Andrew Ference was on the 31 Thoughts podcast that dropped this morning and he had quite a few things to say about his time with the Edmonton Oilers. I’d like to transcribe those for you and I’ll comment on it later since it’s such a long read. And a prefaced apology if the read is a bit hard, I tried to transcribe it word-for-word. Sometimes spoken word doesn’t come off that well when reading it.
EF = Elliotte Friedman
JM = Jeff Marek
AF = Andrew Ference
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On Milan Lucic
EF: I wanted to ask you about Lucic. Nobody is going to feel badly for a guy who’s earning as much as he is but I do feel badly because it’s not working and I think anybody who has any pride, and he has a lot of pride, it hurts.
Do you talk to him at all about how it’s going in Edmonton because I do think even though, obviously he keeps it private, he wanted to be traded last summer. I do think they tried. Do you talk to him at all and try to help him get through it?
AF: Yeah, well he’s got as much pride as anybody. He absolutely loves being in the NHL. He loves playing an important role on a team. You know I see frustrations, the same frustrations I had too going into Edmonton about certain aspects about going there especially coming from a really dialed in- when you see a really dialed in culture and team and how it’s operating and you go to something different, it can be extremely frustrating. I
mean being from Edmonton, I grew up in Sherwood Park, I saw it a million times. There’s always a sacrificial lamb on the team that gets roasted by the radio guys and newspaper guys and then the fans just continue that on.
I think he’s obviously taken that a little bit and you’ve always got a target on your back with a big contract and you know he’d be the first to admit he should be getting more points and scoring more goals.
But it’s tough, it’s really tough to play there and to be I guess the center of so much negativity. I don’t care who you are, negativity gets to you, it doesn’t usually help you at all.
So it’s tough for him and I think it’s tough for any player transitioning from a really super important role on a team to secondary role on the ice. I think he’s still incredibly important in the room and I think that’s probably, whenever I’ve talked to him, it’s goals and assists and sometimes your play can dip and change and sometimes it’s luck and sometimes you’re just not playing good but you can always do the stuff in the room and create that culture and lead off the ice. You always pretty much have full control of that. That shouldn’t fall off the map.
So I think for a guy like that, that’s where you have to transition where your role on the ice isn’t so important but your role off the ice in the room as a leader, you have to magnify that yourself and really make yourself important in those ways as well.
JM: Is it a feeling of almost like getting caught or trapped? Where everything around you- I mean this game changed, as you know Andrew, fast. This game changed quickly. Do you think he has the feeling that maybe he got caught, that, you know; he’s the same player, ‘Hey this worked not that long ago, why isn’t it working now?’ To me, that has to be one of the most frustrating feelings not just in sports but in life. Because you didn’t change, everything around you did
AF: Well, everything’s changing, yes. But I think that there aren’t too many defensemen that still like playing against him. Him on the forecheck when he’s all rambunctious and running around. He’s not a fun player to play against. It’s just that when you’ve had really successful seasons like he’s had, I don’t know what his top line numbers are in his best years but you’re not hitting those same numbers you used to hit. You’re not getting the same playing time, you’re not scoring as many goals, does that mean you’re horrible? No!
I guess people will automatically look at your contract and have expectations of where you should be, and so they should, but I think it’s just some people might adjust their own personal expectations a little quicker than others and accept the fact that I’m not going to be that 40-goal guy, 22-minute-a-night guy, so what can I do? If you don’t adjust that quick enough, the frustration will be neverending.
What’s Wrong in Edmonton?
EF: You mentioned frustrations about going back to Edmonton. I remember a game on Hockey Night where you were the After Hours guest with Scott Oake and Edmonton got pummeled that night. We remember watching the game on-air and saying ‘Scott’s not going to get the guest tonight. There’s no way Andrew Ference’s gonna be on the set after this. He’s going to have to scramble and fill 30 minutes’ and you showed up, which was great. But you were really hard on them. Like, you lit up the group and you’ve talked about that. I don’t think anybody watching that game would’ve had a problem with it but what you just said a couple seconds ago, I just think there’s a lot of Oilers fans out there wondering ‘why doesn’t it work?‘ You know they’ve had a lot of great talent there. Is there something there, in the water of Edmonton, that contributes to all of this? Why do you think they’ve had so much trouble?
AF: I don’t think it’s one thing. I think there’s a combination of elements that go into it, right? Like I said, that aspect of feeling more scared to make a mistake and be the whipping boy rather than being good and taking your chances and having the confidence to try and make a play. I think some guys might get into that role of being scared to be the whipping boy. You take less risks, your urge to win and be bold is less than your urge to not be the whipping boy or stand out, right? I think that is one aspect.
The Media
I think the quickness radio or newspaper or fans jump and attack their own guys is horrible. I think that the quickness to defend the players in the organization, I remember Jeff Petry or Schultz getting raked over the coals and nobody coming to defend them and trading them when their value after they’d beaten them down for months and then trading them. It’s not just for those guys but it’s for other guys on the team. You’re looking at that and saying ‘Woof. They don’t have his back. Are they going to have mine when it’s my turn to be the whipping boy?’
The Most Frustrating Part
But I think the most frustrating part for me as a player like I said, when I went in there straight from Boston, was that talk is cheap. I went in, Dallas Eakins is a fantastic coach, there’s another whipping boy who got dragged over the coals, he’s a fantastic coach who was dealt a pure crap hand and a team that would actually listen. You had a group of players that talked about how they wanted to make the playoffs and talked about how sick they were of losing and then by game three after losing 6-1, they’re straight out to the bar until three in the morning lighting up the nightlife in Edmonton. It was to the point to where it was ridiculous where the lifestyle was way more important than actually playing the game and making the playoffs but like I said, talk is cheap.
Even in practice, I came from a group where you’re practicing with guys like Bergeron or Chara and you’re going at each other, in-game intensity, and that’s how you get better, that’s how you be a playoff contender, that’s how you be a champion and you try to instill some of those values and there were guys that were on playoff teams that had the same frustrations. They come and practice hard and there’s a group of guys there that like it was too cool to try hard. Having derogatory terms for trying hard in practice.
The Culture
That’s the culture and so how do you break that? You come in and try to disrupt, right? So I think over the years there have been attempts to disrupt whether it was Eakins or I come in there or Pronger, whoever it was, different people come in and disrupt but I know personally, it was really hard for me. You come in as an older guy but far from being one of the better players on the team so you can be a leader from experience but I’m not a game changer, I’m a 4/5 defenseman. So your voice only goes so far with people who only respect how good your toe-drag is or whether or not you’re out partying. Your voice doesn’t carry much weight with people that don’t put value on those aspects that I was bringing from Boston or that Dallas was trying to instill on the team.
It wasn’t only frustrating but it pissed me off because it was a waste of years of your NHL career where you never get those back and you see a coach like Dallas get really unfairly treated. Was he perfect, no? He’d be the first to admit that he’d rather do some of those things different but taking the blame for, what are you supposed to do with a culture like that?
The Media Again
JM: I agree with you on that about Dallas. I think he’s a really good coach and I would watch games and then read the reviews of them, and you played, you can tell me if I’m off-base on on-base with this one. I think it was after game seven or maybe game eight that one year that you guys had that western road swing to start down in California and it was a tough one for you. This is when you started that swarm defense and it didn’t work. I think Dallas abandoned it about after game seven or eight but then it would get to about game 12 or game 20 and I’d read about how the swarm defense has to stop in Edmonton. Is anybody actually watching the game, they abandoned this games and games ago. From your point of view as a player on that team, how frustrating is it to play, read the commentary afterward, and say ‘that isn’t even close to what we’re doing.’
AF: Because it becomes an easy narrative. I hate to rag on the media, we were a bad team. We lost a lot of games and got scored on a ton but there is a narrative where it’s just easy to write about something and stick to it whether it’s a player or a concept or whatever it is. You stick to it and it’s fun to write negative things on it and I’m sure that people that call into the show have lots to talk about. It makes it easy. It’s an easy way to talk about a crappy situation. You could’ve had any kind of defense or any kind of system but if you go out on a western swing and your guys are out every single night until five in the morning, you’re not going to win too many games.
