Edmonton Oilers season just weeks away, but does it even matter?

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You can never say the regular season doesn’t matter.

Even when it doesn’t really matter.

It might be presumptuous to suggest the Edmonton Oilers are about to embark on seven months and 82 games worth of pre-season hockey, but that’s kind of where they are in their evolutionary arc.

Gone are the days when we wonder if the Oilers are going to make the playoffs. They’re making the playoffs. They’re probably finishing first in the division, if not the conference.

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They’re going to put up all kinds of gaudy offensive totals, maybe break a few glory years records, and stun the masses with jaw-dropping highlights.

And it just doesn’t matter.

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The only thing that matters, the only thing the Oilers will be judged on this season, is whether or not they win a Stanley Cup. They are either drinking Champagne on the final day of the season or this season is a failure.

This isn’t counting chickens before they’ve hatched or placing unfair expectations on a team when we all know that the Stanley Cup is the toughest trophy to win in all of sports. This is who the Oilers are right now. These are the expectations they are placing on themselves.

They have two of the best players in the world, in the prime of their careers and with a Game 7 Cup final loss to Florida burned into their souls, surrounded by a supporting cast that’s as good as Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl have ever known — all of them laser-focused on winning a championship.

And nothing that happens in October or January will have much impact on that ultimate goal. Ask Jay Woodcroft.

‘We want to get off to a good start’

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So it’s a tricky little spot the Oilers find themselves in this Cup or Bust campaign: They know the real season doesn’t begin until mid-April, but they can’t, for a second, take the regular season for granted because that’s when bad habits sneak in and contending teams slide into a quagmire they can’t escape from in the spring.

“We know where we want to end up at the end of the season, I think everybody knows that,” said Oilers centre Leon Draisaitl, after a pre-camp team skate at the Downtown Community Arena.

“But we have to give ourselves a chance to get there, first. That’s the most important thing. That’s our priority. We want to get off to a good start, or a better start than last year — that would be a good first step.”

While it might seem like a 2-9-1 start didn’t mean much of anything in the grand scheme of things — Edmonton still advanced to the final, after all — Draisaitl points out it was a valuable lesson that hardened their group and provided the impetus for their record-setting late-season charge.

“That’s what the season shows, the adversity that we’re going to face in the season is going to teach us some lessons,” he said.

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“We don’t want to be in that situation again, we want to get off to a better start and give ourselves a bit of a buffer where at the end of the season we’re leading the division and have home ice on more occasions than not.

“You just try and build, week by week over the span of 82 games, and eventually teach your brain and you teach your team how to prepare for the playoffs.”

The Oilers need to gel as a team after all of their changes in the offseason, get back up to speed after the shortest offseason in franchise history, and finish as high as they can in the standings so they have home-ice advantage if a series goes seven games and they need to re-establish the reputation they carved out last spring.

“You have to create an identity,” said Draisaitl. “We’re not the same team as last year. There are a lot of the same pieces but every team creates its own identity, its own look, and its own way of coaching and playing the game.

“We definitely want to be a similar style of hockey team but we’re going to be our own team — we’re not going to have anything to do with what happened last year, we’re going to try and be even better.”

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E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com

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