Despite McDavid’s exploits, ennui and expense eating at Edmonton

Not even Babe Ruth sold out Yankee Stadium every game. The House That Ruth Built, he could not always fill.

But in the modern NHL, a winning Canadian team usually means a packed arena.

That should be doubly true when you have the Babe Ruth of hockey on your team, playing like it’s 1927. The Edmonton Oilers are in just such a position. Connor McDavid, long established as the world’s greatest player, is having a hallucinatory season, on pace to score 200 points – a number only ever produced by another fairly well-known Oiler, back in the Jofa helmet era.

It’s not just the points, but the way McDavid notches them. His speed, quickness, and fluidity stand out so much on the ice, he can look like some newly evolved being – a Homo sapiens among Neanderthals.

McDavid explodes out of the gate to lead Oilers to historic start

There are other reasons to pay good money for Oilers seats. The team is 14-3-3, off to its best start since the 1980s. McDavid’s two-man game with Leon Draisaitl is so well synchronized it can look almost intimate, like the dynamic of a couple at a dinner party that only have eyes for each other. In Zach Hyman and Evan Bouchard, the two superstars even have something approximating their Jari Kurri and Paul Coffey.

All of that should add up to automatic sellouts. In the Gretzky era, you couldn’t get Oilers tickets for love nor money. Edmonton is self-consciously A Great Hockey Town, a place that should know how to appreciate puck genius.

So it has caused some consternation in the City of Champions that attendance is down at Rogers Place – The House That McDavid Built. Not by much – about 5 per cent – but that means the team is playing to an average of about 1,000 empty seats at home.

Superfan Christine Lillo has a theory about what’s going on, rubbing her fingers together in the universal sign for cash money. She and her husband Brent had just spent “a tick over $1,000” for four tickets to take their son and daughter to the Oilers-Flyers game on Wednesday. They had snapped their seats up that morning on resale, at a relative discount because of the dismal quality of the opposition. (“I didn’t expect to turn out for Philly!” said Brent.) One recent analysis estimated the cost to see the Oilers for a family of four, with parking and concessions, at more than $1,200.

If that sounds exorbitant, it’s only ninth highest in the league, and just 15 per cent above average. The Oilers and their starry lineup are far better than 15 per cent above average. And despite the continentwide angst about the cost of living, NHL attendance is actually up slightly across the board.

So what’s eating Edmonton? One school of thought holds the team’s controversial off-season signings partly responsible. First came the hiring of head coach Mike Babcock, a Stanley Cup and Olympic gold-medal winner, but widely seen as a bully who belittled and humiliated players far beyond the macho norms of NHL locker rooms. Until the Oilers hired him in June, he had been drummed out of the league more or less since 2019.

Opinion: Mike Babcock has a winner in front of him, wiping the slate clean for once-ostracized coach

Then in September, the team announced the signing of forward Alex Formenton, one of the five players acquitted of sexual assault in the Hockey Canada trial. Some fans revolted. Mary Loewen, better known as Mama Stanley for her colourful Stanley Cup costumes and loyalty to the team, declared that she could no longer support the Oilers.

Perhaps it is such sensitivities that make the organization so reluctant to discuss the attendance dip. Although the subject has been widely mooted in the local media, attempts to bring it up in postgame scrums are aggressively discouraged by the team’s press minders. When I tried to ask goalie Tristan Jarry why he thought attendance might be down, and whether the players cared, two large men in the corner barked, “No no no, we’re not talking about attendance!” When I expressed some lightly sardonic surprise at their reaction, they threatened to take away my credential.

Forward Zach Hyman was not so cagey. After scoring two goals against Philly, he gamely fielded the attendance question, albeit with rose-tinted glasses firmly in place.

“The fans here are unbelievable. If you asked me I’d say we sold out every night and that’s how it feels. The fans are the best. They’re loud, they’re into the game, they’re standing. It seems like it’s sold out every night.”

It’s true that the Edmonton home crowd can get rowdy, but this season its barn has been a little sleepy. The Edmonton Journal called the building “silent” on Oct. 16 after the Oilers drew the second smallest crowd in Rogers Place history.

On Wednesday against the Flyers, you could hear the murmur of distracted conversation even when the play was live. The crowd made the kind of polite noises you hear in National Film Board footage from Original Six games in the 1950s.

That could be the root of the team’s attendance problem – ennui. Even genius can become old hat. After watching the world’s greatest player decant lightning on the ice like a sommelier of end-to-end rushes for a decade, and having their hearts broken in consecutive Stanley Cup Finals, Oilers fans are having a little trouble getting their pulses up.

It may take a chase for 200 points, or another Cup Final appearance, to once again fill the House That McDavid Built.