Since posting the Tobias Rieder piece I was informed by a source I trust that Tobias Rieder and his agent were heavily leaning towards not signing with the Oilers. While that may give some people inclination to forgive the Rieder for Kessy deal, I don’t believe it should at all.
The facts remain the same. The Oilers traded a real prospect for a player type that could have been acquired by any other means freely. In fact knowing that Rieder didn’t want to sign with the Oilers only raises more questions in my mind and it in no way absolves the club of their decisions.
The first question that comes to mind is to how the Oilers allowed their relationship with a prospect that scored 42 goals in Jr get to the point where he isn’t even willing to start his professional career with them.
Rieder is a former 4th Round selection. He’s expected to take longer to develop than the lottery selected prospects that the Oilers had and there was nobody coming to the AHL that would have been ahead of him. He was set to earn primo ice time in the AHL if he turned pro with the Barons. I don’t buy that the franchise had no place for someone like Rieder, so I wonder about how he was actually treated by the team. Rieder should have been someone of extreme importance to the Oilers development team.
If Rieder did not want to be an Oiler then it behooves us to know why, and simply saying “It wasn’t a fit… is tantamount to saying “No Comment….
The Detroit Red Wings have famously blocked almost all of their prospects at the NHL level, making them earn NHL games by honing their craft at the AHL level. If immediate need of the NHL club was a reasonable excuse for interesting prospects to refuse to sign with their drafted teams then the Red Wings AHL franchise would be a ghost ship.
There’s simply more to the story here, and we don’t have the info. However, the situation doesn’t point to a GM with no options. It points to a GM that made several mistakes along the way until he felt like he had no options. There’s a difference.
How is it that a team whose primary source of talent from 2009-2013 was via drafting and developing young players came to a point with Rieder that he felt like the best way for him to become an NHL player was to get away from them? That’s the biggest question I have.
The second question I have, given Rieder’s preference not to be an Oiler, would be does it matter at all? Does him not wanting to sign with the Oilers change the fact that he was traded for a player with extremely questionable skills and who was never even close to the same caliber of prospect? I don’t think it does.
The trade is still a disastrous one. One in which a young player with NHL potential was traded for one with questionable AHL potential. Having more context is nice, but it’s still a backwards move.
Tambellini is gone and that era of mismanagement is behind us, but if the take away from the situation was that a notable prospect wanted to abandon ship then the organization can afford to ask more questions about what it has done to prevent that from happening again.
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