Oilers Not Planning To Ask Jeff Skinner To Waive No-Move Clause

When the Oilers signed Jeff Skinner to a one-year, $3MM contract after being bought out by Buffalo, the move received plenty of praise with Edmonton addressing the need for more scoring depth.  However, things haven’t gone as planned since then.  Not only did his addition squeeze the team’s cap situation which played a role in the successful offer sheets for Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway but Skinner has struggled relative to expectations in 2024-25.

Skinner has been made a healthy scratch six times so far this season, all coming in the six weeks before the 4 Nations break.  When he has played, he hasn’t been the most productive, notching 10 goals and 10 assists in 49 games.  For context, the 32-year-old had managed at least 24 tallies in each of the last three seasons.  Playing time has been harder to come by as well as he’s logging just 12:29 per night, by far the lowest ATOI of his career.

Given that Skinner’s fit hasn’t been the best so far, the fact that Edmonton doesn’t have a lot of cap flexibility, and the fact that their current GM isn’t the player who signed Skinner to this contract, some have wondered if Edmonton might try to cut bait with Skinner.  However, GM Stan Bowman recently told Daniel Nugent-Bowman of The Athletic (subscription link) that he doesn’t envision that he will go to the veteran and ask him to waive his no-move clause which would seemingly scuttle any thought of a trade at this time.

Edmonton’s deadline plans will largely revolve around injured winger Evander Kane who has yet to play this season while recovering from multiple surgeries.  At the moment, they project to only have $947K in cap space at the deadline, per PuckPedia, which obviously doesn’t give them much flexibility and puts them in a spot where they’d need to clear out money to make any sort of impactful addition, hence the speculation around Skinner.

But if Kane is unable to return this season, Edmonton would be able to go into LTIR which could free up around $5MM in extra spending room (the exact amount would vary depending on how close to the cap ceiling they could get at the time of placement), thus negating the need to clear out money.  Bowman told Nugent-Bowman that there remains no update on Kane’s status but anticipates that they’ll have at least a bit of a better understanding of his recovery timeline by the time the trade deadline comes around.

For now, at least, the Oilers have to operate with very limited financial flexibility which will make adding anything of consequence at the trade deadline a challenge.  But if they do need to move money out to facilitate a move, it doesn’t appear that Skinner will be the one losing his spot.