The return of Ryan Smyth to Edmonton could pay dividends on and off the ice.
EDMONTON — Forget about the 20 goals Ryan Smyth could inject into the Edmonton Oilers lineup this season and let’s not think, for the moment, about which up and coming left-winger will lose some minutes here and there, so a 35-year-old on the downswing can finish his career in the place it began.
We can mullet over later.
Ryan Smyth coming back to Edmonton is about so much more than that for the Oilers.
You see, if you don’t live here you might not realize that Smyth is to Oilers fans what Doug Gilmour is to Leafs fans.
Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier and all the greats whose numbers hang in the rafters here, have nearly all moved on to live somewhere else. But like Kevin Lowe, Smyth is the rare piece of Edmonton’s hockey past who appears to be happy to grow old here, the way so many of the old Canadiens have in Montreal. The way Daniel Alfredsson likely will in Ottawa and Stan Smyl in Vancouver.
Edmonton had more Hall of Fame players in the past 30 years than anyone else, and watched them all relocate. Smyth represents one, historic bone thrown at Oilers fans who know well the reasons the Lauren Prongers of the world prefer to be elsewhere.
But that’s all for down the road.
The most immediate needs for Smyth lie in the dressing where his personality and experience could prove helpful for Taylor Hall, Magnus Paajarvi, and Jordan Eberle.
Smyth could also help mentor hard-grinding, 19-year-old young left-winger out of the Saskatoon Blades named Curtis Hamilton, whom you might remember from Canada’s World Jr. team last year.
This kid could be Ryan Smyth with size one day, and he’s one step closer with the Smyth deal having mercifully wrapped up Sunday.
Hall can’t teach Ryan Nugent-Hopkins what it takes to win at the National Hockey League level and with a pretty high European content on the way in Edmonton,
the qualities of a guy who once picked his teeth off the ice and didn’t miss a shift in the 2006 Stanley Cup final for Edmonton, will be in high demand in that dressing room over the next few years.
With the Top 5 drafting phase now over in Edmonton’s rebuild, it is time now to work on a dressing room culture that can take all this talent and mould it into something more.
It’s time for Ryan Whitney and Shaun Horcoff to have another voice, a voice that can still bring it on the ice.
And the ice time? Don’t worry about ice time.
One of the problems of having all these kids in your lineup at the same time is, they are simply given ice time by acclamation. If Hall is taking a night off on the first line, he can be replaced and the same goes with Paajarvi on the second line.
And if both are playing well, you play hard-charging Ryan Jones on the right side of Smyth, and for the first time in forever Edmonton can ice that grinding third line that softens up the opponent.
If that makes Rexall Place a difficult place to play for visiting teams, than the Oilers have made gains here.
At 35, a tad less ice time for Smyth won’t hurt his game either.
This tweet came in from Jones on Sunday: "For everyone asking if I'm threatened by new flow or a LW coming in. No cause Smytty can give me flow advice and I played RW all last yr."
Smyth will mentor Jones, perhaps more than anybody because he’s a good, experienced player who has been around.
There haven’t been enough of those in Edmonton of late and it has shown.
