Smooth move by Jim Nill. Because Ty Dellandrea is probably worth more than 900K a year.

Not bad, Jim. Not bad.

Ty Dellandrea's sophomore season reminds me of Dog Soldiers: a movie that deserves more genre acclaim despite being rough around the edges. That's a fitting analogy for Dellandrea since I think that's how fans view him: a player with that "dawg in him" (as the kids say) and nothing much else.

That's unfortunate because I think he's way more than that. I've always had good things to say Dellandrea as a player going back to when I profiled him ahead of the draft. However, I've always had nothing but bad things to say about the pick itself.* Needless to say, he's a player I've come to accept rather than embrace. And yet he made somewhat of a believer out of me this year.

It's worth remembering that Dellandrea is functionally a rookie. Two less games in 2020, and his 28 points this year would have been top 50 for the franchise in rookie scoring. In fact - and I apologize for mentioning him in the same breath as this man - it would be tied with Jere Lehtinen, who scored the same amount of points at the same age (22) in his debut.

Evolving-Hockey’s contract projections given his age and point totals predicted two years at $1.54 million. Nill got him for over $600,000 less.

For some, this might all make sense. Despite a year that saw significant growth with Jamie Benn and Wyatt Johnston, the trade deadline pushed him down the lineup. Once that happened, he become somewhat expendable, even getting scratched in the playoffs over the significantly worse Luke Glendening (if faceoffs ever account for a good chunk of the game, which they don’t, then you can semi-justify this).

Yet when all was said and done, Dellandrea graded out like a strong defensive forward who can PK like Glendening (only better) with more offense in him than you’d think.

Yes, he needs to get more disciplined, but at least he draws penalties too.

However, Corey Sznajder’s tracking data makes clear that there’s a lot more going on here. Not only does he help his team generate various types of chances, but his passing ability is not to be underestimated.

Could he be a Connor Brown starter kit?

It’ll be interesting to see how Dellandrea develops. There are a lot of signs he has more to offer. Theoretically, he should only get better while players like Sam Steel and Craig Smith (two players who could conceivably push him out of the lineup) are clearly more developed. And yet neither one of them scored more points than Dellandrea. Smith doesn’t play on the PK, while Steel’s minutes on the PK are limited. It’s hard to imagine Dellandrea getting scratched over one of them, but DeBoer has already singled him out before. Again: his trajectory will be interesting to watch.

*There are only a small handful of everyday NHLers that got picked ahead of him in 2018 (I’m ignoring K’Andre Miller because I don’t even like thinking about it). Mattias Samuelsson, Rasmus Sandin, Martin Fehervary, Sean Durzi, and Alex Romanov are the most noteable. But Dellandrea was clearly in a tier that saw a huge dropoff after Wahlstrom and Dobson. Denisenko, Kaut, Smith, Farabee, Kupari, Veleno, and Bokk have all waivered between disappointing, middling, and decent. Just saying - the Dellandrea pick seems likely to age well given how poor that draft was.