Yesterday, the Edmonton Oilers swept their season series with the Columbus Blue Jackets by tuning them in 4-1, but you would probably never know that as the fanbase was all in a huff because the CEO of the team went too far in regards to a question from a season ticket holder regarding one specific player.
“Toby Rieder … came here for one year because he wanted to play with Leon Draisaitl, who he plays with on the German national team. He thought if he wasn’t playing with Leon, he’d be playing with Connor. He’d score 15-16 goals, and instead of making two million, he’d sign a four-year deal at $3.5 million.”
From my gathering, Rieder is a solid guy with a good head on his shoulders and I love his optimism and long-term planning, but for the love of the Gord himself, can you tell me what he was thinking when he thought he was going to be getting top-6 minutes after being let go by the LA Kings? Did the management group tell him that to get him to sign for only $2M?
Toby isn’t a top-6 scoring winger, he’s a solid middle/bottom-6 checker who contributes on the penalty kill. This is a player that should’ve scored AT LEAST 10 goals this year but has found himself stapled to the boards all year. I think I could count on one hand the number of times he’s found his way to the slot all season…
“Toby Rieder hasn’t scored a goal.”
True. It’s hard to do that when your ass is glued to the wall (or the bench).
“Toby Rieder has missed so many breakaways.”
Not lying here. No reason to get upset with this comment.
“Toby Rieder will not be signed by the Edmonton Oilers at the end of this year.”
Some took offense to this but anybody who watches the game would come to this conclusion as well. Rieder was a calculated gamble, not a guarantee.
I imagine that there will be some analysts that believe Edmonton should try to re-sign him (good luck with that) on the cheap (say 800k or so) and bet on him rebounding. You could do that but he’s not shown to be more valuable than the late-season call-ups from Bakersfield.
0 Goals
11 Assists
-7
-4.2 CF% Rel (2nd worst for regular skaters)
-4.2 FF% Rel (Worst for regular skaters)
Stats courtesy of Hockey-Reference
I think Edmonton tried to trade him at the deadline but there was no interest. Shocking.
“If Toby Rieder would have scored 10 or 12 goals, we’d probably be in the playoffs.”
Can you figure out where he went offside in amongst those quotes?
Now, I made a comment on Twitter yesterday defending this and it was hard to do in 280 characters. But I found this post and it talks about the value of a win in the NHL? And what I took away from it is that 4-5 goals should equate to a win.
So if Toby Rieder scores 10-12 goals, does that equal up to six more points for the Oilers? If it does, that means the Oilers are in the playoffs today.
It’s not this simple. I’m aware of that. What I’m saying is that if Rieder (or anybody for that matter) scores an extra 12 goals for the Oilers, are they still -35 in goal differential? If Rieder or Lucic, Puljujarvi or Brad Malone was scoring, would that have permeated the into the psyches of the other players thus allowing them to reach their scoring potentials as well?
We can bring up if the goals were scored in a blowout for the other team or if they were GWG, EN goals, game-tying goals, shorthanded, powerplay, or ones scored while blindfolded and skating backwards on one leg, but at the end of the year when they are all tallied up, who cares? You need to score goals to win games.
Was what Bob Nicholson said really THAT bad… Terry Jones was far more cutting in his article this morning.
How marvelous is McDavid, how dynamic is Draisaitl and how nifty is Nugent-Hopkins if the Oilers keep playing Tobias Rieder on one of their lines and he hasn’t been able to score one single, solitary goal?
Here’s what the CEO of the Dallas Stars said about the team’s two superstar players that are actually scoring goals earlier in the year…
“They are fucking horse-shit, I don’t know how else to put it,” Lites said. “The team was ok. But (Tyler) Seguin and (Jamie) Benn were terrible.” – Dallas Stars CEO Jim Lites (source)
That’s bad… But the Stars are most likely going to be in the playoffs this year barring some mad collapse on their part. So you can’t say successful organizations never make these sort of comments.
Some oversensitive fans in Edmonton just can’t have enough blood. Two sacrifices were made this year in Peter Chiarelli and Todd McLellan and it’s not enough. Every day there’s some new excuse as to why Bob Nicholson should be the one to go. He’s not going anywhere in my opinion.
Supporters of the team are worried that he’ll make the same mistake again and hire another bad GM. Now, they’re worried that free agents aren’t going to come to town and that’s a bunch of BS too.
Nicholson isn’t the one that is going to be signing players to new contracts unless he appoints himself GM of the team and there’s a better chance of John Tavares going back to the Islanders than the CEO of the Oilers becoming the boss of hockey ops in Edmonton.
Who he hires as GM and head coach of the team will directly affect the quality of free agents that come to town. Full stop. I mean Nicholson isn’t even supposed to be working in hockey operations as it is. From the get-go, he was to be on the “business” side of things and Kevin Lowe oversaw the hockey ops. Then that job was passed on to Peter Chiarelli as POHO.
He was the overseer until Chiarelli was dismissed.
Anybody that has been following the Oilers shouldn’t even be worried about free agents anyhow. The team doesn’t have the money to spend on the good ones and the players they have signed (including Rieder) don’t inspire confidence that they’ll be able to reverse the trend.
Alex Chiasson and Kevin Gravel are probably the exceptions.
Speaking of free agents, not long ago there was a bit of chatter pertaining to the return of Taylor Hall to Edmonton…
Comment from Rieders agent Darren Ferris. “I am totally astonished and disappointed that the president of an NHL team can make such a callous and reckless statement about a player. This is unacceptable.”
— Ryan Rishaug (@TSNRyanRishaug) March 22, 2019
Darren Ferris represents Hall as well as Rieder.
I do have a bone to pick with that release though. Ferris would’ve known about the comments as soon as they went out publicly if not before. Surely he would’ve had media (like Rishaug) calling him, right? So he had the whole day to figure out what to say in response and when to release the comments… Ferris lets the day go by and allows the talk shows to dig in to see how the public reacts, then he allows his response to go public late in the evening close to the end of the Oilers game. Was his hope that the media would pick up on it and ask the players about it? What was the motivation there?
The Oilers are not having great luck with agents this year… At all…
I reached out to a person that is close to the organization and asked what they thought of the chances Edmonton would have in the Hall sweepstakes now should there be one and I was told that only time will tell…
You would have to think that Nicholson would have been more tempered in his comments but should he be crucified for making a mistake? I don’t think so. He’s already apologized to Rieder and both he and the German had a good laugh about it by all accounts.
This from Mark Spector’s post-game article from last night,
“I screwed up,” Nicholson told me before the game Thursday. “I promised I’d talk until all the questions were done. I don’t look back on that in a negative way. But where I got offside in my comment is that Toby wouldn’t be here next year. That, if he would have scored 12 or 15 goals, we’d be in the playoffs.
“That’s wrong for me to say that.
“Now you’re saying the reason you’re making the playoffs is because of Toby Rieder, which is the furthest thing from what I meant to say,” rued Nicholson. “I take the blame. I said it. I phoned the player and apologized. He chuckled and said, ‘Don’t worry about it Bob.’”
Bottom line, Rieder is just as frustrated as his boss and Bob made a boo boo, but he did the right thing and made amends immediately.
As a hockey guy himself, he should’ve known better than to throw one of his own under the bus like that. You can be sure that he’s learned from this and any comments coming from him in the future will likely be more guarded.
The Oilers are still playing meaningful hockey and that shouldn’t be glossed over. Like it or not, Bob Nicholson is driving the bus right now and this isn’t the mishap that the former head of Hockey Canada should be judged upon during his tenure in Edmonton.
On a more positive note, the focus is off the GM search and onto the team’s CEO search…
This fanbase never ceases to amaze me.
“Always drink upstream from the herd.” – Will Rogers
