[peck420]

When your club is listed on most NMC's, your only option is to develop via draft and UFA over payments.

Which is precisely what the Oilers have been doing for the past 10 years.

This is an area the league really needs to sort out if they want to maintain parity among the teams. It starts a cycle that is extremely hard to break, and one that can affect any team that is not in a major 'world-class' city...which is about 3/4's of the NHL.

[N_Fiddledog]

peck420 peck420:

When your club is listed on most NMC's, your only option is to develop via draft and UFA over payments.

I'm guessing you mean players write Edmonton into 'No Movement Clauses' as cities they won't consider. Is that correct?

[peck420]

N_Fiddledog N_Fiddledog:

I'm guessing you mean players write Edmonton into 'No Movement Clauses' as cities they won't consider. Is that correct?

Correct.

Pre-cap, it was possible to spend your way out of a situation like that, but post-cap, your hands can become tied very, very quickly. The more you over pay for UFA's, the less likely you are to actually win, the harder it becomes to get players to not put you on their NMC clause, or to avoid you during RFA/UFA season.

Luckily, for Edmonton, they landed McDavid. Those generational type players make things a whole lot easier. Look at Pittsburgh. Lots of folks seem to forget how long they wandered the waste land, before they drafted Crosby. After they got their generational talent, it became a whole lot easier to acquire and retain talent.

The question, at this point, really becomes, "can Edmonton get enough wins to retain their generational talent?"

If they don't, McDavid is gone, and Edmonton heads right back into the wastelands of 27-30th place until they get lucky again.

If they do, there is going to be the perception of hope for potential players, letting them slowly build back into a credible long term contender.

[shockedcanadian]

peck420 peck420:

When your club is listed on most NMC's, your only option is to develop via draft and UFA over payments.

Which is precisely what the Oilers have been doing for the past 10 years.

This is an area the league really needs to sort out if they want to maintain parity among the teams. It starts a cycle that is extremely hard to break, and one that can affect any team that is not in a major 'world-class' city...which is about 3/4's of the NHL.

The problem is, you can't change the weather in Edmonton. That's probably the biggest complaint.

You are correct about the world class city tag, but this won't change for the NHL. It's asinine that Sin City gets a franchise while Quebec doesn't. Furthermore, I think the NHL have coddled the Toronto market. If they really want to help smaller market teams, they should force/allow a second franschise in Toronto, that would improve the leagues revenues and create more big ticket rivalries. So the league often speak from two sides of their mouth. They don't want more, Canadian small amrkets teams in Quebec, but yet, they allow the Leafs to control the monopoly in the region. Meanwhile New York has three franschises to cheer for.

[peck420]

I can just about guarantee that we will see the NHL drop the hammer on the Toronto monopoly the second that they get enough revenues to not rely on said Toronto monopoly.

As long as Toronto is the primary 'sharer' under the revenue sharing plan, they get to dictate terms to the NHL.

As for the weather in Edmonton, I doubt that matters as much as many people think. A lot of these players grew up in shitty weather environments, or spent much of their late teens playing in shitty weather environments, and they don't have to stay during the off season (ironically, when Edmonton's weather, and scenery, become quite spectacular).

I'm fairly confident that 'it has bad weather' is code for shitty management in a desperate situation. Nobody gave a hoot about our weather during the Gretzky years and our weather seems to have suddenly become palatable since McDavid.

[shockedcanadian]

peck420 peck420:

Nobody gave a hoot about our weather during the Gretzky years and our weather seems to have suddenly become palatable since McDavid.

Money will do that to ones outlook on a snowy day...

[Thanos]

I'm fairly certain that it has to do almost entirely with how uncompetitive the team became after Glen Sather left. All the Canadian teams also had a hard time in the 1990's prior to the cap thanks to the currency devaluation of the time. Even when our teams made the playoffs they couldn't break through, Montreal93/Toronto93/Vancouver94 being the exceptions, because the money on the US teams was just too good for them to keep their top players. The years before the cap would have killed off all the Canadian teams except for the deep-pockets in Montreal and Toronto so we need to keep that in mind and remember what a truly black period that was for our teams.

I'm not sure why Mike Peca left the Oilers after the '05 playoff run but we all know enough that the Chris Pronger situation was because of the problems in his personal life. Can't judge Edmonton either by the way Dany Heatley behaved either, nor should you, because you dodged a major bullet when that cancerous little brat said he wouldn't show up: that little fucker would have single-handedly made things worse for the Oilers just from the sheer obnoxious power of his awful attitude. None of the recent crop of good draft picks said they would show up either. If there's anything wrong with them it's that their confidence has been convincingly shattered by all the bad coaching and terrible management they've had to work under for the last decade.