Very Bad News: Edmonton Oilers Head Coach Angry and Announced resignation immediately….

Very Bad News: Edmonton Oilers Head Coach Angry and Announced resignation immediately….

We all love Mattias Ekholm, veteran defenceman and hockey hero of the Edmonton Oilers, the king of the north, the Viking of the blueline.

He’s a top Oilers d-man for sure. In fact, at times in the past few seasons he’s been Edmonton’s best d-man.

That said, as a fan of the team before I’m a fan of any one player, I can’t say I love the idea of Edmonton extending Ekholm’s contract just now. I hadn’t been thinking it was a possibility but this week on Oilers Now, Edmonton’s top NHL insider Bob Stauffer, the team’s master of whisperers, shared this nugget: “It wouldn’t surprise me if the Oilers extended Matthias Ekholm, maybe even this summer.”

When Stauffer mentioned it, the ideas sounded OK enough, mainly because I’m like almost all of the rest of you: I admire Ekholm both as an individual and as a player.

Acquiring him from Nashville was one of the two or three best moves former GM Ken Holland made with the Oilers, that and signing Zach Hyman and giving second chances to players like Evander Kane and Corey Perry, even as other NHL teams were too cautious and/or sanctimonious to consider the same.

Ekholm has been a stalwart since his arrival in Edmonton, teaming up with Evan Bouchard on the team’s top-pairing to help lead the squad to two Stanley Cup Finals.

But time and injury aren’t the friends of a single NHL player.

Time and injury catch up to all of them. We got a taste of that with Ekholm this season. He played as well as ever in the first half of the season, but after a series of core injury issues, his game wasn’t the same.