Secret weapon helps Edmonton Oilers to convince top notch players to sign and stay

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The Edmonton Oilers biggest weapon to lure players to sign contracts in Edmonton? The prospect of competing for a Stanley Cup with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. It’s also well known now that when the Oilers are winning, fan support and enthusiasm in Edmonton is unlike anywhere else, a cauldron of enthusiasm and joy.

But Edmonton also has a secret weapon when it comes to recruiting and retaining talent: team owner Daryl Katz.

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Katz is almost never seen or heard in public but his spare-no-expense running when it comes to the care and maintenance of Edmonton Oilers players is being recognized as a key factor in winning loyalty and new recruits, especially when Edmonton’s recent success in signing free agents such as Viktor Arvidsson and Jeff Skinner and retaining their own, namely the team’s entire third line of Adam Henrique, Connor Brown and Mattias Janmark, with the players often rejecting more money and/or term to sign with Katz’s Oilers.

Credit rained down on Edmonton’s hockey boss and interim GM Jeff Jackson for the free agent haul but on Oilers Now, Jackson deflected the credit onto Katz.

“Players know what a great leadership group we have, they know how well the players are treated, they know we have an owner who will do whatever he can to provide the tools, whether it is the facilities, or where we stay on the road, or chefs in the dressing room that help on a daily basis. It’s well known around the league. The players talk to each other and they share it and guys like Adam Henrique, who came in on a trade, or Sammy Carrick, they tell their buddies on their old team.”

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Jackson then summed up Edmonton’s allure: “It’s a combination of the great leadership we have in the room, winning, and all of the stuff that sort of surrounds it with the team, and the fans, and the love of the team in Edmonton. That doesn’t get missed by players either.”

NHL insider John Shannon told Oilers Now host Bob Stauffer that Katz’s long-term plan is finally being realized. “This is something that Daryl Katz has been trying to do for a long period of time is (have) the best building, the best dressing room, the best accoutrements for a player in and around the club. Make sure that there is a club services person looking after everything. And now that word has spread and I think that’s a big part of it. All you have to do is look down the highway to the issues that are going on in Calgary before the building even gets finished to know that the Oilers have a huge edge in trying to recruit players.”

All this had been noted in Stauffer’s previous interview with NHL columnist Frank Seravalli of The Daily Faceoff, who talked about how different Edmonton is now with the new arena and downtown Ice District, which flowed out of a shared vision for downtown renewal held by former Edmonton Mayor Stephen Mandel, the majority of his city council and Katz.

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“There is no mosh pit, there is no fan village, there is no gleaming new arena, there is no hotel that all the visiting teams like staying in without the support that they get from Daryl Katz,” Seravalli said.

Seravalli said the Oilers were the Green Bay Packers of the NHL. “They’re a juggernaut of league business. The Oilers are a top seven revenue generating team in the NHL.”

Added Seravalli: “Leon (Draisaitl) said they have the best owner in pro sports.”

Seravalli said there’s not one thing that’s not looked after for the Oilers. “You want to do something special on an off day for the Super Bowl, we’ll do it…These players have everything at their disposal. Facilities, everything else that comes with it.”

Seravalli said he became interested in Katz’s relations to his players during the Oilers-Stars series when he saw Draisaitl and Katz’s celebrating a big win. “They stood there and they hugged. And I was like, ‘Huh, that’s interesting.’ You don’t see that that often. There’s real relationship there.”

The Katz plan

Katz has spent tens of millions of extra dollars to help his Oilers win.

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If there was one thing that fans of the Edmonton Oilers were excited about when news leaked out of Katz’s intention to buy the Oilers in 2007, it was that Katz had exceedingly deep pockets and he was willing to use his money to build a winner. For decades the Oilers had had ownership that couldn’t or wouldn’t compete with the very top teams for top talent.

Former Oilers owner Peter Pocklington infamously sold away players like Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier, and lost other players like Glenn Anderson, Jari Kurri, Esa Tikkanen, Grant Fuhr, Bill Ranford, Kevin Lowe, Craig MacTavish and Paul Coffey because he was unwilling to pay market value for them. Profits from the team were sunk into Pocklington’s outside ventures.

When the Edmonton Investors Group (EIG) led by Cal Nichols took over the team in 1998, they had to scrape together their millions just to make the purchase. As a group they were a frugal bunch, not at all keen to over-spend, especially in an NHL without a salary cap where the richest teams in the biggest markets could lavish massive contracts on free agents.

Those Oilers competed hard and sometimes made the playoffs, but they also lost star player after star player for contract reasons, from Curtis Joseph to Doug Weight, from Bill Guerin to Ryan Smyth. The EIG also thought it could do without a dedicated American Hockey League team for several seasons, believing that sharing a franchise with another team was plenty good enough.

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When the league’s salary cap and revenue sharing came in in 2005-06, the EIG was hesitant to commit to paying to the cap limit, which is why Katz bowled over the fanbase in the spring of 2007, with news he was prepared to spend to the cap, then set at $50.3 million US, if the EIG would only sell to him. By that time, Oilers GM had a budget of $45 million US to work with, just below the $50 million US cap, but the fans hungered for every advantage for the home team.

Katz also talked about building a new team training facility at the University of Alberta and invested in a downtown arena.

“The larger perception of Katz as the perfect owner is out there and it’s not far-fetched,” wrote the Journal’s Dan Barnes in December 2007. “He’ll spend to the salary cap and contribute to a new barn. He wants Nichols to stay on as governor and is a huge supporter of GM Kevin Lowe… Frankly, it sounds too good to be true, but I think it is true and I think the timing is right for EIG to sell.”

In March 2008, after Katz had finalized his deal to buy, Lowe said he’d have all the money he needed under the new $55 million cap to build a team. “I really think we’ll be 1,000-per-cent better than we were last year, just from a contract position and just in terms of getting players.”

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“He will have the flexibility to do whatever he wants,” Katz said of Lowe.

It’s all about winning, Katz said. “I’ve told all the guys we’re going to do whatever we have to do to make the Oilers a competitive, elite team in the National Hockey League.”

Season after season, GM after GM, Katz was willing to keep on spending, spending, spending.

Here is a summary of Katz’s major areas of investment in the team:

Spending on AHL. He bought the Oilers their own American Hockey League affiliate team and Katz has often spent on expensive AHL players to stock that team with solid veteran leaders and scorers, from Alexandre Giroux and Brad Moran in 2010-11 to the coming 2024-25 Bakersfield Conors, full of veterans, such as Lane Pederson, Collin Delia, James Hamblin, Noah Philp, Connor Carrick, Ben Gleason, Noel Hoeffenmayer, and Cam Dineen, who will be making anywhere from half of the NHL minimum or that full amount of $775,000.

Dumping weak NHLers in AHL. Katz has been willing to park all kinds of players on expensive NHL contracts in the American Hockey League, meaning they’re being paid NHL wages but not on his Oilers. Such players include Nikita Nikitin, Denis Grebeshkov, Mark Fayne, Ben Eager, Ben Scrivens, Eric Gryba, Ryan Spooner, Brandon Manning, Devin Shore and Brendan Perlini in the past, and Sam Gagner, Adam Erne and Jack Campbell last season.

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Front-loaded for back-ended contracts. Katz has agreed on numerous trades where the Oilers have moved out front-loaded contracts, where the Oilers have already paid a high percentage of the contract, sometimes for back-ended contracts. This includes the Milan Lucic for James Neal deal, the Lubomir Visnovsky for Ryan Whitney deal, the Tom Gilbert for Nick Schultz deal, the moving out of Shawn Horcoff, and bringing in Adam Larsson’s back-loaded deal. The Cult’s Bruce McCurdy has estimated the Oilers have lost about $20 million in these five transactions alolne.

Buy-outs. Katz has also been willing to sign off on expensive buy-outs of players, including on the deals for Andrej Sekera, Benoit Pouliot, Lauri Korpikoski, Eric Gryba, James Neal and, just this week, Jack Campbell, who will be paid $1.5 million for the next six years, even as he’s no longer an Oiles.

Extra management and scouts. Katz has also paid heavily for two or three more managers in hockey operations, as well as paying for fired coaches and managers, from Pat Quinn, Todd McLellan and Peter Chiarelli to Dave Tippett and Jay Woodcroft. The number of people in pro and amateur scouting has gone from about a dozen in the final years of the EIG to about 16 in recent years, along with a now growing analytics department.

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But it’s Katz’s Ice District investment that has been greatest driver of Edmonton’s success. More than $2 billion of private funds has been invested there, as well as the $480 million public-private partnership that went into the new arena with its state of the art training facilities, including the NHL’s top dressing room and a community practice rink, all of which makes life better and sweeter for an NHL player in Edmonton.

On the Pat McAfee show, ESPN announcer P.K. Subban talked about how his great time during the Stanley Cup Final in Edmonton won him over. “Edmonton did a phenomenal job those three, four days, we were there, the food, the fans. They deserved that win, and I found myself … actually cheering for the Oilers. I wanted to see them win.”

As for the Oilers, Subban said, they were riding on the roar of the amazing Edmonton hockey crowd. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard a building that loud. The energy in the building was contagious They fed off of it.”

Some Oilers players have condos in Ice District. In a cold and fish bowl Canadian hockey market, players can cocoon somewhat in a bubble of privacy and fine living, if that’s their wish, all of it the result of Katz’s vision for Edmonton’s downtown.

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Of course, for more than a decade Katz’s extra spending did not pay off. The Decade of Darkness-plus, 2006-2019, were hard times when it comes to winning.

The success of the team, and the arrival of Connor McDavid, has also made Katz a lot of money. The franchise is now valued at $2.5 billion (Canadian dollars). Playoff tickets cost fans a small fortune. If it’s any consolation, though, much of Edmonton’s revenue is now directed to make Edmonton the premier hockey destination in the NHL for players, meaning Edmonton’s far more likely to attract and retain star players, as opposed to having them move on to Los Angeles and New York, which cost Edmonton three or four Stanley Cups in the 1990s.

Those hard days are gone. The Pocklington era, as great as it was, is a distant memory now. The Katz era is here, and while it’s yet to produce a Stanley Cup, no expense is being spared to win one.

At the Cult of Hockey

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