Glory is expensive. In Edmonton, it carries a literal price tag of $112 million—the ransom Leon Draisaitl extracted to keep his services in a city where the sun disappears in October and doesn't return until the playoffs. But money is just the baseline. The real currency in the NHL’s late-stage McDavid era isn't CAD; it's efficiency. It’s finding a way to make the bottom half of the roster stop leaking oil while the superstars are catching their breath.
Enter Matej Samanski. He’s the newest piece of hardware in the Oilers’ laboratory, a raw prospect with a high ceiling and the unenviable task of proving he isn't just another draft-day pipe dream. The buzz out of camp isn't about his skating or his shot, though. It’s about the proximity. Draisaitl has apparently taken the kid under his wing. On paper, it’s a feel-good story. In reality, it’s a desperate attempt at a system update.
The Oilers are essentially a two-man operating system trying to run a thirty-two-team server. When McDavid and Draisaitl are humming, the performance is elite. When they aren't, the whole thing crashes. For years, the front office has tried to patch the bugs with aging veterans and mid-tier free agents who cost too much and deliver too little. Mentorship, in this context, isn't an act of charity. It’s a necessity. It’s Draisaitl realizing that if he doesn't personally program Samanski to play the right way, he’ll spend the next eight years of his massive contract doing the work of three men.
Draisaitl isn't a natural tutor. He’s a clinical, somewhat prickly perfectionist who treats a misplaced pass like a personal insult. Watching him work with a rookie is like watching a senior software engineer explain Python to a high schooler who still thinks "the cloud" is where rain comes from. There’s friction there. You can see it in the way Draisaitl barks after a botched drill. He isn't interested in Samanski’s "growth" or his "journey." He wants a reliable outlet. He wants a player who understands lane integrity and puck protection so he doesn't have to cycle back into the defensive zone for the tenth time in a period.
The trade-off is the risk of ruin. We’ve seen this script before. A young talent gets paired with a supernova, tries to mimic a style they don’t have the processing power to execute, and ends up a shell of the player they were supposed to be. If Samanski tries to play like Draisaitl—the backhand passes, the slowed-down pace, the physical bullying—and fails, he’s useless. He needs to be a tool, not a clone.
The Oilers’ management is betting on the "Big E" effect. If Samanski can absorb even ten percent of Draisaitl’s situational awareness, he becomes the ultimate arbitrage play: a top-six talent on an entry-level contract. In a league where every dollar of cap space is fought over like a scrap of meat in a cage, that’s the only way Edmonton wins. They can't afford to buy another star. They have to grow one in the shade of the ones they already have.
It’s a high-stakes experiment in human capital. If it works, Samanski becomes the bridge that keeps the Oilers' championship window from slamming shut on their fingers. If it doesn't, he’s just another name on a long list of prospects who got blinded by the light of the stars they were meant to support.
The city is watching, hopeful and anxious, waiting to see if the German machine can actually teach a newcomer how to grind. Draisaitl seems committed, at least for now. He’s spent extra time after practice showing the kid how to shield the puck, how to use that massive frame to create micro-seconds of space. It’s the kind of granular detail that usually costs a team a first-round pick at the trade deadline.
But there’s a cold logic to it all. Draisaitl didn’t sign that extension to be a babysitter. He signed it to win. If Samanski can’t keep up with the download speed, he’ll be moved to the peripheral, just another legacy component that couldn't handle the new firmware.
Is this the start of a new era of depth in Edmonton, or just a superstar trying to fix a broken roster by hand?