EDMONTON — The pertinent question for Edmonton general manager Craig MacTavish, with Ryan Nugent-Hopkins still out of the Oilers lineup recovering from shoulder surgery, was: “What is the hurry?”
Couldn’t they wait until Nugent-Hopkins had played 40 games, and proven his shoulder could take a hit?
“I’d seen enough,” was MacTavish’s frank reply, a few hours after signing his 20-year-old, franchise centre to a seven-year, $42-million contract extension that will kick in for the 2014-15 season.
“I had seen enough of Ryan’s character, enough of his game to know he is a guy we want to build our future with,” MacTavish added. “You can’t find anyone in our organization who even remotely questions this deal. It’s a no-brainer.”
After years of derision, when the hockey world rightfully questioned almost everything this losing Oilers organization has done since 2007, could this mark the point in the timeline when that all changes?
If the cap rises as expected, and Nugent-Hopkins, Taylor Hall and Jordan Eberle — all inked to long-term deals paying them $6 million per season — all become elite NHL top-15 scorers, will we look back one day and say, “Man, those Oilers were smart to get them signed for all their prime seasons between 20 and 28 years of age, for such a good number?”
“I feel very strongly that he will outperform the number on this contract,” MacTavish said of Nugent-Hopkins.
He feels the same about Hall, who last year signed an identical seven-year, $42-million deal, and Eberle, (six years, $36 million), a pair of Canadian Olympic hopefuls. Eberle, Hall and RNH will have their contracts expire respectively in 2019, 2020 and 2021, a nice stagger when it comes time to renew them once again.
Hall and Nugent-Hopkins will each be 28 years old at the expiration date of their deals, while Eberle will be 29.
“It’s really surreal,” Nugent-Hopkins said of the deal. He had to miss the second season of peewee hockey because his family could not afford the registration fees. Now, the slick centre could pay for every peewee in Edmonton, including equipment and chicken wings after the game.
“Obviously things have changed. It’s a bit surreal for all of us,” he said of his family back home in Burnaby, B.C. “As a kid, obviously, it was pretty tough. I still skated quite a bit … but it was tough not playing organized hockey.”
The upside of this contract, even if it does seem like largesse for a player with just 102 NHL games to his credit, is that the Oilers are paying for Nugent-Hopkins’s best years. Same with Eberle and Hall, each of whom will spend their most productive seasons in Edmonton, rather than that time honoured NHL practice of paying unrestricted free agents big dollars for something accomplished years earlier in another town.
And when all of these deals are done?
“It is our objective to make the experience so rewarding,” MacTavish said, “that they won’t want to leave. Like it was here before. I see the pendulum swinging back in that direction.”
Ironically, the Oilers dynasty fell apart for economic reasons. It’s a cap system now however, and like it or not, this is the template for building and retaining a good team.
Players like RNH, Hall and Eberle are only accrued at the draft — except for the rarest of trades. Once you get them, if they meet the GMs key criteria — “skill and character” — then you lock them up long-term.
The risks of this signing are few. Only one, really, but it’s a big one: In his first two NHL seasons Nugent-Hopkins has played in 102 of 130 games, missing about 21 per cent of his starts due to injury. He is expected to miss a few more at the beginning of the coming season as his left shoulder heals from major surgery performed late last season.
This organization has much experience with shoulder surgeries to Hall and Ales Hemsky however, and everyone is confident that Nugent-Hopkins will heal up just fine. His expected date of return is cautiously set at Nov. 1, and as a player that the team has invested in for the next eight years, “We will err on the side of caution,” MacTavish promised.
So, like with so many aspects of this cautious, patient rebuild here in Edmonton, only history will tell us if this contract — and so many other decisions — are borne of brilliance or buffoonery.
The timeline, the losing, the money spent, the “bold moves” made and not made — all of it can only be justified by one thing: A Stanley Cup parade in Edmonton one day.
“The environment around here will speak for itself,” MacTavish promised. “People will want to play here.”