Like I said, I have no reason to comment on this trade. It was severely detrimental to our current situation considering the actual value of those picks. But mistakes happen and teams move on despite them.
Management always feels so short-sighted and the reliance on rookies in important roles is something that's been haunting this organization since Gagner was drafted. I always look at other organizations and most of them ease their rookies into the lineup without expectations but around here it's "We traded Eberle away, score 20 goals please". Ironically Eberle probably was the last player they were truly patient with. He and Nurse are the only first rounders we've drafted in the last nine years that didn't see NHL action right out of the gate.
Great story, except that the market for Hall and Eberle's second contracts were set by the Skinner signing earlier that summer.
Maybe so, but it doesn't discredit the fact that these contracts set a poor standard organizationally. Even Jeff Skinner, who made less, never lived up to expectations of that contract and thus received a very lukewarm trade return. In Edmonton, those three $6m men were the future until they weren't.
If we look back to that time, we were all worried that Hall, Eberle, RNH, etc... were going to be the next Weight, Guerin, Pronger, Peca, Spacek, Smyth, etc... who left for more money and/or personal reasons. Overall, the Oilers were still trying to establish themselves as an organization that would pay star players, and have players consider Edmonton be a market in which they wanted to play.
I don't think those three ever fell into that category considering the Oilers had team control with all of them. If anything we played our hands poorly there, signing all of them into UFA status--though I'm not entirely certain that would've been avoidable considering the draft pedigree of Hall and RNH.
The comment was specifically aimed at Jeff Skinner. Whether or not our players 'lived up to' these contracts is besides the point in the grander scheme. The point was that these players were paid as primary contributors and given every opportunity to take the reins and ultimately all of them ended up being players who would play second fiddle on the future roster, yet their contracts remained as the benchmark for any future player in this organization--and apparently other organizations--who outproduced them.
The player agents are always going to use internal comparables primarily if that's what's beneficial for their client. Alternatively, teams can use them to their favor if their case is strong enough. When teams and agents don't have those accurate comparables, they'll look elsewhere.
This has been argued to death, but no, that's not how comparables work imho. It goes league-wide, not within the team. Sure, internally maybe Boston didn't want Pastrnak making more than Bergeron, but they got that by giving less UFA years than Draisaitl got. The same thing happened with Gaudreau. Pastrnak also wasn't as valuable as Draisaitl at the time of signing, so the number is pretty much the league market value. As for Drai's comparables, it's pretty easy to see that they were guys like Johansen, Kuznetzov, and Tarasenko, not RNH. And, there are understandable reasons why Draisaitl got more cash than those three.
