Adam Oates had an amazing career! He was playmaker for so many legendary goal scoring seasons. Yzerman 65 goal 155 point season, Hull 86 goal season, Neely 50 in 49, Bondra Richard winning season. Kinda like the forward version of Paul Coffey who was with alot of amazing seasons too.
Adam Oates
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Peter Tosh
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Oates was an amazing passer and playmaker but he and Yzerman centered different lines so he didn’t have a huge direct impact on Yzerman’s big season.
Adam Oates 1988-89 Scoring Log | Hockey-Reference.com
Looks like he assisted on 5 of Yzerman’s 65 goals and they were all on the PP.
What a mistake to essentially him trade for Federko and to a division rival.
Edit: the other point here I should make is that Oates wasn’t relying on Yzerman much either. He had a great season himself with 78 points in 69 games. Time to trade him for a guy who would play one season in Detroit, then retire. Meanwhile we all know Oates would break out in St. Louis and go on to have a great career.
Adam Oates 1988-89 Scoring Log | Hockey-Reference.com
Looks like he assisted on 5 of Yzerman’s 65 goals and they were all on the PP.
What a mistake to essentially him trade for Federko and to a division rival.
Edit: the other point here I should make is that Oates wasn’t relying on Yzerman much either. He had a great season himself with 78 points in 69 games. Time to trade him for a guy who would play one season in Detroit, then retire. Meanwhile we all know Oates would break out in St. Louis and go on to have a great career.
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The Panther
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As you say, Oates had basically no impact on Yzerman's big seasons in 1987-88 and 1988-89.
But man, that Oates + Paul MacLean trade for one-foot-in-retirement Federko doesn't get enough ink as one of the very worst trades of all time. Just by getting Paul MacLean, St. Louis got equal value for Federko... and then you throw in Oates!
Stephen
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Detroit trading Adam Oates to St. Louis in 1989 for Bernie Federko was a tragedy. Can only imagine what that Yzerman Oates duo could have done rolling into the early 90s for the Red Wings. Seems almost like the Hockey Gods said "this isn't fair" and gifted Detroit with their legendary 1989 draft 2 days later...
GlitchMarner
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Stephen
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Weirdly enough, they traded Adam Oates June 15, 1989, and drafted Sergei Fedorov two days later at the 1989 NHL Draft, so technically they never had all three under one roof.
GMR
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Likely plays more wing (or alternates wing with Yzerman). Oates isn't playing on the wing. Probably don't sign Larionov. Maybe deal Primeau even sooner (or draft Jagr instead). Too many what ifs. Terrible trade on paper, but I'm not sure it cost them more Cups. Do they win 5 Cups with Oates instead of 3? I don't see it.
vadim sharifijanov
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if they don’t trade oates, they probably never trade all three of graves, murphy, and klima for jimmy carson.
can you imagine those detroit teams but with the two adams added, plus murphy and whatever they get for klima?
otoh they never get coffey, which might have affected lidstrom’s ceiling.
Stephen
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Good point. They did really change course on their rebuild around 1989-90.
Professor What
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I've long wondered just how much Oates had to do with Brett Hull's peak. Hull was a phenomenal scorer either way, obviously, but he had that 72-86-70 (well, part of the 70, anyway) run with Oates, and "only" a couple of seasons in the 50s after that. Yet, Oates had that 142-point season after he went to Boston, so his best came without Hull, remarkably.
Big Phil
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Hull was a sniper in his own right and it was obvious since he still could crack 50+ goals without Oates, but when you are a playmaker of Oates' level it is impossible to play worse as he built his game around getting the puck to his teammates. There is an overtime goal from the 1994 playoffs that Oates assisted on against New Jersey. Game 2 I believe. Don Sweeney scored it, and I have no idea why Don Sweeney was in the position to score it but Oates made this lovely move around the Devils' defense and he was literally point blank right in front of Brodeur and then he slid a pass over to Sweeney to basically just tapped it in. I mean, if there was ever a time to shoot it was then, but he still passed it and assisted on the goal. So I think that's why whether it was Hull, Neely, Bondra, or even Chris Simon, Oates was built to make his linemates better, and actually seemed to go out of his way to do it.
If we are doing a poll on the 2nd greatest passer in NHL history is Oates in the running for it? I think he might be.
If we are doing a poll on the 2nd greatest passer in NHL history is Oates in the running for it? I think he might be.
vadim sharifijanov
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an unscientific way to look at it is hull scored 16 goals and 28 points in the 19 games after oates was traded in 1992.
that prorates to 67 goals, 119 points.
in the games oates was there that season, hull scored 54 goals, 81 points in 54 games.
that prorates to 80 goals, 120 points.
so his overall scoring didn't go down, but his goals did.
in his 86 goal 1991 season, oates missed 19 games. 18 of them were in a row. in those games, hull scored 16 goals, 25 points in 18 games.
prorates to 71 goals, 111 points.
that also means in the games oates did play, hull scored 70 goals, 106 points in 60 games. which is a bonkers scoring rate of 93 goals, 141 points.
as for oates without hull, that 142 point season was in 84 games. prorated to 80, that's a more reasonable 135 points (92 assists). that's basically splitting the difference between denis savard's best season and peter stastny's.
at the same time, if you prorate oates' 1991 season total to 80 games, that's 151 points (118 assists). the points are in the range of yzerman and jagr's best seasons, and the assists are basically peak mario numbers.
sr edler
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Of the examples in the OP I don't think Oates played much with Bondra either, weirdly enough. I guess Caps fans can give better details on that than me, though. Bondra was a Bugs Bunny type of player who would roam up & down the wing, one of the fastest & most fluid skaters in the league, while Oates was more of a slow ass cerebral puck disher. Probably wasn't an optimal combo at even strength (?). Bondra had won a goal-scoring title already before Oates arrived, in 94–95 (playing with I think Joe Juneau), so the premise that Oates made Bondra a Rocket recipient isn't a particularly strong one either, to put it mildly.
Just glancing at Bondra's big 52 goal season in '97-98, it appears Oates assisted on 22 of those goals. So it looks like you're correct. Bondra was a great sniper in his own right but they probably fed off each other on the PP and some ES time.
I have a lot of time for Oates. He was a low PIM guy and quite a good two-way centre, and excellent on faceoffs.
As a Wings fan I don't see anything but it being a positive for the franchise if they didn't make that trade. Oates was on his way up even with Yzerman there. I don't think keeping him would have prevented them from drafting Fedorov. Oates was 26 and a late bloomer but he nearly got an assist per game before the trade and had a nice playoff run as well when Yzerman was out. I always feel like giving him credit for Probert's big playoff run in '88 but they also played on two different lines. John Chabot usually centred Probert then with Klima on the other side.
Having an Yzerman-Oates duo at centre and then having Fedorov arrive in town would probably be a "problem" the team could overcome somehow.
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I think that trade gets tons of ink. It's quite infamous for Red Wings fans but I thought most people make note of it as one of the worst trades ever. It set the franchise back from where it could have been.
Tony McKegney was the other guy going to Detroit and he only played 14 games for them. Federko played one season and retired at 33. I'm not sure where I read this but I think it was the Jacques Demers' connection with Federko from his days in St. Louis that made this trade happen. Apparently?... the Blues knew Federko was planning to hang 'em up soon, too.
Paul McLean went with Oates and he just came off a great season in Detroit, so it makes even less sense. The only saving grace is that he retired early as well, only playing a season and a half in St. Louis.
Professor What
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Yzerman, Oates, and Fedorov on the same roster makes me wonder if we might not have seen Fedorov moved out to the left side more frequently. His defensive prowess would have worked well with some of the schemes that put some responsibility on that side, and I can only wonder what his scoring would have looked like fed by Oates. I say Oates because that feels like a better pairing to me since Oates was much heavily leaning toward playmaking in his game, as opposed to Yzerman's strong goal scoring. However it was lined up, that would be one nasty roster with three guys with such good two-way games.
OgeeOgelthorpe
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Oates, Klima, Probert, Chiasson and a couple of others were part of a locker room clique in the late 80's and were big party boys. I don't know if Graves was a part of it but I wouldn't be surprised if Murphy was in that group. Oates needed to get out of Detroit. The trade for Federko and the subsequent trades were horrendous in terms of value and absolutely stupid. Detroit with Randy McKay, Adam Graves, a defenseman that we got by trading Oates (because we really needed one in the 80's) and whatever else we could get for Klima and Murphy makes Detroit a much better team going into 1989 and beyond.
Regarding your last point, Lidstrom gives Brad McCrimmon a lot of credit for his career success, not Paul Coffey. That was his first defense partner. The guy really showed young Lidstrom the ropes.
Hobnobs
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A reputation that Oates had for most of his career. A lush, a mercernary and someone you didn't want leading your team. Now how much of that was true once he got older I don't know. Sinden said the same thing about him when he traded him from Boston but Sinden is quite a bad source when it comes to ex-bruins players.
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Smirnov2Chistov
EEK!
I always wondered why Anaheim never gave him a second chance after the 03 run. He really was electrifying with his playmaking abilities.
Anaheim suffered in 04
Anaheim suffered in 04
It was near the end of the road for Oates because he was 40 and they brought in Fedorov that summer as you probably know. Still makes you wonder if bringing Oates back for another season would have been a good idea, too. Sometimes a player is comfortable somewhere and it helps extend his career. In this case Oates went to the Oilers and faded away.
Big Phil
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It reminds me of the fantasies many of us have if Quebec had a Lindros, Sakic, Sundin trio down the middle. That's a good problem to have, but then again how many teams in NHL history have three star centres on their team? You often see two of them but three? Somewhere along the way one of them is either traded or moved to wing. It isn't Oates either. There are players that are destined for centre and he was one of them.
His last year in Edmonton was huge for Jarrett Stoll and Shawn Horcoff. Oates worked with them both on faceoffs and helped turn them both into pretty good players.
