue being operatic failures. People will still pay to see him play. Maybe becoming the new Marcel Dionne and making eight figures is enough for McDavid. Let’s hope so. Because that’s where he’s headed.

The only thing McDavid and the Oilers have to do this off-season is decide what they each want. Do they want to make money? Do they want to keep their jobs for as long as possible? Do they want to avoid making decisions?

Then do nothing. That’s a completely feasible choice. Go fiddle around with another roster tune-up. That will fool most people. At least, it will until next April. And, hey, maybe one of these years they’ll accidentally fall on the right side of that fine line everyone talks about.

Or do they want to become something more than a theoretical contender? That requires a clearly articulated diagnosis of the problem. A lot of people will not want to hear that. Then you have to get elbows-deep in the engine and start switching out parts. There is every chance that while trying to fix things, you will make them worse.

It would be a marvel to see what Edmonton might become if they changed their organizational mantra from ‘win maybe’ to ‘win or else’. But when you can just keep cashing cheques and telling each other hockey is weird, why bother?