Bringing back Evander Kane Part 2

It should be pretty obvious by now that Evan Bouchard has usurped Barrie’s spot on the second pairing for the Oilers.

Barrie accepted his demotion to the third pairing without publicly complaining and that’s all well and good but now that the season’s over that makes him a luxury the Oilers simply can’t afford going forward.  You shouldn’t be paying a bottom pairing guy $4.5 million a season no matter how good he is.

There’s all kinds of possibilities for where Barrie can go – but I’m going to suggest Ottawa in exchange for either their first round pick or both their second round picks this year (they have two of them, their own and Tampa Bay’s after trading for Brayden Coburn and Cedric Paquette) and Nikita Zaitsev (provided Ottawa retains 50% of Zaitsev’s cap hit – otherwise this trade is rendered pointless as Zaitsev has the same $4.5 million cap hit as Barrie and is an inferior puck mover).  Alternately, if Holland likes the internal options at third pairing left D better than anything from the outside, he can simply re-sign Kulak, move him to the right side (he plays both sides) and then play him with either Broberg or Niemelainen (whoever makes the team out of training camp).

In that case, he could simply trade Barrie to a number of teams for a first rounder or two second rounders and a solid prospect.