You cut me Selley. You cut me deep.

What real reason could a Toronto fan have for disliking the Oilers? There's no playoff history, and the regular-season games, then and now, have tended to be cheap walkovers for the home team.

Now that I think about it, the Oilers have generally had plenty of league-wide hate/dread figures (Tikkanen, Linseman, McSorley, Bryan Marchment, Semenko, Dave Brown, etc.) For some reason I don't think of the Leafs as having had a lot of those guys, though I'm sure it's easier to sustain a sneaky affection for Domi and Tucker from this end of the continent. Nobody (outside Toronto) ever sat around in a bar talking about how much they hated that friggin' Bill Derlago.

Cosh, that comment just proves the necessity of the new blog. You assume that the only people who can dislike the Oilers are their victims; I'd approach it more like, "in the face of all this evidence, who could possibly like the Oilers? Oh, you live there? Well, I guess I get that, but..."

On a slightly less combative note, though, I'd wager there's 10 times as many people across Canada who dislike the Oilers because of Gretzky, Messier, Anderson, Coffey, Huddy, and Sather than because of Tikkanen, Brown et al.

"I'd wager there's 10 times as many people across Canada who dislike the Oilers because of Gretzky, Messier, Anderson, Coffey, Huddy, and Sather..."

Yup.

Especially Sather. God, I love to see him reaching new heights of success with NYR.

Dean