Edmonton are struggling to develop players and harbor growth, in the process throwing away the early years of Connor McDavid’s prime.
On Friday, the Edmonton Oilers traded winger Ryan Strome to the Rangers for Ryan Spooner. It was an innocuous November trade, the second one-for-one deal of the week. Spooner had struggled in New York this season — his game score per 60 is in the negatives, per Corsica. Strome is a plateauing once-talented 25-year-old. Both players needed a change of scenery.
For an Oilers player, Strome has a familiar career trajectory. He debuted with the Islanders, scoring 0.62 points-per-game in 2014-15 before being flipped to Edmonton for Jordan Eberle and regressing to 0.41 PPG in 82 games last year. The Oilers can’t fully be blamed for Strome’s decline, though he has just two points in 18 games this season.
The story surrounding this team is the same: Players aren’t developing. General Manager Peter Chiarelli and coach Todd Mclellan have coaxed little internal improvement. Despite their Cleveland Cavaliers-level run of winning draft lotteries, they hit on only one of those picks, and that one pick was literally one of the easiest draft picks a sports team has made in history.
Taylor Hall, remember, was one of those picks. He was good for a few seasons in Edmonton, compiling 80 points in 75 games in 2013-14 as a 22-year-old, but Chiarelli traded him to the Devils before the 2016-17 season for defenseman Adam Larsson. Hall won the Hart Trophy last year.
Players improving the second they leave Edmonton is a trend:
When Peter Chiarelli was hired in Edmonton he had Taylor Hall, Jordan Eberle, and Justin Schultz on his roster and five of the top-80 picks in that draft.
— Adam Gretz (@AGretz) November 16, 2018
Here is what he has today to show for those assets. pic.twitter.com/LBlYeFogF2
Chiarelli turned the superstar Hall into Adam Larsson, an unspectacular defenseman. He turned Eberle into Strome, who was then turned into Spooner. He traded defenseman Justin Schultz to the Penguins, where Schultz promptly blossomed into a puck-moving d-man who played important minutes on two Cup-winning teams.
Chiarelli punted on his draft picks. As noted in the tweet above, he dealt 2015 16th-overall and 33rd-overall picks to the Islanders for Griffin Reinhart, who ended up in Vegas in the expansion draft. The Islanders, no joke, picked Mathew Barzal and Anthony Beauvillier with those selections. Barzal is a franchise cornerstone and Beauvillier, still 21, scored a hat-trick Thursday night. Poor Edmonton.
The Oilers haven’t hit on a draft pick recently. The jury is still out on 2016 fourth-overall pick Jesse Puljujarvi, who has yet to prove he is better than some selected immediately below him, including Clayton Keller, Matthew Tkachuk, Tyson Jost and Charlie McAvoy. Edmonton is a sinkhole for young players.
The Western Conference finals run in 2016-17 was a fluke. They were a dumpster fire last year and are getting by solely on McDavid this season, with the occasional help from Leon Draisaitl. You can’t putter around the prime of a transcendent legend in the making for long.