DOOR OPEN A CRACK?
Yamamoto could stick around: Matheson
There are no Blake Wheelers or Patrik Laines on the right side here eating up 20 minutes a night, so if you’re Ty Rattie or Jesse Puljujarvi, Pontus Aberg or, yes, Kailer Yamamoto, that is a very good thing for the players, maybe not so much with the coach or the GM in Edmonton.
Oilers coach Todd McLellan and general manager Peter Chiarelli would like more statistical certainty on the right wing like the Winnipeg Jets — but they don’t have it, so Yamamoto’s chances of making the team are fair with gusts to good if he’s going to score two goals a night as he did in Calgary on Monday.
While McLellan says Yamamoto has to do the requisite team things — check industriously and smartly, compete hard against bigger guys who could carry him like a bag of groceries, and think the game well — the reality is he has to also score his way onto the roster as he did last fall. He had five goals last exhibition season and hung around for nine league games before going back to junior in Spokane. The difference this season is he can go to Bakersfield to learn the pro game in the AHL.
Last fall, Yamamoto scored liberally in pre-season, but once the real games started it got a whole lot harder. One night in Pittsburgh, he missed an open-netter and he felt like slapping himself upside the head.
“Oh yeah, I remember that ... a pass that threaded its way past about five sticks. And I had a wide-open net and when I missed I went, ‘Oh, my God,’ That’s engraved in my head,” he said.
“I’m sure it was tough on him. I mean we all get chances during games, sometimes they go in, sometimes they don’t, but when you’re an 18-year-old trying to make the team, maybe you think about it for a little while,” Oilers centre Ryan Nugent-Hopkins said.
Yamamoto, who turns 20 on Sept. 29, knows the fallback with NHL teams is to send first-year pros to the minors to percolate. He doesn’t think he has to score night after night in camp to get a leg up, but it would make their decision harder. Along with not taking short cuts, of course.
Last year his chances were about 10 per cent coming into camp at 150 pounds, a 22nd overall pick in the June 2017 draft. This fall, it’s probably 40-60. How are things different this year?
“I feel I’ve got bigger and stronger, being quicker, able to make plays off the wall,” he said. How much bigger?
“I’ve gained a couple of pounds. Don’t want to give out the details.”
Nugent-Hopkins, who made the team right out of the box as an 18-year-old, likes what he sees in Yamamoto.
“I played with him last year and he’s tenacious on pucks and plays with some pace and there’s lots of skill to his game. Once he gets comfortable in the league I don’t think points or scoring is going to be much trouble with him,” he said.
Truth is, Zack Kassian is going to be the fourth-line RW. And Tobias Rieder, even if he can play left wing, right now looks like a semi-fixture on the right wing with Leon Draisaitl. And Rattie, as long as he isn’t a wallflower with captain Connor McDavid, will be on the right side, at least to start out.
Yamamoto has to play in the top nine, so he has to be better than Puljujarvi, you’d think.
Oilers tryout winger Scottie Upshall, the sixth overall pick in 2002 with Nashville, was brought along slowly by the Predators because that’s the way they do things: Milwaukee, then Music City.
“Back in my day, teams were so much older ... turning pro and coming into a room with six or seven 35-year-old guys, the dynamic was different,” said Upshall, a veteran with 759 NHL games. “They wanted you to learn to be an adult, to be a professional, and you did (in the room and off ice).
“I played three years in the Milwaukee and won a championship there in 2003. Maybe I played a few more games there than I wanted to, but I learned how to play playoff hockey at a pro level and I played a full year there during the lockout with Shea Weber, Pekka Rinne, Vern Fiddler. That was the route Nashville wanted with its young guys.”
The Oilers made a mistake keeping their fourth overall pick Puljujarvi for the first few months in 2016, then sent him to the farm. They won’t do that again with Yamamoto, not if he’s on the first line in Bakersfield with Tyler Benson and Cooper Marody, playing on the power play.
“We have to win games and lots of games early and we’re going to pick the guys who give us the best chance to do that. If it’s Yamo, it’s Yamo. I brought a group of right wingers in the other day and I discussed where we were and maybe there’s room for two of those individuals. They’ll sort it out,” McLellan said.