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Brendan Shanahan announced today that Toronto Maple Leafs center Nazem Kadri would miss the next two games for “disciplinary reasons… and essentially challenged the player to take his craft seriously. His exact words were, “This is a key moment in Kadri's career. He needs to look at the mirror and decide where he wants his career to go." Well, the 23-year-old pending restricted free agent might just decide that he wants his career to go to another NHL club and I think the Edmonton Oilers should be interested.
To be fair to the Leafs, they also said that Kadri was an important part of their future while they were feeding him a shiv to the back in the prison yard. Embarrassing young athletes doesn’t work anymore. I think those days are over. The break them down then build them up mentality that Toronto looks to be trying to employ might have worked when these dramas weren’t played out on 24-hour sports networks, in dozens of print publications, and all over social media. What used to be a somewhat controlled way of re-shaping behavior turns into a zoo real fast now.
There’s always more to the story than what gets leaked out originally. Nazem Kadri was late to a team meeting and has been suspended for three games in a league where taking your skate off and trying to murder an opponent might only get you two games if you had a clean record.
Shanahan cited other incidents but didn’t elaborate.
The first thing that comes to mind is that the Leafs are really going about this TankNation thing in a ham-fisted way (but Buffalo traded both their starters so obviously the NHL doesn’t care about tanking). But once you let that go the possibility remains that the Leafs and this player simply are at an impasse for reasons we aren’t privy to and probably won’t be made fully public until things become entirely irreparable.
Is Kadri a head case? Is he just immature and not cut out for the spotlight of Toronto? Should any of those things even be a concern if another NHL team want’s to pursue a trade?
Probably not, maybe, definitely not.
Nazem Kadri is playing 17:31 a night and when he’s on the ice the Toronto Maple Leafs are almost dead even in possession and that’s on a team that struggles five-on-five to leave their own zone. He only has 36 points in 64 games, which must be disappointing to him and the club, but he is second only to Lupul at even-strength at 1.77 points per 60 minutes. For comparison’s sake, that’s somewhere between Jordan Eberle and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.
He’s seventh on the Leafs in power play time on ice per game, which seems nutty. He seems ready to take on a greater role than he has been given on the Leafs and they just challenged his professionalism quite publicly. Given that he now has a reputation as an immature player who doesn’t win a lot of faceoffs (which NHL teams still think is actually important), now is the time to strike.
The Oilers have Pittsburgh’s first-round pick in the upcoming draft. Can a deal be centered around Pittsburgh’s first and say Teddy Purcell plus prospects or more picks? Obviously Darnell Nurse and Leon Draisaitl are off limits, but beyond that the rest of the players in the system are fair game.
For those that say it isn’t enough for Nazem Kadri, let’s not forget that right now the Leafs have just done everything in their power to devalue this asset. He looks like a very risky pick-up for any team out there. That’s not even mentioning that the Oilers are probably more interested in fixing their Defense and Goaltending this summer. Nobody is giving up Jordan Eberle for a guy both the President and Head Coach of the Leafs just threw under the bus.
There’s a strong case to be made that the Oilers should just simply re-sign Derek Roy and use whatever available assets they have to find a goalie and a potential top pairing defenseman. I’m not going to refute that. It’s extremely valid. Roy is productive enough and he makes Yakupov want to be a better man. However, if Edmonton were to end up selecting third and negotiations with Roy don’t go the way the club wants them then they might be selecting Hanifin in the Draft and still in need of a second-line center for their club.
The situation in Toronto should be something the Oilers want to keep an eye on in the event an opportunity to snag a pretty good center becomes available.
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