On this day in 1980, the Edmonton Journal's Jim Matheson raised the alarm about a lack of scoring from the Oilers' best player.
"In the last seven games, [Wayne] Gretzky and the rest of the Oiler forwards have hit for a measly eight goals," he wrote from Long Island, where Edmonton was set to meet the New York Islanders.
Forty-one years later, Matheson was expressing similar concerns about the Oilers and their current best player.
"When you've been the hottest team in the league for a month, and you lose two straight and can't score against the back-up or the back-up to the back-up, it's obviously not a good look for Connor McDavid and Co.," he wrote this week after the Oilers were twice shut out by the Toronto Maple Leafs.
The Oilers did lose that 1980 game, but it wasn't Gretzky's fault — he had two goals and two assists in a 6-4 loss. New York ended up winning the Stanley Cup that year, with Edmonton losing to Philadelphia in the first round. The Islanders' dynasty continued until 1984 when the Oilers beat them in the finals, starting their own run of Stanley Cups, all of which Matheson covered.
This clipping was found on Vintage Edmonton, a daily look at Edmonton's history from armchair archivist @revRecluse.