Oilers: Highlighting some key pieces of news from the past week
As most Oilers fans are well aware of by now, Adam Larsson was signed as a free agent by the Seattle Kraken and thus was Edmonton’s selection in the expansion draft.
A lot of fans are blaming Holland for the move, but it was very much a decision by Larsson to move – and it was unrelated to money, as the Oilers were believed to have offered the same or more money to Larsson as Seattle signed him for. Holland offered Larsson three different contracts, so he had plenty of options to return to the Oilers. He ended up signing with Seattle the day before the expansion draft.
Larsson had the opportunity to test free agency and he did. I wasn’t expecting to lose him to Seattle personally – I mean what player in his right mind would sign with an expansion team? Or so I thought. Turns out quite a few guys would, despite the high possibility of being on a bad team. Didn’t see that coming.
Zack Kassian
So many people – myself included – were wondering why Kassian was protected in the draft. I mean, he’s not the worst contract on the roster but probably the third-worst. This was a good way to cut him loose. However, rumor has it that there are teams interested in trading for Kassian. I guess teams want to get tougher, and despite the off-season, he had last year quite a few teams were interested in taking a flyer on him.
Can’t blame Holland for wanted to avoid risking losing a trade chip for nothing. That would be bad asset management otherwise.
That trade hasn’t happened yet, but I would expect it to happen later on in the offseason.
What would we get back for him? I wouldn’t expect a blockbuster trade, but I would expect a middling prospect or a third to fifth-round pick back. Maybe as high as a second-rounder if Holland can pit some of his colleagues against each other. With any luck, we won’t have to retain any salary in the transaction.
Or, he could be a centerpiece in trying to jettison Mikko Koskinen from the roster – then we can get $7.7 million off the books. This will be interesting to watch as the offseason goes on.
Dylan Wells trade
Just before the expansion draft, the Oilers traded goalie Dylan Wells to Carolina for future considerations. I was assuming the future considerations would be the negotiation rights to Dougie Hamilton until Holland said he wasn’t going big game hunting in free agency.
I was very much surprised by this move, seeing as how Wells has done absolutely nothing throughout his career other than being an ECHL bubble player. Seriously, check out his numbers – he’s spent his entire career being shuttled between the AHL and the ECHL. We were lucky to get anything at all for him, as I was expecting him to be a free agent with no takers.
What was even more of a surprise, though, was Carolina actually qualified him as an RFA. I can only conclude they want to take a flyer on him and perhaps add to their farm team depth, I mean otherwise what was the point?
Mike Smith re-ups
This is not worth devoting an entire blog to because we all knew it would happen. It’s a two-year contract worth $4.4 million in total, $2.2 million per season.
The two year contract was apparently something Smith insisted upon as he spent the entire season last year away from his family and didn’t want to do that again. So, here we are.
He gets a slight raise on last year’s $1.5 million with $500K in bonuses, after a season in which he actually garnered some Vezina votes. Very much unexpected by most, considering his age. However, Smith is a fitness freak, a great leader in the locker room, and is driven to backstop the Oilers to a Stanley Cup.
It remains to be seen who his tandem partner is as a lot of heat is on Koskinen right now.
Rumour has it this will be his retirement contract, he’ll be 41 by the time it ends and the Oilers will probably have at least one younger option at that point. On the other hand, if he’s a fitness freak like Chris Chelios before him, maybe he defies the odds of age and plays until he’s 45, maybe backing up a guy like Andrei Vasilevsky or Connor Hellebuyck.
Regardless, there is risk with this contract but it’s still pretty reasonable and allows Holland to check yet another box from his offseason list. Great job, Kenny H.
Is Mikko Koskinen being replaced?
Rumors persist that Koskinen will not be back with the Oilers next season. There are potential trading partners for him – they’ve been linked to Darcy Kuemper in Arizona in trade, and I could see Koskinen plus a high draft pick going the other way.
Although they’re bound to get Samsanov signed, Washington has only one goalie in the fold at the time of this writing. Could they be interested? Perhaps. I’d be willing to retain at least $1 million of Koski’s cap hit to make a trade happen, would you? Not sure what the return would be from Washington, but the Oilers are running out of trading partners between the pipes fast, so they’ll have to act quickly on a Koski trade.
We’re also hearing the Oilers might actually buy him out, as well. We’ll see what happens on this front too. If they can complete a Zack Kassian trade, maybe they use whatever they get back to flip Koski out.
Kyle Dubas misses an opportunity with Zack Hyman
Zack Hyman was signed earlier today by the Oilers (more on that in my next blog) but Holland had spent some time earlier on trying to acquire the negotiating rights from the Leafs – probably by offering them one of the sixth round picks they had in the 2021 draft. However, Dubas refused and asked for a second-round pick in return for the neg rights to Hyman.
A second-round pick? Seriously? Dubas obviously was oblivious to the fact that Holland could just wait a week and sign him for nothing but money. No GM is stupid enough to trade away high picks just for the negotiating rights to a player, and Holland is no exception.
Obviously, like Stan Bowman in Chicago, Dubas doesn’t understand the concept of leverage. However, this time Holland didn’t enable the opposing GM’s obliviousness by balking at Dubas’s ask of a second-round pick and as expected signed Hyman as a free agent. Now Dubas lost Hyman anyway and gets nothing in return for him. Talk about poor asset management.
Expect Leaf’s fans and media to roast Dubas over the internet for that one, and deservedly so.
James Neal gets bought out
Holland wanted a little more room to maneuver cap-wise so he bought out James Neal. With the move, the Oilers will save $3,833,333 per season for the next two seasons, then have a money pit of $1,916,667 for the next two seasons after that.
This move is bittersweet for me. I’m not going to deny that he’s declined in play a bit – I mean, he played two of the playoff games against Winnipeg and produced nothing, after producing three points in four playoff games the season before. However, a lot of Neal’s problems this year were due to health. He got covid twice and had to do the quarantine because of that. At least this way the Oilers aren’t stuck paying Neal a huge signing bonus like they would’ve if they had to buy out Milan Lucic instead.
The chances that that would’ve been duplicated this year would’ve been zero. IMO he’s well-positioned for a rebound from last season after ending this season healthy and having an entire offseason to train as well as a training camp to get up to speed.
But, I get it. I guess I wouldn’t want to take the chance of a rebound at his full salary anyway. What really stings, though, is Neal’s dead cap space kicks in right after all the other dead cap space – the buyout of Sekera and the retained salary of Lucic – is off the books. This means we start new dead cap space right after getting rid of the rest of it, and to me that stings a bit.
But, at the same time, it’s absolutely justified. After all, the Oilers cap space at the time of this writing is $2,451,032. That’s not including the inevitable LTIR cap space from Klefbom’s contract, but still. Also, the Oilers still have to re-sign Kailer Yamamoto and sign the newly acquired McLovin – I mean Warren Foegele. That’ll take most of the cap space we have – and we need to leave room for an extension for Darnell Nurse next season. I’m guessing any Zack Kassian trade will open that up a bit.
Stay tuned for my commentary on the opening of free agency – boy Ken Holland sure was busy.