Avs’ misspent youth reality cheque for free-spending Oilers
When it all goes sour, no one remembers the flowery compliments, the strong words of commitment and belief.
That’s mostly because it was all hot air anyways, all public relations chatter designed to get people to buy tickets and invest their money and affections in the supposedly golden future of an NHL team.
Remember, for example, the words of Colorado executive Joe Sakic back in July 2013 when the Avalanche inked blue-chip young forward Matt Duchene to a five-year, $30-million contract (all dollar figures U.S.).
“Matt already is and will be a big part of our team’s nucleus for the long term,” said Sakic. “We all felt it was important to secure his rights.”
Well, four years later, the Avs are trying to get rid of him, and Duchene wants out. The team is terrible, and “locking up” the core of Duchene, Gabriel Landeskog (seven years, $39 million) and Nathan MacKinnon (seven years, $44.1 million) has led the Avs exactly nowhere.
Sakic says these days he’s “listening to offers” on Duchene, but the ones that were hot around the draft earlier this summer don’t seem to be there any more now that teams have committed to the bulk of their rosters for the coming season.
“Quiet on all fronts,” reported Sakic this week. Duchene may well go somewhere and flourish. But, like Taylor Hall when he was dealt out of Edmonton, the return for him in a trade will probably disappoint those who believed what they were sold for years, that this player was the future of the franchise, a surefire untouchable superstar.
At a time when the Oilers have committed $168 million to lock up two very young players, Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, and with the Maple Leafs already having to consider how they will take care of young forwards Auston Matthews, William Nylander and Mitch Marner, the Colorado story is a cautionary tale for fans and media to remember.
Temper your hope. Restrain your predictions of glory. Remember that giving tens of millions of dollars to a 20-yearold athlete may not be good for him and his personal motivation.
Beyond that, this business of “locking up the core” is too often represented as both shrewd business and a guarantee of future success when it is neither. Teams have to give these top picks the money and the term. They don’t really have a choice. They’ve touted them as stars since the day they were drafted, and in a league where they have to spend to the salary cap floor at the very least and have few options, they’re really just throwing the money at these twentysomethings and hoping.
Moreover, it may or may not work out. There’s the Colorado example. Edmonton, remember, showered massive contracts, $128 million in all, on Hall, Jordan Eberle and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
“You have to have complete belief in that player and our organization obviously does,” said Edmonton GM Steve Tambellini when Hall was signed.
That was five years ago. Now Hall and Eberle are gone, neither traded for star quality in return, and Nugent-Hopkins may be soon moved if GM Peter Chiarelli decides he needs the cap room to accommodate McDavid and Draisaitl.
There are other examples. Remember shortly after Atlanta moved to Winnipeg? The Jets inherited high draft picks Zach Bogosian and Evander Kane, and committed $67.5 million to them between 2012 and 2013. Two years later, both were traded to Buffalo.
Let’s go back to Ottawa after the Senators made it to the Stanley Cup final in 2007. The club gave Jason Spezza $49 million over seven years, Dany Heatley $45 million over six and Wade Redden $39 million over six. The club dutifully locked up its core amid predictions of surefire glory.
And it all went pretty much nowhere.
All this means is that as good as it looks right now for the Oilers, as much as it seems an eight-year run riding on the talents of McDavid and Draisaitl is in the offing, nobody should be saying it’s a sure thing.
The Oilers do appear set up better than any other Canadian team for a run at the Stanley Cup, and for those among us who would very much like to see the Cup back in Canada, this would be a fine thing indeed. At this point, after a quarter-century of watching U.S. clubs from Carolina to California hoist the grand trophy, it hardly matters which of the seven Canadian teams manage to get the job done.
Both McDavid and Draisaitl are coming off terrific seasons. They might be Edmonton’s answer to Pittsburgh’s dynamic duo of Sidney Crosby and Evgeny Malkin. But the wealth they now have may change many things for them. Moreover, we live in an age when you can’t just assess hockey players on their talent. You have to assess their impact on their team’s cap situation, among other factors.
What we know is the Oilers don’t have anything to worry about now in terms of the cap. But next year the new contracts kick in, and something will have to give.
Darnell Nurse will have to be paid soon, and they already have $18 million a year committed for the next four years to four defencemen: Andrej Sekera, Kris Russell, Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson, the player acquired in the Hall trade. Maybe that group is good enough, maybe it isn’t.
Assuming Jesse Puljujarvi blossoms, he’ll have to get paid in two years. With Milan Lucic just into the second year of a seven-year, $42million contract that will almost certainly become a major cap im- pediment, the Oilers will have trouble creating the room to add more talent to take those runs at the Cup that everyone is anticipating.
The truth here is that Edmonton didn’t have a choice.
McDavid and Draisaitl had to be signed to these long-term deals. The money has to be spent on someone in a cap world, and these two seem as good a bet as any of their peers.
Together, they might bring the Cup back to Edmonton for the first time since 1990. But the celebratory atmosphere that greeted the news of the Draisaitl signing this week should also be muted to some degree.
That’s what recent hockey history tells us. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for The Star. Follow him @DamoSpin. His column appears Tuesday and Saturday.