Well, it’s another trade deadline day come and gone for the Edmonton Oilers. For anyone expecting any major moves, you set yourself up for naive disappointment and it’s your own fault for thinking so.
After all, let’s think about this for a minute – the Edmonton Oilers top six forward group is solid and healthy now. While the top four D group might not have a lot of sexy names in it, it too is solid with two great puck movers – Nurse and Bouchard – at the top of the forefront with Tyson Barrie able to come back in a pinch as well – and two great defensive types in Ceci and Keith who have really found their games at the right time of the season who are also capable of kicking in secondary offence (Ceci has already met my expectations in this area with 20 points on the season at the time of this writing, while Keith is getting close at 16 and could very well finish well above that mark if his current scoring rate holds up [29 points projected for him right now]). All of these players are healthy right now as well.
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While goaltending was the one area we could expect a major move in if one is to be made, we’ve heard that Ken Holland has been working the phones pretty furiously prior to the deadline trying to look for help, but any moves made would’ve either been only a lateral move at best and thus not a good hockey trade in the right direction (ahem….Joonas Korpisalo), or the GM was naively asking for way too much in return, as was the case in New York for Alexandar Georgiev (a first round pick for a struggling goaltender? What is GM Chris Drury thinking? Now he’s going to get a lot less in trade for him or lose him for nothing). Also factoring into the equation is Koskinen has been playing better as of late, perhaps trying to disprove the myth that he’s a 1A type at best. Mike Smith has also looked better since he came back from his last injury (hopefully for the last time). We can’t start next season with this duo, but for now at least it should work.
Then there’s the issue of our cap space, which is right at the max right now. I think Holland mentioned in his post-dd presser that the Edmonton Oilers have $1000 of cap space left, just enough to call up one player prior to the end of the season.
All the teams that made the big splashes yesterday all had more cap space than the Edmonton Oilers did. The Edmonton Oilers didn’t have the cap space to make big moves, nor did they really need to. So, that being said, let’s analyze the two moves they did make yesterday.