10 Newly Added NHL Players expected to change around their teams –Part 2
Teams around the National Hockey League (NHL) are not always looking for a top-class scorer or defender when it comes to hiring during the offseason, but there may be many other reasons as to why teams sign on the players that they do, which at the moment
look as to be of no benefit at all but there is always a deeper meaning to the situation.
This statement is especially true for the teams which have a majority of younger players on the roster who lack guidance and need a person to guide them that truly has seen everything there is to see in the North American major league and sometimes even
outside it.
Our next player is rejoining his former team after a bitter sweet trade which sent him to another franchise mainly on his request. This time he is returning back maybe just to end his career with the people and city he loves most to play with.
Ryan Smyth (Edmonton Oilers)
Ryan Smyth has reached that age in which a player is either thinking about wrapping up his career with a final championship or ending it in peace and harmony with the team he began his career with. For Smyth, he has both options readily available because
Edmonton is a team which is in dire need of experienced leadership and have been struggling for the past two seasons now even though they have a thorough line-up full of young talent.
Players like Smyth have the chance to go down in history as true leaders but is up to him whether he is up to the challenge or not now that he is back on his original draft team which selected him sixth overall during round-one of the 1994 NHL Entry Draft.
The 35-year-old left winger is in the last year of his huge five-year, $31.25 million contract which will pay his $4.5 million next season. It is highly unlikely that the Banff, Alberta, Canada native, will get another contract of such monumental size once
he becomes a free agent next July unless if he can return to his 60 plus point performance he had with Edmonton during the 2005-2006 regular season.
Having such capable players like Taylor Hall and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, both first overall picks on the roster means that Oilers will have an advantage over those teams which are getting older day by day. It depends solely on Smyth on what he is willing to
do for himself and his long time team.
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