When we talk about the Edmonton Oilers dynasty, the same names always come up. Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, Paul Coffey, Jari Kurri. Those guys earned every syllable of every sentence ever written about them. But one wins five Stanley Cups in seven years because of a room full of people who show up every single night and do the hard invisible work.
We wanted to dig into the names that deserve more shine, the players who were essential to what Edmonton built but who rarely make the opening paragraph. Some of these players had very remarkable careers. A few were very good hockey players by any measure.
Today we take a look at the underappreciated Oilers, a fascinating collection of guys and many of who collectively made the dynasty possible. This is their list.
Dave Semenko: the great protector
Wayne Gretzky was the engine of the Oilers dynasty and one could say Dave Semenko was the armoured car around it. His entire job, night after night, was to make sure no one did anything stupid to #99, and because of that, nobody did. He was one of the most feared fighters in the league, logging 981 penalty minutes in 454 games with Edmonton and an estimated 70 fights over his career. When opponents weighed up whether to take a run at Gretzky, they had to factor in Semenko and that math almost always came out in Edmonton’s favor.
What gets lost is that Semenko was part of two back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in 1984 and 1985, and he played regular shifts, killed penalties and finished his career with 65 goals and 153 points across 575 NHL games. When the Oilers traded to bring his rights to Edmonton from the Minnesota North Stars, the deal also netted them a third-round pick they used to select Mark Messier. Acquiring Semenko came bundled with another Hall of Famer.
Off the ice, Semenko was known as a warm gentle presence, a tough guy who was anything but once the skates came off. He remained with the Oilers organization for decades working as a broadcaster, assistant coach, and scout before passing away in 2017 at 59 years old. Edmonton fans who lived through the dynasty never forgot him. Most everyone else sort of did.
Charlie Huddy: the most decorated nobody
Charlie Huddy was on the ice for every single one of Edmonton’s five Stanley Cup championships. He is one of only seven players in Oilers history to appear on all five Cup-winning rosters, and yet his name barely comes up when people rattle off the dynasty’s key contributors.
He played alongside Paul Coffey, one of the most offensively gifted defencemen in NHL history, and was often described as the guy who covered for Coffey when he went wandering up the ice. Playing that role meant no headlines.
Huddy put together 81 goals and 287 assists over 694 games with Edmonton, and he was elite defensively. In the 1982–83 season, he led the entire NHL in plus/minus at plus-62, a staggering number for a player who never received so much as an All-Star nomination. He finished his career with an overall plus/minus of plus-343, one of the best marks of his era. He was also undrafted.
Charlie Huddy’s legacy is five rings, near-zero name recognition outside of Edmonton and a plus-62 season that most fans have never heard of.
Randy Gregg: the doctor who won five cups
Randy Gregg might be the most quietly remarkable person to ever play for the Oilers. He was an undrafted defenceman who didn’t make it to the NHL until he was 27 because he was also a physician and hockey kept getting delayed around life. He then won five Stanley Cups in eight seasons with Edmonton, an extraordinary success rate for someone who barely cracked a roster until his late 20s.
His best season came in 1983–84 when he scored 12 goals and 40 points and then added 10 more in 19 playoff games as Edmonton won their first Cup. He was a steady presence on the blue line, big at 6’4″, smart in the room, and effective against opposing forwards. He never lobbied for ice time and by most accounts was one of the most respected people in the dressing room.
Gregg was a physician moonlighting as a professional hockey player, or perhaps the other way around, and he was good enough at the hockey part to collect five championship rings before he was done. We don’t talk about Randy Gregg enough.
Craig MacTavish: three cups and no helmet
Craig MacTavish is best remembered for one visual detail. He was the last NHL player to skate without a helmet, which became his unofficial trademark. That quirk often tends to overshadow what he actually was: a very important two-way centre who won three Stanley Cups with the Oilers and then captained the team through the mid-90s.
In 701 games with the Oilers, MacTavish produced 331 points (155 goals, 176 assists), solid numbers for a checking centre, but his value was in the face-off wins, the defensive reliability, and the veteran leadership that kept the team functioning even as the core broke apart. He won Cups in 1987, 1988 and 1990 and later became head coach, guiding the Oilers to within a single win of the 2006 Stanley Cup Final. His total hockey lifespan in various roles for Edmonton is extraordinary and somehow he’s still mostly known for skating without a helmet.
Esa Tikkanen: the Pest who was also great
Esa Tikkanen gets some recognition, but probably not the right kind. People remember him as the agitator who delivered trash talk in a blend of Finnish and English that teammates called “Tiki-Talk.” That reputation is real. Under it, though, Tikkanen was an excellent hockey player who was a multiple-time Selke Trophy finalist as the league’s best defensive forward, which is elite company by any standard.
He was a member of four Stanley Cup-winning Oilers teams and then won a fifth with the Rangers in 1994. He played on the same line as Gretzky and Kurri and was tasked with the defensive responsibility that allowed those two to operate freely, doing the dirty work so the best players in the world could focus on scoring.
After Gretzky’s trade to Los Angeles, Tikkanen shadowed him in playoff series and did it more effectively than almost anyone else could have. It was a strange, thankless, fascinatingly specific role and he did it well every time.
The version of Tikkanen that history tends to remember is incomplete. He was also a disciplined, two-way force who led the Oilers in scoring in 1990–91 with 69 points. That detail rarely follows him around, and it should.
Kevin Lowe: the foundation that nobody noticed
Kevin Lowe eventually got some recognition, inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2020, but even now the appreciation doesn’t feel proportional to what he actually did. He was the Oilers’ very first NHL draft pick in 1979 and went on to play 1,037 games for Edmonton without ever missing the playoffs. Lowe scored the franchise’s first-ever NHL goal. He won six Stanley Cups total, five with Edmonton and one with the Rangers in 1994. His teammates consistently pointed to him as the defensive foundation that made the whole thing work.
While Gretzky and Coffey were getting the glory, Lowe had a career plus-minus of +260 and was an All-Star six times in one stretch of seven seasons. That is an elite defensive defenceman’s resume by any standard.
Petr Klíma: the benchwarmer who won us the Cup
The Petr Klíma story is one of the great footnote tales in Stanley Cup history. He was a skilled Czech winger who defected from communist Czechoslovakia in 1985 to play in the NHL, one of the first players to do so, and arrived in Edmonton via a blockbuster trade from Detroit that also brought Adam Graves and Joe Murphy. He had real offensive ability, finishing his career with 313 goals across 786 NHL games but his relationship with coaches was complicated and he was sometimes seen as inconsistent.
Game 1 of the 1990 Stanley Cup Final is where his story gets strange. Klíma had been buried on the bench by coach John Muckler for most of the game. The Oilers had blown a 2–0 lead, Ray Bourque had tied it with two third-period goals and the teams were grinding through triple overtime in a stuffy Boston Garden when the lights literally went out. A 26-minute power outage stopped play. When hockey resumed, the rest of the team was exhausted. Muckler put Klíma on the ice almost by default because everyone else was gassed, and with fresh legs, Klíma scored the winner at 15:13 of the third overtime, ending what remains the longest game in Stanley Cup Final history. Edmonton won the series in five. Klíma, the guy who barely played all game, delivered the most important goal of the year.
He passed away in May 2023 at 58. His name barely comes up in Oilers conversations which seems wrong given what he did that night.
There are many more of them. Charlie Huddy’s defence partner Lee Fogolin. The steady Craig Muni. Kevin McClelland, the second-most penalized Oiler. The thing about the Oilers history is that it was so stacked that even very good players got buried in the footnotes.
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