Oliver Ekman-Larsson Either Really Believes In The Coyotes Or He Really Loves Money
The 2019 NHL Free Agency class mostly revolves around 2 guys right now–Erik Karlsson and Drew Doughty. Two of the best defensemen in the game. Karlsson has won the Norris Trophy twice in his career so far and Drew Doughty has the chance to win it for his 2nd time this year as one of the three finalist. However, there is another defenseman who fans and teams should be equally as interested in, and that is Oliver Ekman-Larsson of the Arizona Coyotes. Most casual fans probably don’t know about OEL because he’s been stuck in Arizona playing for a dog shit team on the west coast. Especially for everybody here on the east coast, you probably get a chance to see this guy the 2 times that your hometown team plays against the Coyotes and maybe one more time at the All Star Game and then that’s it. But OEL is currently a top 10 defenseman in the league with the potential to still round out to be a top 5 defenseman in the league. He put up 20+ goals in back-to-back seasons from 2014-16. He has won back-to-back gold medals with Sweden at the World Championships. All if his comps are pretty similar to John Carlson but you also have to factor in that, again, OEL plays for the goddamn dog shit Coyotes who haven’t sniffed the playoffs since 2012, and Carlson gets to play with Alex Ovechkin. Which is basically like saying you could take a shovel to Oliver Ekman-Larsson’s face multiple times and he’s still at least as hot as John Carlson.
Anyway, you’d think a player of that caliber would at least like to test the free agency waters. You’d think that a guy like Oliver Ekman-Larsson would at least like to explore his options come July 1, 2019. But instead, it looks like he’s already made up his mind and that an extension will be coming later this summer.
Now there are 3 possible reasons why Oliver Ekman-Larsson would decide to forego his free agency process and lock himself into Arizona until 2027-28. Reason #1 being that he’s a hockey player and hockey players have this strong sense of loyalty. Guys in the NHL rarely ever want to move. OEL might feel like he owes it to the team who drafted him to see this one out. I doubt that would be the only reason he stays but I’m also sure that it played a role.
#2 would be that Oliver Ekman-Larsson really loves money. If somebody calls you up and says, “hey, bud. So we were thinking. How would you like to make $8+ million a year for the next 8 years?”, it would be pretty damn difficult for you to hang up that phone without saying heck yes. I know the salary cap is going up and everything but with Karlsson and Doughty both hitting free agency next summer as well, maybe Oliver Ekman-Larsson decided that $8+ million was probably the biggest offer that he was going to see and he went with it.
Finally, reason #3 would be the Oliver Ekman-Larsson truly believes in the Arizona Coyotes and sees them being a contender at some point over the next 8 years. I know that I said this was a dogshit team twice so far this blog, but I still really like the pieces that Arizona has. Between OEL and Jakob Chychrun on the backend, they have two highly skilled top and young top pairing defensemen. Up front you’ve got a ton of young talent with Clayton Keller and Max Domi trying to turn things around. Then you’ve got Dylan Strome and a big body like Lawson Crouse looking to finally crack the full time NHL roster. Christian Dvorak and Brendan Perlini are both only 22 and really good pieces. Then they have the 5th pick in the draft this year and 3 picks in the 3rd round in case they want to package any of those to move up a little. So the majority of the puzzle parts are all there. They’re still missing a goalie and they would probably need to figure out how to land a free agent here and there, but they’ve got a lot of the pieces. They just need to put them all together and considering OEL now has 8 years to get that puzzle figured out, I guess it’s not the worst career decision of all time.
Either way, it looks like you can already take OEL’s name off the board for the 2019 free agency board. And with that extension that Dreger reported, that will probably be the number that John Carlson’s camp goes for this summer and that’ll probably be the number that both Doughty and Karlsson start at next summer. OEL is going to be making the jump from $5.5M to 8+. Karlsson is currently at $6.5M and Doughty is currently at $7M. With Ekman-Larsson getting at least 8, I wouldn’t be too shocked to see both of those guys get to 10. And yeah, John Carlson is definitely on the phone with his agent right now. Not a bad day for him. He gets the parade in DC and he finds out he’ll probably be making around $8 million next year. Must be nice.