Oilers star's one-time team to give away 2,000 bobbleheads at game this fall
A Leon Draisaitl bobblehead giveaway is toy-rific news – if you're a child planning to attend a mid-October hockey game in California.
The Bakersfield Condors, a minor-league affiliate of the Edmonton Oilers, announced 2,000 of the wobbly keepsakes in the likeness of the National Hockey League superstar will be given free to kids aged 12 and under attending their opening-night game on Oct. 18 against the San Jose Barracuda.
Draisaitl – the NHL's leading goal-scorer last season with 52 goals, and a former league most valuable player and leading scorer – played six games for the Condors in their inaugural American Hockey League campaign in 2015-16.
The 29-year-old centre has played 790 NHL games over 11 seasons, scoring 399 goals and 557 assists for 956 points, all with the Oilers, who drafted him third overall in 2014.
Draisaitl, whose eight-year, $112-million contract extension signed in September begins this coming NHL season, is in the south of France this coming weekend to marry Celeste Desjardins. The couple became engaged a year ago.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Globe and Mail
31 minutes ago
- Globe and Mail
With imminent success, McLaren must also deal with future disappointment
McLaren boss Zak Brown is preparing to deal with disappointment at the end of the Formula One season, even as the team enjoys one of its most dominant years and a 200th grand prix win at the weekend. As the title battle between Oscar Piastri and teammate Lando Norris heats up, the McLaren pair separated by just nine points after Sunday's Hungarian Grand Prix, the American conceded he was thinking also about how to handle the aftermath. Red Bull's reigning champion Max Verstappen, the McLaren drivers' closest rival, is now 97 points off the pace and told reporters at the weekend that he may not win again this year given his car's issues. Even before the weekend, both Piastri and Norris cast caution aside and called it a two-horse race. One of them will surely end the year celebrating a dream come true. The other will rue what might have been, with a new engine era next season shaking everything up again and chances potentially disappearing. Losing always hurts, doubly so when it is to a teammate with the same car, and Brown said McLaren would have to deal with the situation sensitively when – although he still insisted on saying if – the time came. 'Eventually ... we'll just sit down and actually have a conversation and go, 'Right, one of you is going to win and it's going to be the best day of your life. One of you is going to lose. How do you want us to handle that?'' he told a select group of reporters. 'We'll actually sit down and go, 'Right, you want us to jump up and down and celebrate? This guy won'. So we're fully aware and sensitive to, 'How do you celebrate that situation?'' Australian Piastri has won six races to Norris's five but the Briton has momentum going into the August break, with three wins from his last four starts. The pair have had seven one-two finishes from 14 races, including the last four, and have left rivals trailing. McLaren is so far ahead in the constructors' standings – 299 points over Ferrari – that the crown is a given. Much has been made of the potential for a falling out between friends, for clashes on track given what is at stake, but Brown was sanguine and said the relationship was only growing stronger. When Norris ran into the back of Piastri as he challenged for the lead in Canada in June, the Briton defused the situation by immediately taking responsibility. Piastri locked up behind Norris in Hungary on Sunday, in what could have been a repeat of that Montreal accident, but no contact was made. Brown said there was no 'elephant in the room' at McLaren, with the drivers having complete transparency on strategy and how the team go about racing, and he expected more close calls in future. 'There's competitiveness brewing ... as the championship builds, I'm sure that tension will grow,' said the boss. 'We're fully anticipating them 'swapping paint' again at some point, I'm very confident it won't be deliberate, which is where you then get into the problems. 'They will have racing incidents in their further time here at McLaren, we know that and they know that, so we're not afraid of that. 'I'm positive they're never going to run each other off the track, and that's where you get into bad blood. So they're free to race ... there are rules around our racing, which is respect your teammate, they know that.'
CTV News
4 hours ago
- CTV News
Millions are flocking to grow virtual gardens in viral Roblox game created by teenager
Whether it serves as a chill escape from the onslaught of the real world or simply a way to beat vacation doldrums, a viral Roblox game about gardening has become the surprise hit of the summer. Grow a Garden, created by a 16-year-old in a few days, has shattered records for the most concurrent players of any game in history, beating out video games that take years and millions of dollars to develop. And there's no one to shoot, fight or race. If your last attempt at cultivating vegetables was FarmVille in 2010, don't worry — your tomatoes will grow even if you never water them. Grow a Garden is as simple as its name suggests — players can fill a plot of land with plants and animals, harvest and sell, trade or steal each others' bounty. The game is low stress, with an aesthetic reminiscent of Minecraft and a soundtrack of soothing classical tunes such as Mozart's Rondo Alla Turca playing in the background. Its popularity has further cemented Roblox' place not just in the gaming world but in popular culture — for better or for worse, it's where the kids hang out. 'The word I keep hearing used over and over to describe this particular game is that it's chill, which is just such a nice alternative. I get a lot of sort of that Animal Crossing vibe from it. You know, like you can check in, you can check your gardens, you can get some new seeds, you can plant them,' said Betsy Bozdech, editorial director at the nonprofit Common Sense Media. 'I have an 11-year-old son who (plays it) and he says to him the big difference is that a lot of games have a big giant objective that you have to do, but in Grow a Garden, you can just kind of hang out and do what you want.' Coincidence or not, Grow a Garden soared to popularity around the same time that Take-Two Interactive announced it would delay the launch of its wildly anticipated Grand Theft Auto 6 until next year. In late June, the gardening game logged 21.6 million concurrent players, surpassing Fortnite's previous record of 15.2 million according to Roblox. Analysts who follow Roblox's stock say Grow a Garden is helping boost the company's revenue and will push the company's quarterly earnings numbers above Wall Street's expectations. While it's not clear if the GTA audience flocked to this simple gardening game to pass the time until then, the timing reignited the age-old debate about who gamers are and what titles are taken seriously by the video game establishment. It happened with Candy Crush, with puzzle games, with Animal Crossing. Are people who play cozy games true gamers? Or is the title reserved for the folks who shoot enemies in Call of Duty or drive around creating mayhem in GTA? 'There's a huge percentage of gamers that play Roblox and the actual industry just views it as like this esoterically immature platform of weird gameplay habits,' said Janzen Madsen, the New Zealand-based CEO and founder of Splitting Point studios, which acquired the game from its teenage creator. 'Well, I actually think in five years this is what player expectation is gonna be. And because you guys haven't embraced it, like you're not gonna know how to make games.' To start growing your garden, you'll need a Roblox account. The game will start you out with an empty plot and some money — sheckles — and a starter seed. From there, you can plant seeds, harvest and sell your crops and buy more seeds, animals or tools for your garden. While it is possible to play the game without spending real-world money, it will take longer. Once you sell enough crops, you earn money to buy more expensive seeds beyond basic carrots and blueberries. 'For me, I just, I really want to get all the rarest stuff. I'm a completionist, so I want everything and that's what's fun for me,' said Leah Ashe, a YouTuber who plays Grow a Garden and other popular games to an audience of 5.3 million. 'It's really cool because you can come together because the seed shop is global, so everybody's shop is the exact same. So you can work with other people and be like, 'Oh my gosh, the sugar apple is in stock. Get online!' The seed shop updates every five minutes, so there's always something pulling you back into the game.' For Roblox, which has faced a backlash for not doing enough to protect kids on its gaming service, Grow a Garden has served as something of a reprieve — along with new safety measures such as chat restrictions and privacy tools. New players get help from more established peers who send them gifts and let them know when rare seeds become available in the seed shop. Bozdech said that 'if you have the right supervision and guidance,' Roblox can be a positive experience for kids, allowing them to create their own designs or practice coding, for instance. 'Something like Grow a Garden, particularly, is a nice opportunity maybe for parents and kids to play together,' she said. And perhaps the slow cultivating of a magical garden can benefit parents too. 'It's hitting a nerve, you know?' Bozdech said. 'People need an escape from the world, I think we all do.' —- This story was first published on Jul. 30, 2025. It was updated on Aug. 4, 2025 to correct the spelling of Betsy Bozdech. Barbara Ortutay, The Associated Press
CTV News
4 hours ago
- CTV News
A weekend for the Oiler books as players celebrate Draisaitl wedding
Leon Draisaitl and Celeste Desjardins during their rehearsal dinner, shared on Aug. 3, 2025. (Source: Leon Draisaitl/X) With two months until the Edmonton Oilers come back to Alberta's capital for a new hockey season, many of the players travelled to the south of France this weekend for the wedding of Leon Draisaitl and Celeste Desjardins. The forward and alternate captain shared a quick photo on Aug. 3 of him and Desjardins, an actress out of Sudbury, Ont. The newlyweds have shared a select few photos on social media. Among the guests were Connor and Lauren McDavid, who have reportedly been close friends with the couple for a while. In fact, Lauren McDavid was the maid of honour. Her social media this weekend was replete with photos of the happy couple. According to posts on X, nearly every current Oiler and many past teammates attended the wedding.
