‘CHANGE OF SCENERY’ BENEFITS BOTH PLAYERS
Oilers send underperforming centre Strome to Rangers for speedy Spooner
Ryan Strome for Ryan Spooner qualifies as a ‘change of scenery’ deal, just like Pittsburgh moving along speedster Carl Hagelin to Los Angeles for the better hands of Tanner Pearson.
Or, “we’ll take your guy who’s spinning his wheels for our guy who can’t get anything going.”
And if the money’s the same, all the better.
And so, the Edmonton Oilers dealt third-line, right shot centre Ryan Strome, who came here in a salary dump for Jordan Eberle at the 2017 draft, to the New York Rangers for their fourth-line, left-shot winger Ryan Spooner, who went to Broadway in the Rick Nash deal with the Boston Bruins last February.
Both guys had two points on the season, so if this sounds like a flotsam for jetsam trade in terms of current offence, it is. With the Oilers in salary cap hell with Andrei Sekera on long-term injury status, they got the Rangers to pay $900,000 of Spooner’s $4 million salary this season and next to equalize Strome’s $3.1 million, so it’s a wash.
It’s not quite the same as the Hagelin for Pearson deal because both of those guys have Cup rings and Pittsburgh was merely looking to rattle some cages with a core player going while the Kings wanted to move Pearson’s $3.775 million salary for the next two years for Hagelin, who is an UFA on July 1. They can likely deal him for a draft pick at the trade deadline.
There’s history there with Spooner, 26, and Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli and right-hand man Keith Gretzky from their days with the Bruins, of course. He’s been a centre but he’ll not be a plug-in replacement for Strome. That job could go to farmhand Cooper Marody, at least for the short term, anyway. Spooner will be a winger here.
Their 2018 second-round draft, Ryan McLeod, who had a good camp showing off his speed and size before going back to junior, is very much in the picture for a No. 3 centre spot in a year or so, too.
Strome, a well-liked player in the dressing room, wasn’t what the Oilers were counting on here. They hoped he could be a top six right-winger but he morphed into a third-line centre who had 36 points in exactly 100 Oilers games.
Chiarelli knew off the hop that Strome wasn’t going to be the 50-60 points, guaranteed 20-25 goals contributor that Eberle is. This deal was moving money as much as the player, but he hoped Strome, at $2.5 million, could maybe be a No. 2 right winger.
While he showed flashes, he wasn’t enough of a playmaking third-line centre for the Oilers. He was solid on the penalty kill, for sure, a second-unit power play guy, and he was good 3-on-3 as an alternative to Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl.
But they wanted more speed and more points. He was a rightshot centre, always a good thing, but they probably hoped he’d be a 50-55 per cent guy on faceoffs like, say, Mark Letestu. He was 48.8 per cent this season.
“He played a neutral game,” said Chiarelli.
He held serve, but when he didn’t get a point until game 15 in Tampa, the Oilers brass started getting antsy.
“We expected more from him. Did he make enough offensive plays?”
It was an experiment that just didn’t work.
Spooner was very good in 20 games with the Rangers last year with 16 points and was signed to a two-year, $8 million deal, but was playing on the fourth-line a lot.
“We drafted Spooner in Boston and developed him, and I know him as a person,” said Chiarelli. “That helps when there are two players who are under-performing, but the big thing was we want to change the chemistry here. We’re looking at the secondary, bottom-half of the lineup, and what Spooner has is speed and skill. He’s got deficiencies, as does Strome, but we like Spooner’s speed through the neutral zone.”
Chiarelli certainly agreed with trying to shake things up for both teams.
“Yeah, I agree with the change of scenery component with both players” he said.
So did Rangers’ GM Jeff Gorton.
“We like Strome’s versatility. He can play centre and kill penalties. He’s a different kind of player,” Gorton told New York media.
“When you’re a top-five player overall, there’s pressure to perform and do certain things with that. He’s been in the league for almost 400 games and I think we all know where he fits in. Maybe there’s a bit more there,” said Gorton.
Strome, 25, has played 69 more games (358-289), putting up 162 points to Spooner’s 160. Neither is a scorer. Spooner, the 45th overall pick in 2010 and a junior (Peterborough) teammate of Zack Kassian, is a better skater, at least to Chiarelli’s eyeballs.
Chiarelli said having just one veteran right-shot centre in Kyle Brodziak remaining with McDavid, Draisaitl and Ryan NugentHopkins is no impediment. He likes what he’s seen from Marody in a small sample size, the way he finds people with passes. His skating needs work, but there’s no denying his offensive flare.
“Cooper will be an NHL centre when it’s all said and done. He has great vision and some hands to go with that distributing the puck,” said Oilers coach Todd McLellan.
McLeod, who could be on Canada’s world junior team at Christmas, is back in the OHL with Mississauga and has 20 points in 17 games.