We’ll need suction cups and ropes, flashlights and hacksaws. We’ll need a balaclava or two, and a plan.

Because it’s time to start thinking about freeing Connor McDavid.

Edmonton Oilers fans will become spittle-flecked rage zombies at the mere notion, and that’s fine. That Oilers fans still have a hockey soul left, that they are not simply dead-eyed and gazing at the wall above the TV, speaks to the power of human resilience.

The best thing that has happened to Oilers fans in the last 13 years was winning the McDavid lottery, and getting to watch the best player in the world play every night. Second place was Peter Chiarelli getting fired.

That happened late Tuesday night, when Edmonton’s general manager was canned during a 3-2 loss to the Detroit Red Wings. It happened right before the all-star weekend, so the franchise player can have a relaxing weekend answering questions about it in California. Sounds fun.

“We’re not going to be in a real rush to get a general manager,” Oilers president Bob Nicholson said at a news conference in Edmonton. “We have to get the right one. And if that takes us some time ... because we have to look at all parts of this organization. I want to emphasize again, we got some real good players. We got some real good staff. But there’s something in the water here in Edmonton that we don’t have right. And we got to get that figured out.”

“I really believe when I watch this team through games this year we can be a real good team. But we just haven’t shown it and we haven’t show it consistently. So what is that? We need to make sure we have the right chemistry in the room, the right character in the room to bring the best out in all our players.”

But ... Nicholson was hired in 2014, and has been in charge since 2015. He hired Chiarelli and left him to make the kind of mistakes that set a franchise back years. And teams that sing songs of character and chemistry — especially after bleeding talent in trade after trade and transaction after transaction — are just lost. The talent pipeline is mediocre. They’re not good enough. They’re slow. It shows.

So Nicholson wears this, too, because he let the car crash. Chiarelli came in saying the Oilers would play heavy, in a league that was slimming down and speeding up. His very first trade was moving first- and second-round picks (one of which became, of course, Islanders star Mathew Barzal) for washout Griffin Reinhart. A year later he dealt former No. 1 pick and future MVP Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson, one for one, and agreed to that ponderous Milan Lucic contract. A year later he traded Jordan Eberle for Ryan Strome, who became Ryan Spooner, who recently cleared waivers.

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Those are just the hits, and but every one was a hydrogen blimp crashing into a power line, right up to and including signing a no-track-record, 30-year-old goalie to a rich contract last week. Chiarelli won a Cup in Boston by mostly not making moves; maybe that was the problem. Edmonton asked him to do something.

But when the Leafs spent decades submarined by greed and incompetence, it came from the top. It always does. Owner Daryl Katz has cycled through old Oilers for years; Keith Gretzky as interim GM seems like dark comedy, honestly. But this one is on the imports.

Connor McDavid doesn’t deserve this. He shouldn’t be trapped in hockey hell. He hasn’t even hinted he wants anything else; he’s a hockey player under contract, after all. He took the money, though less than he could have. And surely, after everything — after the owner swanning around semi-threateningly in Seattle with Wayne Gretzky, after paying for a rink, after enduring this soul-sucking hockey farce for a hockey generation — Oilers fans don’t deserve to watch him leave.

But the franchise is wasting a singular career. This is not arguable. The Oilers have made the playoffs once in McDavid’s first three years because they ran a goalie on a hot streak out there 73 times, and Edmonton outscored opponents 77-47 at 5-on-5 with McDavid on the ice. In McDavid’s career the Oilers have outscored opponents by 55 goals at 5-on-5, and been outscored by 90 when he is on the bench.

It’s like he lost a contest, or a lottery. As then-Oilers winger Pat Maroon said in 2017, “You can’t just rely on one player every year. You can’t wait for him to do it. Someone else has got to do it.” What’s really changed?

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So the rest of hockey should go break him out, so he can start a new life. Except, the Oilers could make the playoffs this year, because the West is five teams and a bag of hammers. And maybe this time they’ll get the right GM, and it will only take a few years to make Edmonton a contender.

But if you were McDavid, would you bet on that? The only generational player who has ever started a career in this bad a situation for this long was Mario Lemieux. Every lost year is a waste of a nonrenewable, once-in-a-lifetime resource.

Still, the bottom line is this: Nobody can break Connor McDavid out except Connor McDavid, and he has never shown the slightest inclination. Maybe this time the Oilers will get it right. For his sake, for the sake of hockey history, you hope they do.

And if they don’t he should borrow a hacksaw, and start hatching a plan.

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