Oilers Still Exploring Trade Market

It has been a busy couple of weeks for the Oilers, to put it lightly.  They lost Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway to St. Louis via offer sheets, moved Cody Ceci and a third-round pick to San Jose for Ty Emberson, and acquired Vasily Podkolzin from Vancouver for a fourth rounder.

With the team largely capped out (they have less than $950K in cap room, per PuckPedia), they’ve been speculatively linked to the PTO market in recent days, particularly on the back end.  But it appears that they’re considering more than just that as well.

In an appearance earlier this week on Oilers Now (audio link), Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli relayed that Edmonton is considering some options beyond the PTO market in what would amount to more of a shakeup type of move.  He suggested that GM Stan Bowman may be parsing through as many as seven different options at the moment.

Speculatively, it stands to reason that Edmonton’s focus on the trade front is likely on the back end.  While Broberg might have been expected to play on the third pairing this season given his limited NHL workload so far, Ceci logged at least 20 minutes per game in each of his three seasons with the Oilers.  While Emberson might be able to fill the intended role for Broberg on the third pair, they still need someone capable of playing higher up the lineup.  And while free agents like Tyson Barrie, Tony DeAngelo, and Kevin Shattenkirk, have played that high on the depth chart before, they’re not ideal fits to play in the top four at this point of their respective careers.

How Bowman might be looking to shake things up isn’t quite as clear.  The team has eight players with some form of trade protection in their contracts and are core pieces that aren’t likely to move.  Their four highest-paid players without trade protection are core players who aren’t getting traded (Mattias Ekholm and Evan Bouchard) or just signed with the Oilers (Viktor Arvidsson and Adam Henrique).

At this point, effectively anyone making more than Brett Kulak’s $2.75MM is probably off the table in trade discussions and for that money, it’s going to be tricky to find someone to fit that top-four role.  While Evander Kane ($5.125MM) could be moved to LTIR to start the season as he recovers from a hip injury, that’s only a short-term fix as they’d have to get cap-compliant again to activate him.  Accordingly, dipping into that this early would be somewhat risky.

Seravalli suggested that this move, should it come to fruition, is likely to come before training camps start so Bowman and the Oilers have a couple more weeks to see if they can find a way to shake things up and add to their back end.