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Welcome to the other side of a team being “all in.’’
This is the part where in the last three years the Edmonton Oilers have just three picks inside the top 60 at the NHL draft, including the 32nd overall selection they acquired in Friday’s 11th-hour deal with the Philadelphia Flyers.
They didn’t have a first rounder last year, they traded away their first rounder from two years ago and up until they selected Sam O’Reilly of the London Knights at 32 on Friday the Oilers didn’t have a pick in the first round this year, either. But they sort of kicked the issue down the road because they spent a conditional first round pick in 2025 or 2026 to get him.
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In Saturday’s second day of the draft the Oilers have a late second rounder, one in the fifth, two in the sixth and two in the seventh.
This is hockey’s version of a credit card bill coming due, the price of doing business in a Stanley Cup window. It’s very exciting when the team is making all those shiny purchases — a first for this piece, a second for that piece, a third and fourth for integral depth — but they come at a cost.
And the draft is where you pay.
Draft Day and Lottery Day used to be the biggest events on Edmonton’s hockey calendar. Gathering around to the television to see what the NHL’s balls of fate had in store for the Oilers, and who they’d spend that fortune one were annual rites of spring and summer.
Now it’s barely worth watching.
Emptying the cupboards the last few years, which is understandable when a team believes it’s close to a championship, has made for some pretty barren hauls recently.
2022: The Oilers have nothing from the first four rounds. The first round pick from that year (Schaefer) went to Nashville in a Mattias Ekholm deal that turned out brilliantly for the Oilers. The second-round pick went to Montreal for Brett Kulak, who’s been a solid acquisition. The third rounder went to Chicago for Duncan Keith, who also had an impact in his time here. And the 2022 fourth went to New Jersey for Dmitry Kulikov.
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So three out of four isn’t bad on that front.
2023: The Oilers didn’t have a first-round pick (also went to Nashville in the Ekholm deal), nor a third (used to acquire Nick Bjugstad) or a fourth (Derick Brassard).
So that’s a grand total of six players taken in 14 rounds over the last two years, and almost all of them from deep in the draft (56th, 184th and 216th last year and 158th, 190th and 222nd two summers ago).
2024: This year was going to be nothing in the first round (Anaheim has Edmonton’s pick for Adam Henrique and Sam Carrick), no third rounder (part of the Zack Kassian salary dump), and no fourth (the last piece of Ekholm’s price), but the Oilers managed to get a player out of the first day with the Flyers trade.
2025: Depending on the conditions of Friday’s trade, the Oilers have no first round pick, no second (Kassian salary dump) and no fourth or fifth (Henrique/Carrick).
This isn’t quite scorched earth that the Oilers are in — adding a pair of high-end young talents in Dylan Holloway (22) and Philip Broberg (just turned 23) satisfies the need for internal growth for a while — but there will be a day of reckoning.
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A dry pipeline always catches up with you down the road.
Maybe they can hit on some late prospects? Scoop up a couple of blue-chip kids that everyone else missed? That would be new. The last player to make and stick with the Oilers after the third round was Vincent Desharnais from Round 7 in 2016.
With some massive contracts on the horizon — Draisaitl this year and McDavid, Ekholm, Skinner and Bouchard next year — the Oilers are going to need talented help on cheap, entry-level deals.
But after we find out whether prospects like Beau Akey, Xavier Bourgault and Carter Savoie are going to pan out at the NHL level, there’s going to a long dry spell.
Recent rankings of the NHL’s top prospect pools had Edmonton rated as low as 25th out of 32 teams.
The Oilers made their living off the draft for years and wouldn’t be where they are today without it. They draft lottery dynasty, winning four times in six years (Taylor Hall in 2010, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins in 2011, Nail Yakupov in 2012 and Connor McDavid in 2015), might never be duplicated.
And they supplemented their roster with Darnell Nurse (7th in 2013), Leon Draisaitl (third in 2014) Stuart Skinner (78th in 2017), Evan Bouchard (10th in 2018), Ryan McLeod (40th in 2018), Philipp Broberg (eighth in 2019) and Dylan Holloway (14th in 2020).
That’s a lot of impact players in an 11-year window.
Enjoy the Stanley Cup window while it lasts, because it’s going to be a while before the pipeline gets that good again.
LATE HITS — The Oilers signed goaltender Calvin Pickard to a two-year contract extension with an AAV of $1 million. Pickard stepped in in the wake of the Jack Campbell crisis and steadied the situation in net.
E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
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