The Edmonton Oilers are a good, young team with loads of potential. Like past clubs that found themselves in that same situation, there are now two roads before them.
The first is the one taken by the great teams that realized their potential: win, and win quickly. The other is to patiently wait for the stars to align, a treacherous path that occasionally works out, but more frequently ends with an old, declining club realizing that it missed its window.
Three teams have won multiple Stanley Cups in the salary cap era, accounting for seven of the 11 Stanley Cups won since the cancelled 2004-05 season. Each was built around key young players and each was a legitimate contender right around the conclusion of those players’ entry-level contracts.
The Chicago Blackhawks won three of those titles. They drafted Jonathan Toews third overall in 2006 and left him in college for a year; they took Patrick Kane in 2007 and moved him to the NHL right away. They went from a minus-57 goal differential team in 2006-07 to a plus-four team in their joint rookie year. As sophomores, Toews and Kane went to the third round of the playoffs. In the last year of their respective entry-level deals, they won a Stanley Cup.
The Pittsburgh Penguins have two Cups in the same period. Sidney Crosby made his NHL debut in 2005-06 and the Pens gained 41 goals over their prior campaign. Evgeni Malkin followed the next season and Pittsburgh improved by another 103 goals. They went to the Stanley Cup final in the last year of Crosby’s entry-level deal and won their first title in the final season of Evgeni Malkin’s first contract.
The Los Angeles Kings are the lone exception to this rule of rapid dominance among teams with multiple Cups. Anze Kopitar was drafted in 2005 and Drew Doughty in 2008; not only was there a three-year gap between those two players, but both had been signed to long-term, big-money deals before Los Angeles finally won the Stanley Cup in 2012.[snippet]
While a slower build like what the Kings did can work—and it’s worth reiterating that the timeframe from Doughty’s arrival to that first Cup was still only four years—there is a long list of good young teams that never got off the ground. Expansion teams in Columbus and Atlanta couldn’t turn elite talent into championships. Alex Ovechkin is now 31 and while his Capitals may yet win a Cup, they couldn’t do it in his prime. Colorado, despite a bevy of high picks, has imploded this season.
Edmonton knows firsthand what those kinds of failures look like. Two of the team’s three consecutive first overall picks (Taylor Hall and Nail Yakupov) have now been shipped out of town, while the third (Ryan Nugent-Hopkins) is on-pace for the worst offensive season of his career. Until the franchise-altering arrival of Connor McDavid in 2015 it looked like the Oilers were going to be one of those failures that went from up-and-comer to never-was.
Of course, McDavid changed all that, but the memory should be fresh. If a star or superstar player is going to push a team over the top, it generally happens fast. If a core is going to win more than one title, it usually has to be good enough to do it both before and after the star’s years of peak production (typically the mid-20s).
If the Oilers are to follow the trail broken by the Blackhawks and Penguins, that means a deep playoff run absolutely no later than next season. In the same year Edmonton is in now on the chart above, those two teams had combined for 24 playoff wins.
It’s also worth remembering that neither of those teams had a chain of unbroken successes following their first titles.
The Blackhawks had to fight the salary cap. General manager Stan Bowman mostly did a good job of ruthlessly trimming away anything non-essential (his poor Bryan Bickell contract excepted) and Chicago was able to rise again (and again) but it’s been a constant battle to pay Kane and Toews while staying competitive. Oilers GM Peter Chiarelli had the same problem after winning in Boston in 2011 and paid for his inability to be similarly severe.
Already it’s possible to see trouble on the horizon in Edmonton.
Leon Draisaitl, the Oilers’ other key forward, will enter his second contract next season and won’t be cheap. The year after that, McDavid’s entry-level deal comes to an end and he will basically be able to name his price. If all goes well, Darnell Nurse will get expensive the same year. The year after that, Cam Talbot and Jesse Puljujarvi’s deals will expire, potentially at the same time as a hypothetical Draisaitl bridge deal.
The Penguins had different issues in different years. They had serious injury problems. They had goaltending meltdowns. They couldn’t beat the guy at the other end of the rink. Health problems and percentage swings have been the bane of teams for a lot longer than the salary cap has existed, and they too can derail those seasons when a team was supposed to be in its prime.
Edmonton will undoubtedly face those woes, too.
There’s still some room for patience. If the team isn’t ready now, burning assets on rentals won’t put it over the top.
What there isn’t room for is complacency. Next season is the last of the cheap McDavid years, and if the Oilers aren’t a Cup contender at that point it only gets more difficult from there. Caution was the watchword of the Tambellini-led Oilers, and it ultimately destroyed them.
Nobody will accuse Chiarelli of the same tentativeness that Tambellini showed. His moves the past two summers were sometimes flawed, but they were never timid. Nevertheless, he doesn’t have much time if he’s going to turn Edmonton into a great team. If they aren’t a serious contender by next season, they may well be too far behind Pittsburgh and Chicago to catch up.
[relatedlinks]
