There are certain parallels between the Kansas City Royals and Edmonton Oilers that go beyond analytically inclined fans (possibly because both Kansas City and Edmonton offer little to do beyond obsess over the circumstances of the local sporting concern). Neither franchise has been particularly relevant since the salad days in the 1980’s, both franchises have a history of clumsy totalitarian actions when criticized and neither has particularly innovative management at the moment. Rany Jazayerli summed up my experience as an Oilers fan a few months back when he wrote:

I can’t keep writing five-thousand-word screeds every time Moore makes the Royals the laughingstock of baseball, and besides, I’m at the point where I’m repeating myself every time I write about a player acquisition. It’s hard not to repeat myself when the Royals keep repeating themselves.

Still, as a general rule of thumb, any time the Royals make a move that inspires friends to send emails of condolences and #royalsfail to become a trending topic on Twitter, I have to write something.

If there’s a distinction to be drawn between the Oilers and the Royals, it’s that the Oilers are a rather wealthy team at the moment, if a bad one. The owner says that the general manager (whoever that might really be) is free to do what he wants to make the team better. With that in mind, I thought I’d point out how a wealthy team could do some rebuilding through restricted free agency.

As some of you might recall, the Oilers have a little bit of experience in the RFA market. It came during the summer of 2007, when Kevin Lowe was convinced that he could spend the Oilers back to relevance, if only EIG would take off the fiscal handcuffs. They did. Self loathing and disaster ensued. At the end of it all, Sheldon Souray signed for five years, $27MM, a shoulder surgery, a wrist surgery and a near death experience. Dustin Penner also came aboard for five years. His price was $21.25MM, MacT’s sanity and the Oilers first, second and third round picks in 2008, which went to Anaheim. I wasn’t particularly fond of that move when it was made.

The Oilers might be better next year with Penner than without, but limiting the exposure to a finish in the real depths of the league has come at the cost of future possibilities to finish higher. It’s disappointing and, to me, it suggests that Lowe lacks the vision and willingness to do something that’s really difficult - telling the city that the moves aren’t there and that this team is going to suck for a while - to be the right guy to fill this job at the moment. Far from Billy Beane, Lowe’s doing a very passable imitation of Steve Phillips at the moment.

If Lowe and the Oilers could go back in time and undo the Penner signing, I suspect that they would. It’s not so much that he’s been a bad player - it’s that the wins he’s added have been wasted because most of the rest of the roster has been a slag heap. Penner’s deal is up in two years and it’s doubtful that the Oilers will be in a position to compete before that time. To an extent, the Penner deal has been a waste of money because the Oilers couldn’t do anything while he was here.

Brian Burke did not react with a great deal of class and dignity to Lowe’s signing of Penner. This undoubtedly angered the hockey gods, who blessed the Oilers with a bounty of overtime games and silly puck luck down the stretch in 2007-08, which let Lowe avoid Frank Selke Jr.’s fate as the Oilers pick was twelth in the first round. Last year’s pick was tenth, this year’s pick will likely be in the top two and you sort of suspect that there might be an organizational aversion to going after restricted free agents at the moment.

I’ve got no problems with that aversion, where it costs a first round pick. I think Lowe failed in 2007 because he didn’t realize quite how bad the team was, something that took them another three years to figure out. Risking first round picks on other than surefire players is a spooky thing to do when you’ve got a team that, if things go poorly, could have a table that’s awfully close to Napoleon’s podium on draft day. These picks are like gold and it’s hard to see how giving away a realistic shot at one (something I still think Lowe did in 2007) can be justified.

Second or third round picks? Those are a different matter entirely. If you have a high first round pick, you will get a player who you can plausibly expect to be a difference maker. A high second or third round pick? That’s a lottery ticket. I’d be willing to give those away in exchange for a young player who looks like a real prospect. Last year, if you signed someone for between $994,433 and $1,506,716, it cost a third; $1,506,716 to $3,013,434 would cost you a second. Those numbers will bump up slightly this year.

If I ran an NHL team that had money to spend, I would be scouring the second and third lines of the really good teams that are tight to the cap, looking for players who might be able to play bigger roles and teams that can’t afford to pay people for potential, because they’re busy paying people for performance. Washington might be a pretty good example of that. The Caps are currently at $36.7MM for next year with an awful lot of guys to sign, including Nicklas Backstrom and Eric Fehr.

Fehr’s an interesting player. He’s a young fellow who turns 25 in September. Over the past two years, he’s posted very impressive ESG/60 numbers - 1.25 ESG/60. He hasn’t really had a lot of PP time because Washington is just loaded with talent and he can’t earn significant minutes. That isn’t really a failure on his part - the Caps have Alexander Ovechkin, Alex Semin and Nicklas Backstrom ahead of him. Two of the best goal scorers in the NHL and a 90 point centre. There’s no shame in your team preferring to feed those guys the PP minutes.

To those whom much is given, much is asked of, course, and having been given Ovechkin, Semin and Backstrom the Capitals will probably be asked for about $21MM or so for the three guys for next season. There are some other big tickets on that team for next year and a lot of unrestricted free agents who will need to be replaced. They are going to have budget problems.

Which puts them in a similar position to the Anaheim Ducks in 2006-07. One wonders what they’d do if the Oilers offered Fehr a contract worth $4MM for 2010-11 and $2MM for 2011-12, a cap hit of $3MM. That’s a $2.2MM bump on his current cap hit, an increase that the Caps would have trouble finding room for.

Fehr’s not without his warts - his Corsi isn’t all that hot, he’s got a big PDO number this year and he’s had fairly favourable starting points on the ice. With that said, he’s mashed the soft parade over the past two years, going 66 GF and 39 GA at ES. At $3MM, he’s not a bad risk to take, particularly where your exposure is limited to two years AND you only have to qualify him at $2MM at the end of those two years in order to retain his rights.

There are tons of these guys out there this summer - my non-exhaustive list includes Fehr, Andrew Ladd, Braydon Coburn, Ryan Parent, James Sheppard, Josh Harding, Blake Wheeler, Marc Staal, Kris Letang, Joe Pavelski, Bobby Ryan, David Perron, Erik Johnson, Martin Hanzal, Wojtek Wolski, Rob Schremp and Ryan Kesler. I’m sure that some of these players, you simply could not get for the money and picks that are available. I am, however, convinced that there will be some opportunity, particularly if the salary cap doesn’t go up by too much.

The key to doing it properly, and not getting killed on the deal, I think, is limiting yourself to offers that require a second rounder or less in compensation and limiting yourself to two year offers. In the early days of restricted free agency, the key was to find some poor team without any money - like the Edmonton Oilers - and offer the guy a pile of money that his team was unprepared to commit to offering him. This frequently involved offering lots of years.

Lowe’s deal with Penner reflects this kind of thinking, I think - he could have done a deal with Penner for two years, at $5.6MM and $2.9MM that would have put him in a position to qualify Penner in two years at $2.9MM and negotiate something, while at the same time leaving Burke with the big cap hit to swallow. It doesn’t make any different whether the deal is two years or five years if you can’t fit it under the cap in year one. I’m not at all sure that Penner could have got himself a big raise in arbitration from a $2.9MM qualifying offer if he’d been in front of the arbitrator last summer.

The attractiveness of this approach is that while you still pay a premium, you basically just pay it for one year, and you’re then left with a guy whose rights you own, at the cost of a second round draft pick and a few million dollars. There’s a guarantee that you’ll obtain an NHL player, something you can’t do if you go through the draft.

Do I expect the Oilers to do something like this? Not in the least. The Oilers have about two modes: conventional and conventional-desperate. They’re similar but the latter, which has fueled the signings of Penner, Souray and Khabibulin is a lot stupider than the former. What I’m suggesting here basically entails paying a short term premium to be certain of adding real talent who you can then get back into a more normal salary structure. I’m pretty certain that they could pull it off - if Fehr wants to stay in Washington, he’s basically going to accept that he’s never going to know how good he could be and have an opportunity to make as much as he might otherwise make - and I’m pretty certain that they could add talent quickly by doing so, but I just can’t see them having the creativity to realize that they can add talent this way.