Saturday Sunshine: Tea leaf Rieder

Today’s Saturday Sunshine is about one of the new additions to the team. He gives us plenty of hope and excitement for being a “utility knife” type of player with boatloads of speed to burn. So, let us turn on that smooth listening Burt Bacharach theme song, and sit back and enjoy Tobias Rieder.

Drafted in the fourth round by the Oilers in the summer of 2011, not much was expected by the organization in the sense that fourth-round picks rarely round into form. Rieder had just finished off a season with the Kitchener Rangers with a very respectable 49 points. The very next year he would balloon that number up to 84 points in 60 games. Times were exciting for Oilers fans. Could they have found some late-round gold from the draft?

Then the trade happened. Kale Kessy was brought in and Tobias Rieder was shipped to Phoenix. Now, this is supposed to be a positive time and article, so I won’t delve too much into what happened with Kale Kessy, but suffice to say, it wasn’t much.

As we all know, Rieder would go on to have some success in Phoenix before being traded to the LA Kings mid-season last year. One of his more famous moments in Phoenix came against our beloved Oilers when Rieder set an NHL record by a first-year player when he scored two back-to-back shorthanded goals in a 58-second span on December 1st, 2014 against Fasth and the Oil.

Not so happy, but that is a hell of an effort by a young penalty killer who wanted it.

That brings us to this offseason. The Oilers are up against it when it comes to the cap. They weren’t hunting for any big names in the free agency period this year. They were rumoured to be in on him early, but there were rumblings that the player was being courted by multiple teams. That could only mean bigger contract numbers, right? Wrong.

On July 1st the Oilers announced the signing of Tobias Rieder to a $2 million, one-year deal for the 2018-19 season.

No doubt Rieder left some more cash on the table to take the chance in Edmonton and to have his chance to work his way up the wing to be with Connor or Leon (maybe even click with Strome)

Chris the Intern was kind enough to go back and look at Tobias’ year last year:

At the very least Edmonton got a young player with speed to burn and the ability to kill penalties (something they were atrocious at last year).

Tobias Rieder is definitely a positive.

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