Edmonton Oilers goalie Ben Scrivens (30) sits on the bench after being pulled from the net against the Chicago Blackhawks during second period NHL hockey action in Edmonton, Alberta, on Saturday Nov. 22, 2014. (AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Jason Franson)

(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.)

Gun to your head, what would you say the three biggest problems facing the Edmonton Oilers are these days, in order from most concerning to least?

Naturally and coincidentally, you'd have to start with center depth, move on down to the blue line, then finally settle in the crease. That's in terms of on-ice issues anyway. Maybe you mention the cronyism somewhere, the total lack of accountability the team seems to carry in its organizational bones like ink-black corrosive marrow.

One thing you might not mention is that a cloud seems to hang over this team like a rumbling thunderhead, waiting for the Next Big Screwup so that the finger-pointing can begin anew, as it has at least three or four times a season more or less since the Oilers last made the playoffs.

Saturday night was the latest of these, obviously, with the Blackhawks building a lead so big and so quickly that no one knew quite what to make of it, other than to find it all rather funny. Even Edmonton Oilers fans unfortunate enough to have been in attendance couldn't find it in them to either mock-cheer their team for doing the basic things correctly (putting a shot on net, stopping another easy Chicago zone entry, etc.) or boo them for the things they did wrong. It was the all too familiar silence of a fanbase that had seen this particular episode of the Odd Couple before:

“One is a legitimate NHL team, probably the best in the league on paper, the other is a directionless and shambling disaster that is an NHL team in-name-only and boy it's not even US Thanksgiving and they're already feeling like a team playing out the string. How can they ever get along?”

Turns out they can't.

Yeah, all the on-ice problems filter in some way back to the fact that Darryl Katz is a long-time Oilers fanboy who can't help but giggle with childlike glee every time he writes a check to someone whose name got stamped on the Stanley Cup in the mid-80s, around the same time his haircut was in fashion. And that's an unavoidable and insidious aspect to all this losing, obviously. Were Katz not so enamored of the Kevin Lowes of the hockey world, his childhood team likely wouldn't be in this fix, because someone actually competent at running a team would have long ago been hired to pull it out of the mud, with a winch if necessary.

But here they are, knee-deep in former Cup winners — as though winning as a player has ever really begat winning as a manager in any kind of mathematically reliable way — even now, and the team once again looking like it's on the fast track to a top pick in the draft. Not that this is a bad year in which to be on just such a track, of course, because Jack Eichel is looking every day to be more and more not so much a consolation prize at No. 2 but a split-pot push with ol' No. 1 Connor McDavid. Maybe it seems a little early in the season to say that, but it's: a) Almost December, and b) Not like this team is going to make the playoffs at this point even if they do turn it around in a major way.

If the Oilers could run either prospect down in this season, maybe all the futility will have been worth it.

Because either way you're getting an NHL-ready center who can immediately make an impact on the ice and, one would hope, throughout the rest of the organization. Either prodigy immediately gives the team not only a franchise cornerstone No. 1 pivot of the generational talent variety, but also someone for whom the team is forced to say, “We need to improve so as not to waste his prime years, and the sooner the better.”

This is what led to the rise of the Penguins, after all: They realized that having Sidney Crosby gave them a sort of moral imperative to be good enough to win the Cup. You bring in veterans, you bring in solid bottom-of-the-lineup support. It's not easy, necessarily, but when you've been bad for so long you at least have the benefit of having covetable assets which have become suddenly expendable. This has happened to a lesser extent in Tampa and on Long Island, to choose more recent examples, because these franchises don't want to waste the primes of guys who might already be moving into the Hall of Fame conversation at ludicrously young ages.