As the focal piece acquired by the Edmonton Oilers in the trade that sent center Ryan McLeod to the Buffalo Sabres last summer, many believed Matt Savoie would become a low-cost, high-upside option that the Oilers could put next to Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl in the team’s top-six. Hindsight being 20/20, Savoie only played in four games with Edmonton throughout the 2024-25 season, spending much of his time with their AHL affiliate, the Bakersfield Condors.
Still, the team expects Savoie to register his rookie campaign during the 2025-26 campaign and be a potent contributor. In a recent piece by Derek Van Diest of NHL.com, Oilers’ General Manager Stan Bowman laid out his expectations for Savoie, saying, “There is some growth from within. I think Matt Savoie is probably poised to take a big step next year.”
The team’s head coach, Kris Knoblauch, shared similar sentiments, saying, “With Savoie, the one thing that I’m very optimistic about is penalty kill and how good he was in Bakersfield in that role. He didn’t have any penalty-kill time when he was with us but certainly, we saw him being a reliable two-way player at 5-on-5. The opportunity for Savoie is on the penalty kill, not that he can’t be on the power play, but I definitely see him being a big part of our penalty kill.”
Interestingly, Knoblaugh highlighted the penalty kill regarding Savoie. He’s been an efficient scorer at the AHL level over the past two years, scoring 21 goals and 59 points in 72 games between the Condors and the Rochester Americans. There’s little expectation that Savoie earns a spot on the team’s first power-play unit. Still, there’s reason to believe he should be viewed as a top candidate for the Oilers’ second iteration of their man-advantage deployments.
Savoie only has five NHL contests to his name, so it’s difficult to tell how effective he would be on the penalty kill. He finished last season with a +21 rating, which is impressive given that Bakersfield as a team finished with a -9 differential. He’s not an overly physical player, but his high pace and skating ability could be viewed as a positive variable to plug into a penalty kill unit.
At any rate, Edmonton is expected to insert some high-upside youthful talent into its group next season. Especially after acquiring the 2024-25 Hobey Baker Award winner, Isaac Howard, a few weeks ago from the Tampa Bay Lightning, the Oilers will have a lot of options to play around with in their top-six as they pursue their first Stanley Cup championship since 1990.
This is genius. I know how we’ll keep McDavid. Let’s hope one of our prospects comes up and has a monster rookie season. This is how we’ll finally win a cup and get McD signed. Well here’s to hoping from a killer last season of the best player in the world in EDM.
Bye, bye Connor. Welcome to Florida. No state tax and winning hockey teams, less pressure, more fun.
And neither Florida team has the space plus assets to acquire him and fill their roster with a competitive team. Both have about 20-25M in space next offseason with most of their roster tied to NMC or NTC that aren’t likely to waive to move from Florida to Northern Alberta and then need to fill another 6 roster spots after adding McDavid’s 15Mish leaving 5-10M for those 6 spots…
Tampa will have cap room when he hits free agency
That is why Tampa will trade Kucherov and Hagel for him now! LOL!
Not sold on this prospect, but…if THEY believe in him, put him and Howard on Draisital’s wing for the year.
Those two panning out as top six impact players while pushing the other wingers down the depth chart and strengthening the other lines is probably the Oilers only path to improvement since they refuse to fix the goaltending.
It better work out. They gave up a lot I am a huge Ryan McLeod fan. The best thing BUF did this offseason was not let him get poached in an offer sheet. He can play 2C to 4C and would solve 95% of the teams’ needs.