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It’s the calm before the storm as National Hockey League teams prepare for 2 of the biggest events on the hockey calendar later this week, with a significant deadline squashed in between.
The NHL Draft convenes in Nashville on Jun 28-29, with the first round conducted to much fanfare on Wednesday night, Rounds 2 through 7 in a much quieter, more businesslike environment on Thursday morning until close. Then on Friday afternoon comes the deadline for submitting qualifying offers Restricted Free Agents. The next morning the window opens for Unrestricted Free Agents.
- At this moment the club has just 3 picks in the upcoming Draft, none of those in the top 50 and just 1 in the top 180. Never have Edmonton’s “draft assets” been at such a low ebb. As covered in our last post, the interest of Oil fans is far more invested in riding the trade winds that blow any time the GMs get together than they are in what sets up as a puny draft haul.
- There are currently 6 RFA’s in NHLers Evan Bouchard, Ryan McLeod, and Klim Kostin along with farmhands Raphael Lavoie, Noah Philp and Olivier Rodrigue. Seems likely that the club will take the first step and issue that QO in all 6 cases; the biggest question whether the club will risk an arbitration case with Kostin, who made a pretty good case for himself in 2022-23. It’ll be a paper transaction in the case of the recently-retired Philp to protect the Oilers’ future rights over the player in case his circumstances change. That’s a no-brainer based on his fine rookie season in the AHL.
- As for free agency the Oilers will likely be shopping in the Peanuts aisle, which might involve signing an inexpensive player or two early, then doing some bargain shopping of unsigned players later in the summer. On Jul 01 itself, some of the most interesting options will be the unsigned RFA’s whose names won’t be official until just 18 hours before they hit the open market.
Back to the first item, the Draft. For the Oilers, it’s an exceptionally rare one in that they do not have a first-round pick for just the second time in their history. Most years they simply used their own pick. Occasionally they have “traded down” but never right out of the first round. In 2008 they ceded their first rounder to Anaheim as compensation for the Dustin Penner offer sheet, but in the same draft they got Anaheim’s own first rounder as the famous “fifth asset” in the (second) Chris Pronger trade and used it to pick Jordan Eberle. On occasion the Oil have had a second first-round pick from another team along with their own; one year they even had 3 top-21 picks. But with a single exception until now, they’ve always had at least 1 first-round arrow in their quiver.
The exception was an interesting case that rewards a deeper dive. The year was 2006, and the season that had just been completed was Edmonton’s most successful since their last Stanley Cup win in 1990.
It was the first year of the Salary Cap Era and Oilers GM Kevin Lowe sensed an opportunity. He had inherited/acquired a solid core group of players collectively referred to as “The Little Team That Could”, who among them had a number of excellent value contracts in the sub $1 million range: Ales Hemsky, Shawn Horcoff, Jarret Stoll, Fernando Pisani, Raffi Torres, Marc-Andre Bergeron.
With plenty of cap space, Lowe added quality to the team with preseason swaps like the first Pronger trade and another that landed Michael Peca, then by adding other vets like Jaro Spacek and Sergei Samsonov. A couple of 2006 picks were moved in those transactions. Finally, a day before the deadline Lowe ceded the coveted first-rounder (plus a third in 2007) to rent veteran goalie Dwayne Roloson and solve a season-long headache in goal.
Roloson was good-not-great down the stretch, posting an 8-7-4 record with a decent .905 save percentage and excellent 2.43 goals-against average. This behind a Pronger-led defence that led the NHL in shot suppression at 25.5 SA/GP but couldn’t get enough saves until Roloson arrived. (All of Jussin Markkanen, Ty Conklin and Mike Morrison were sub .885.)
Edmonton just squeaked into the playoffs, but once the big games started Roloson upped his game to another level. He posted a .929 save percentage in a massive upset of first-place Detroit; .931 in another 6-game upset, this over San Jose; then .934 in a 5-game defeat of Anaheim that included a trio of wins on the Pond with just 1 goal against in each. “Roli” was the talk of the town.
The less said about the rest the better, but it’s a matter of record that Roloson suffered a knee injury in the third period of Game 1 at Carolina that sidelined him for the rest of the playoffs. Oil fans were left asking “what if Roli hadn’t got hurt?” Some of us still ask that question; many more bear the scars.
The 2006 Draft
So what happened to the traded draft picks? 17 years later, 2 of them are still in the NHL.
The first round pick the Oil traded to Minnesota for Roloson got traded a second time to divisional rival Los Angeles Kings, who used the #17 overall spot to select forward Trevor Lewis. Not an impact player but a useful checker and PKer who has played 15 years in the NHL. Every single one of those years Lewis has been a division rival to the Oilers, be it labelled the Northwest, the Pacific, or the Scotia North Division. Lewis has played 892 NHL games and counting for the Kings, Jets, and Flames, winning the Stanley Cup as a King in 2012 and 2014.
- The second rounder the Oilers traded in the package to land Samsonov included “Poor Marty Reasoner” and this pick. No telling what the Oil might have done with it, but the Bruins made very fine use of it indeed, selecting big Milan Lucic at #50 overall. The massive power forward made the NHL full-time at age 19 and has since racked up 1173 GP in the NHL and 0 in the AHL. The feared enforcer and underrated scorer won the Stanley Cup with the Bruins in 2011.
The Oilers seemingly spent the next 10 years trying to draft The Next Milan Lucic, without success. Peter Chiarelli took it to the next level in 2016 when he signed the original Lootch to a 7-year contract that, shall we say, didn’t end well for the Oilers. In fact, it hasn’t ended even yet, in the sense that Edmonton still has to deal with the last 2 years of the James Neal buyout, itself the fallout of the organization’s divestiture of Lucic to Calgary in 2019 — Ken Holland’s first trade. - The fourth rounder included in the trade for Peca was used on a Kevin (“Not Jim”) Montgomery who never reached the Show.
Oil fans would say that price was worth it for that brilliant run in 2006 that saw all of Roloson, Samsonov and Peca make key contributions along the way. The fair-minded ones would say that price was worth it even in the cold light of retrospect of what ulimately happened with those draft picks.
How did the Oilers themselves fare in the 2006 Draft? Not so badly, all things considered. Despite trading out both their first and second selections in early March, they had one more arrow in their early-round quiver. That was a second round compensatory pick rewarding the club for its failure to sign 2002 first-rounder Janne Niinymaki, just another of the NHL’s many weird rules. The club had lost its 4-year rights to the unsigned Euro, thus got another, lower pick, to compensate.
The Oilers hit a home run in the person of Jeff Petry, son of a Major League Baseball star who went a different route. They did have to wait a while as the American-born right-shot defenceman developed at Michigan State, but he signed with the Oilers in 2010 and half a season later was a full-time NHLer. Which he still is, a dozen years later, now a veteran of 864 NHL games.
The first 295 of those were with the Oilers where he was developing very nicely indeed into the all-purpose top-4 righty that every team craves. Alas, his contract situation was mishandled and as a pending free agent he was traded by mutual consent before the deadline of 2015. All Edmonton recovered was a similar second round pick as they had successfully used on Petry himself 8 years later, and a bonus fourth rounder. The second was the principle part of the trade package for Cam Talbot, and the fourth used on d-man Caleb Jones who, like Petry, is now an NHL d-man on another team.
The point remains, the Oilers waited patiently for 44 picks before getting their shot, and still were able to land a significant player. Today he ranks 14th in that draft class in career GP. Of those ahead of him, 10 including Lewis were first-rounders; just 1 other second-rounder in the person of Lucic; and 2 third rounders filled out the group. Of the 16 players from that fine draft who reached the 800-game plateau, every single player was drafted in the top 72, with a mean draft position of 22 and a median of 10. To get such a player at 45 is some pretty fine drafting that proves there is life beyond the first round.
This year Edmonton’s pick at #56 is a little further down the line and represents their lowest-ever first selection. For a first-order view of what kind of player might be expected, here is every #56 choice since our featured year of 2006:
- 2006: Blake Geoffrion, NSH, 55 GP
- 2007: Akim Aliu, CHI, 7 GP
- 2008 Danny Kristo, MTL, 0 GP
- 2009 Kevin Lynch, CBJ, 0 GP
- 2010, Johan Larsson, MIN, 488 GP
- 2011 Lucas Lessio, PHX, 41 GP
- 2012 Sam Kurker, STL, 0 GP
- 2013, Marco Roy, EDM, 0 GP
- 2014 Ryan Donato, BOS, 325 GP
- 2015 Vince Dunn, STL, 421 GP
- 2016 Dillon Dube, CGY, 282 GP
- 2017 Josh Brook, MTL, 0 GP
- 2018 Jacob Olofsson, MTL, 0 GP
- 2019 Brett Leason, 90 GP
- 2020 Tristen Robins, SJS, 3 GP
- 2021 Evan Nause, FLA, 0 GP
- 2022 Rieger Lorenz, MIN, 0 GP
Not the most inspiring of lists, but at #56 why would it be? We can discount the last several years as “too soon to know”, and we can laughingly point out that Montreal had 3 swings at it without garnering a single GP, but the Oilers had a failure of their own at that draft number. Just 4 on the list with even 100 GP, though encouragingly all 4 are at 280+. Of the entire lot, only Vince Dunn can be considered an impact player.
The Oilers’ task in 2023 is to find the next Vince Dunn. Or the next Jeff Petry or Milan Lucic for that matter. Or else it’s to include that pick in some sort of trade that may deliver some returns a little quicker than a freshly minted #56 draft pick is apt to.
