The 2014-15 Edmonton Oilers are in a very familiar place right now. Five games past the halfway point of the regular season, the Oilers have amounted a measly 12 wins and are only two points ahead of the last-placed Buffalo Sabres.
The Oilers position at the bottom of the NHL standings is nothing new. In fact, the once dynastic team of the eighties has swam under a sea of heavy teams for close to a decade now. For the past five seasons, the Oilers have finished at or somewhere near the bottom of the standings and they have failed to make the playoffs since they magically played all the way to game seven of the 2006 Stanley Cup Finals.
All of this is no big secret, but the biggest tragedy of the current Oilers is their attempt to rush the development of some of their high draft picks, thrusting players like Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Nail Yakupov into the sort of intense pressure that comes with playing for a team in a Canadian hockey town.
Some simpletons would call all of this losing bad luck, but I’m sure most of us have discovered that the Oilers have been poorly managed since mega-defenseman Chris Pronger bolted from the team after the 2005-06 season. Countless draft picks, especially in the later rounds, have been wasted and some argue that even the Oilers’ successive first-overall picks have been thrown away, too.
Nevertheless, it’s clearly evident that the Oilers have not had any success drafting players past the first round. Combine that with an abundance of highly questionable trades over a span of eight seasons and you have a team treading water at the bottom of the standings like the Oilers. Hopefully, their rescuers will come soon. But until then, let us dwell by taking a closer look at the five players the Oilers should have never traded.
1. Ryan Smyth
Most trades are judged not only by what you give up, but by what you get back in return, as well. When Oilers general manager Kevin Lowe made the difficult decision to trade Ryan Smyth—the heart and soul of the Oilers—to the New York Islanders at the trade deadline in 2007, we hope he fully considered what kind of player he was giving up and what he could get back in return for such a player. In hindsight, it doesn’t look like Lowe realized (or knew) what he was actually doing.
In exchange for the most dedicated and competitive player of the previous ten seasons and the highest-scoring player on the Oilers at the time, Lowe ultimately received three horrible underachievers: Robert Nilsson, Ryan O’Marra and a first-round pick that ended up being the big, slow-footed defenseman, Alex Plante.
2. Jarret Stoll
Jarret Stoll, a six-foot-one, 210-pound faceoff specialist, was an integral piece of the Oilers’ 2006 Stanley Cup Finals appearance. He’s the kind of gritty, hard-hitting centreman the Oilers have been desperately searching to replace ever since he was traded to the Los Angeles Kings in 2008 for defenseman Lubomir Visnovsky. Visnovsky would play two injury-shortened seasons with the Oilers before being traded to the Anaheim Ducks in 2010.
The Oilers have had great difficulty finding a replacement for Stoll at centre. Over the years, they’ve brought in players such as Gilbert Brule, Eric Belanger and, most recently, Boyd Gordon. But to this day, the Oilers remain weak down the middle. And what’s worse, Stoll went to the Kings to play a major role in winning two Stanley Cups in the past three seasons.
3. Matt Greene
The other piece of the puzzle in the Oilers trade for Visnovsky was the big, bulky defensemen Matt Greene. At six-foot-three, 230-pounds, Greene has only just entered his early thirties. Sure, he seemed expendable at the time of the trade because he was still pretty young and prone to the usual mistakes of a developing defenseman. But Greene quickly developed into the type of reliable defender the Oilers are currently in desperate need of.
Just like Stoll, Greene has become a hard player for the Oilers to replace. Since the trade, the Oilers have brought in countless players to maybe bandage up the holes on the back-end. But defenders like Jason Strudwick, Jim Vandermeer, Mark Fistric, Colten Teubert and Mark Fraser simply don’t cut it.
4. Kyle Brodziak
Some may question Kyle Brodziak’s inclusion on this list, but remember that trades are judged by what you give up and what you get in return. And the Oilers got back nothing in return for the big six-foot-two, 209-pound centre, who had just finished having another solid year as a fourth-line centre with the Oilers in 2008-09. Brodziak is also noted as a pretty decent penalty-killer and a faceoff specialist. That’s odd, this sounds like another type of player the Oilers have been searching for over the past few years.
On June 27, 2009, general manager Steve Tambellini traded the promising, pounding forward and a sixth-round draft pick to the Minnesota Wild in exchange for two earlier draft picks in the fourth and fifth rounds of the upcoming draft. These two draft picks (Kyle Bigos and Olivier Roy) will never play a single game for the Oilers. At just over half-million a season, Brodziak’s contract wasn’t costing the Oilers much at all. He was a bargain at that price and the Oilers just tossed him away for nothing.
5. Ladislav Smid
If you’re wondering what happened to Olivier Roy, well, he was included in the trade that sent leading shot-blocking defenseman Ladislav Smid to the Calgary Flames for goaltender Laurent Brossoit and forward Roman Horak. Smid was the Oilers best defenseman at the time of this trade last season, which is why it came as a huge surprise to most when general manager Craig MacTavish excused the trade as a way of opening up some cap space. MacTavish subsequently signed controversial goalie Ilya Bryzgalov, who is currently a backup for the Ducks.
So far, the Flames look like the clear winners of this trade. Oilers fans also viewed Smid as compensation for Chris Pronger’s departure. Smid was the first piece of the pie included in the Pronger trade with the Ducks. Actually, the outcomes of both trades have yet to fully materialize, especially since the Oilers were able to draft Jordan Eberle, Martin Marincin, and Oscar Klefbom, either directly or indirectly because of the Pronger trade; and the extra cap space freed up in the Smid trade has allowed MacTavish room to sign players like Benoit Pouliot, Teddy Purcell and Derek Roy. Plus, Brossoit hasn’t had an opportunity to play goal in the NHL yet.
Are there any other former-Oilers that you think shouldn’t have been traded?
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