Not long ago Corey Pronman reminded me about one of the last and most inept moves made by former Oilers GM Steve Tambellini. Now teams like the Oilers don't just get bad over night. It takes time. It takes effort. I mean, the level of neglect that goes into souring an NHL club to the point where 3 straight 1st Overall picks can't even take you out of the basement is actually quite impressive.

Sometimes the moves that take you down the path to bitter disappointment are big, like trading Lubomir Visnovsky for a player that even local media knew had serious feet problems that required surgery. Sometimes they're smaller moves dealing with relatively unknown prospects. The thread that connects them all together is the fact that they are easily avoidable.

Here's the tweet that twisted the knife:

Maloney also made earlier comments indicating he thinks Lessio and (EDM fans avert your eyes) Tobias Rieder have a shot to make the team.

— Corey Pronman (@coreypronman) September 7, 2014

Tobias Rieder was an Oiler prospect drafted in the 4th round of the 2011 Draft. Taken 114th Overall, he was always going to be a player that needed time to develop but there were plenty of up arrows. After he was drafted he scored 42 goals and added 42 assists in 60 games with the Kitchener Rangers. That's the kind of production that raises eyebrows when we're talking about anybody, never mind 4th round picks.

His next year wasn't nearly as productive as he only scored 56 points in 52 games. So there was perhaps a concern that he was moving in the wrong direction but the Oilers don't (and didn't) have a lot of forwards with offensive potential heading down the AHL route so there was plenty of room for Rieder in the system. He was also playing on an injured foot for part of that season so Tobias seemed to have a plausible excuse for his downturn.

Back to the Oilers, it's early into 2013 and the team is bad. The GM, desperate to do something, anything, decides the team is lacking "grit" in the system. Perhaps he was feeling like the rope was getting tighter and any action was better than no action. We can only guess. What we do know, though, was that the decision he made was a bad one.

Tambellini, in his infinite wisdom, traded Tobias Rieder and all of his potential for Kale Kessy. Now Kessy had been drafted 3 spots earlier than Rieder in the 2011 draft and there's every reason to believe that the Oilers liked him on Draft day but had to settle for the kid that scored 42 the next year. Kessy was having his best offensive season yet in his Draft+2 year totalling 43 points. Before that his totals were 29, 24, and 16 points in that order so he was trending WAY down before his sudden outburst.

But he wasn't drafted for his hockey ability. He was drafted because he was a goon. According to HockeyFights.com Kessy had 54 fights in his WHL career and 511 PIMs. This kid was a killer and the Oilers needed killers...I guess.

The problem with trading a real prospect for someone like Kessy is that there are always people like him cheaply available. They could have had him for free. There is absolutely no reason to waste a perfectly good asset on a Jr aged fighter. It's not as if the Oilers hadn't blown picks on Cam Abney and others before. This was a lesson they SHOULD have learned.

Even if you figure that the odds of Rieder actually cracking the Oilers given their newfound depth on the Wings was pretty low, he is still more valuable to other teams as a trading chip than Kale Kessy ever will be. There is truly nothing wrong with building a prospect up in the Minor Leagues to the point where he could be moved for something the big club actually needs.

This past season Rieder broke into the AHL and put up 48 points in 64 games with the Portland Pirates. Kale Kessy had 6 points in 54 AHL games and another 1 point in the 3 ECHL games he played. It would take Kessy, at this rate, 378 more AHL games to match Rieder's single season output. That is, if he plays another 378 games as a pro. Meanwhile, we have indications that Tobias Rieder is ready to win a job in the NHL this coming year.

Destroying an NHL team is as much a collection really terrible small moves as it is a few devastating big ones.

Steve Tambellini traded Tobias Rieder for Kale Kessy on March 29th 2013. He was fired on April 15th 2013, two weeks too late to prevent one last blunder.

Follow me on Twitter @Archaeologuy

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