how is his morale with the team/front office after the GM debacle? are there indications he wants out?
genuinely curious
OEL, like the rest of the players the GM cycled in and out, had struggled mightily under the wholly inept coaching staff that was installed here. Reports of OEL and Tocchet clashing go all the way back to the first camp. They don’t work well together and it’s pretty clear to most neutral observers that Tocchet’s complete failure does vindicate OEL in some ways.
The Coyotes have been left in a complete no man’s land. They had the league’s 10th worst P% before the plague stoppage. The veteran core was failing. Despite catching a sleeping Nashville team in a gimmicky play-in tournament, they got absolutely exposed again for what they are by Colorado. Their older players are absolutely not good enough as a whole to be a meaningful playoff team.
That’s a big problem when you don’t have any draft picks this year or any draft picks next year and they only meaningful prospects outside of the NHL are Jan Jenik, Matthias Maccelli, Ivan Prosvetov and Victor Soderstrom. That’s a mediocre prospect pool, and one that gets worse and worse with the passing of each successive draft wherein it doesn’t get restocked AT ALL.
This leaves the Coyotes with really just Keller, Dvorak, Garland, Hayton, Schmaltz, and Chychrun their core, young roster pieces. And that just isn’t nearly good enough. Ideally Keller should be no better than your 3rd best forward and Chychrun no better than your 2nd best D. The rest are at best 2nd/3rd line tweeters. And there is precious little coming up to support this core. There is no Calvary on the way.
Chayka really left the team absolutely no choice but to trade as many over 25 players as they can possibly move while getting any type of younger assets back that they can.
I’m sure OEL has no interest in enduring this. Even if he doesn’t want to waive his NMC right now, how will he feel once Kuemper, Raanta, and Stepan are gone? How about when Hjalmarsson and Goligoski are asked to waive their clauses? Certainly they won’t fight it once the other vets have been moved. Does OEL want to be alone on an island? A sinking island?
The writing is on the wall. The Chayka plan was a complete failure and it has to be totally burned down and rebuilt.
These players with No Movement Clauses demanded them in their contracts in order to avoid situations like these, not so they can force themselves to stay in them.