Nail Yakupov turned 22 on Tuesday. On Wednesday, he will be in the Edmonton Oilers’ lineup for the start of his fourth season in the NHL. Typically, a No. 1 overall draft pick has already shown signs of greatness by Year 4. Yakupov’s teammate, Taylor Hall, already had a better than point-per-game season under his belt at the same age. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins was coming off a year where he averaged better than 20 minutes per game as the Oilers’ top centre.
Yakupov has shown brief flashes, but nothing more. He led all rookies in goals in 2012-13, scoring at a pace he ultimately could not sustain. Perhaps that shouldn’t come as a total surprise; after all, he was the standard-bearer of what looks so far to be a generally weak 2012 draft class. Second overall pick Ryan Murray has already been battered by injuries, third overall selection Alex Galchenyuk has had mixed success in Montreal and fourth overall selection Griffin Reinhart is now in Edmonton after the Isles decided he wasn’t a franchise cornerstone after all.
Draft pedigree weighs on all those players, but none more so than Yakupov, who has been more liability than asset in three campaigns with the Oilers. At this point it seems unlikely he’ll equal the accomplishments of Hall or Nugent-Hopkins. Edmonton’s former management certainly wasn’t betting on it; while the team generally preferred to lock up its star forwards long-term, Yakupov got just a two-year bridge deal from the club.
But what exactly should the Oilers expect from Yakupov? Is he a pure bust, or is there still a player to be salvaged? While Yakupov may not equal his peers, can he still help an NHL team win games? To try and answer that question, we decided to seek out players who had posted comparable numbers at around the same age. Let’s take a closer look at a handful of the players our search identified.
Valeri Bure
By the numbers, this looks pretty close. It’d be a nice comparable for the Oilers, who would have to be very happy if Yakupov became the offensive force that Bure was before injuries stole away his career. Like Yakupov, Bure showed flashes early, scoring 22 goals as a rookie before stagnating for a couple of seasons. He ended up in Calgary, where he was spectacularly effective for three seasons, peaking with a 35-goal, 75-point effort in 1999-00 that put him just outside the top-10 league-wide in both categories.
Jeff O’Neill
The one big difference between Yakupov and O’Neill is the way the two scored their goals. While Yakupov had one big shooting percentage season he’s mostly been a volume shooter over his NHL career, while O’Neill was a pure sniper who didn’t need to shoot a lot to get his goals. O’Neill scored 25-plus goals for four consecutive seasons at the heart of his career, topping out with a 41-goal campaign in 2000-01 which ranked him seventh overall in the NHL.
Maxim Afinogenov
Though the NHL is a distant memory at this point, Afinogenov is still playing in the KHL, a league he jumped to after posting 61 points for Atlanta in his final NHL season. Like Yakupov, he took a few years to get going, but he thrived in the new NHL that followed the 2004-05 lockout, managing a 73-point season in 2005-06 and topping the point-per-game mark the following year.
Alex Frolov
Like Afinogenov, Frolov is still playing overseas, but unlike him he didn’t leave the NHL on a high note. Still, Frolov’s career track was pretty impressive overall. He scored 30-plus goals twice and had five consecutive seasons scoring at least 20 goals. He may have washed out of the league early, but in his mid-20’s he was a handful on offence.
Our search also turned up some truly remarkable players – both Corey Perry and Daniel Sedin make appearances, as does Todd Bertuzzi – but for the most part the wingers that turn up are in the range of the four above. That’s not bad company to be in, either. Offence is a hard thing to find in the NHL and there’s always room for a goal-scoring winger on a line somewhere, even if he isn’t a Selke candidate.
Critically, there aren’t any pure busts on the list either, which suggests that while the Oilers may not be thrilled with what Yakupov has delivered so far, it’s awfully early to write him off. That’s what the Canadiens did with Bure, and the Flames benefitted greatly from a deal which saw them ship out two players who ultimately didn’t last in Montreal.
That isn’t to say that a trade would necessarily be a mistake; Edmonton has plenty of needs and “offensive winger” is well down the list. If they make a move, though, they’ll want to be sure that value is coming the other way, because while Yakupov may never be an all-star, he’s still likely to make his mark offensively in the NHL.
