Taylor Hall was the face of the franchise when it happened.
The Edmonton Oilers’ first-ever No. 1-overall pick in 2010 was their key cog – the marketing meal ticket who led the National Hockey League team in scoring and who was featured on mockups of the jumbrotron in artists’ renditions of the then-under-construction Rogers Place – when, shortly after 6 p.m. MT during televised coverage on April 18 of the 2015 draft lottery, deputy commissioner Bill Daly drew a gold placard.
In the middle of the vinyl album-sized card: the Oilers logo.
Edmonton had won the Connor McDavid sweepstakes.
It wasn’t ‘official’ official until the 18-year-old second-coming of hockey Jesus was drafted a little more than two months later, but 6 p.m. that day was a moment that dramatically altered the Oilers’ future, soon propelling the team out of its chronic, decade-long, cellar-dwelling funk and, eventually, into the upper reaches of not only the NHL standings but deep into its playoff drama spring after spring, the stuff of every hockey player’s and fan’s dreams in pursuit of the Stanley Cup.
Let’s take a look back at the principal things that changed for the Oilers after winning the McDavid lottery 10 years ago today.
Hire a GM with more street cred
Craig MacTavish had his hand on the wheel, steering the Oilers’ hockey operations ship, when the McDavid lotto news hit like a thunderbolt.
MacT had been the team’s general manager for two years at the time, hired for the role a year after he rejoined the organization in an advisory role and four years after he quit as the team’s longtime head coach.
He’d had a mixture of some hits– his crowning achievement was drafting Draisaitl but also Darnell Nurse in 2013, and acquiring David Perron in 2013 for Magnus Paajarvi – and several misses – trading two draft picks to the Anaheim Ducks for goalie Viktor Fasth, firing Ralph Krueger then hiring Dallas Eakins as head coach, trading away Devan Dubnyk and Jeff Petry, signing Nikita Nikitin to a whale of a contract – but the Oilers were clearly galvanized in the wake of the McDavid lottery win.
Six days later, the Oilers hired Peter Chiarelli, fired just nine days earlier by the Boston Bruins, as their new GM – a saga that’s another story for another day – and reassigned MacTavish into another hockey ops role. Chiarelli was four years removed from leading the Bruins as their hockey impresario to a Stanley Cup title.
Attract more higher-end players
Milan Lucic said it best the day he signed with the Oilers in July 2016 on top of a parkade overlooking the almost-complete Rogers Place in downtown Edmonton.
“Getting an opportunity to play with one of the best players of this generation doesn’t come around that often,” the big-name free agent winger told media gathered there after he signed a seven-year, $42-million contract to come to Edmonton.
He was referring to the chance of playing with McDavid, of course. And he was one of the first hired guns or players who waived their limited-movement clauses in their contracts for the opportunity to play with the world’s best hockey player and chase puck glory.
Patrick Maroon mentioned the chance to play with the likes of McDavid and Draisaitl as pluses when he arrived in Edmonton from Anaheim at the 2016 trade deadline.
Duncan Keith said the prospect of playing with Nos. 97 and 29 was the main factor in him accepting a trade to the Oilers from the Blackhawks, whom he backstopped on the blueline to three Stanley Cups.
Mike Smith IDed the McDavid factor when the goalie signed with Edmonton in July 2019.
Same story with Zach Hyman and Tyson Barrie in 2021. Evander Kane and Jack Campbell in 2022.
The list goes on.
“You go with what you know, and I believe in this group,” Barrie told media after re-signing with the Oilers in July 2021, potentially giving up a bigger salary elsewhere to stay with Edmonton.
“We have the best player in the world and a guy who, on any given night, is also the best player in the world. That’s a great crew to build around.”
Hire a coach with more street cred
Todd Nelson was filling in as interim head coach by season’s end when McDavid Day dropped like a bomb in Oilersland.
His status was up in the air after he went 17-25-9 in his 51 games behind the bench after the Oilers showed Eakins the door in mid-December 2014 following a disastrous 1-15 stretch of games.
A month after the lottery win, the Oilers introduced Todd McLellan – arguably the most-sought-after free-agent NHL head-coaching candidate at the time besides Mike Babcock – as the new bench boss.
To McLellan’s credit, he didn’t name the yet-to-electrify-the-NHL McDavid as the major reason for choosing Edmonton – “I’m a western Canada guy,” he said at the time while also identifying family in the area as a draw – but No. 97 was on his mind.
“Everybody had an eyeball on where he’d end up, but he’s not the only factor,” McLellan said on May 19, 2015.
“I only get to make 50 per cent of the decision; the other part is the Oilers.”
And when the Oilers moved on from McLellan three-and-a-half years later, they attracted Ken Hitchcock to fill in for the rest of the season and eventually hired Dave Tippett as the successor, two coaching giants that arguably wouldn’t have been behind the Edmonton bench sans McDavid on the roster.
Move on from Hall
Hall had been anointed the saviour of the franchise that had fallen on hard statistical times by the time then-general manager Steve Tambellini called his name on the 2010 National Hockey League draft floor in Los Angeles.
And rightly so. Hall, chosen over Tyler Seguin in a much-publicized ‘showdown’ over who the Oilers would take No. 1 in the weeks leading up to draft day, was seen as a modern-day blend of speed, skill and toughness, the chief protagonist for the back-to-back Memorial Cup champion Windsor Spitfires junior juggernaut squad of the day.
No one knows in what direction the franchise would’ve headed if the Oilers hadn’t won the lottery and simply picked in their original No. 3 slot, perhaps selecting Dylan Strome instead after the consensus first two picks McDavid and Jack Eichel.
Hall, remember, was still young, just 23. He and the likes of Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jordan Eberle and Nail Yakupov were shouldering the weight of Oil Country’s expectations by the time McDavid became an Oiler in 2015. Oilers fans had seen glimpses of what Leon Draisaitl, drafted the year before, was capable of, but few could’ve foreseen his meteoric evolution alongside McDavid in the years to come.
We’ll never know what could have been with Hall as the continued focal point, and how he and his teammates would have developed and evolved.
It’s conceivable he would’ve continued on the trajectory that saw him capture the NHL’s Hart Trophy as the league’s most-valuable player in 2018 after a masterful offensive performance that saw him finish sixth in overall scoring with 93 points (39 goals, 54 assists) for the New Jersey Devils, to who the Oilers had traded him two years earlier for defenceman Adam Larsson.
The gamble – and selling Hall at such a low price was a letdown to fans at least, with apologies to Larsson, who is as rare and fine, tough-as-nails, hard-hitting nutcracker of a defenceman in the NHL as there is – paid off.
It allowed McDavid, who assumed the captaincy for 2016-17, to become the true centrepiece of the Oilers and turn every head across the league that sophomore season, winning the scoring race, capturing the Hart as NHL MVP and, most importantly, leading the Oilers out of the Decade of Darkness and into the playoffs for the first time in 11 years.
