Two More Edmonton Oilers Bison King Trades

It’s no secret at this point that Jesse Puljujarvi is the Edmonton Oilers biggest trade chip. We already know Ken Holland has actively shopped him around the NHL and even had some interest from other teams. It seems right now the question is not a matter of if JP goes but when, where, and for what.

IMO this is a clear case of both the player and the team needing a fresh start with each other.

There are two rumours that have popped up within the last week or so that are two likely targets of where JP will go. The first is to see him going to Arizona as the centrepiece of a trade to rent the services of Shayne Gostisbehere. The second is to see him going to Florida for Anthony Duclair.

Let’s investigate what those trades might look like here. We’ll start with a Gostisbehere one.

Drafted in the third round by Philadelphia originally, Gostisbehere had a couple of offseasons which was when he was traded to Arizona prior to the 2021-22 season. Ever since then, he has revitalized his career in Arizona (how many NHL players can say that?) with consecutive seasons of 51 points in 82 games last season and 29 points in 48 games so far this season.

This trade rumour was reported by Elliotte Friedman so there may be some legs to it. The aforementioned linked article also mentions the Oilers having an interest in bottom sixer Nick Bjugstad to shore up center depth which is why a third-rounder is included in the trade.

Right now the Oilers have just enough LTIR cap space ($1 million) to fit Bjugstad’s $900K cap hit into the roster.

What they’d do after making this trade to fit in Kailer Yamamoto I don’t know – they may not activate him until the playoffs if they can help it as Tampa did a while ago with Kucherov.

If Gostisbehere can have success in Arizona, imagine how much success he’d have on a better team…..

The two fifth-rounders are being sent as sweeteners to Arizona for retaining just a little bit of Gostisbehere’s cap hit to make the space work. Shore is simply a throw-in to make the cap space work better as he’s been a healthy scratch for the Oilers for quite some time – perhaps he’ll get more work on the Coyotes, a much shallower team. He’s unlikely to be brought back to the Oilers after this season – after all, in times of injury, they’ve preferred to call up James Hamblin rather than put Shore in the lineup. That should tell you what the Oilers are thinking about him at this point in time.

Koekkoek is also a throw-in. His contract is up after this season and he’s spent virtually the entire season in Bakersfield – and as a healthy scratch at that. He went through waivers last year with no takers – he could be depth for the Coyotes farm team or he could be veteran help for their AHL team, or they could take a flyer on him as a seventh d-man at the big league level, whatever they want to do.

The centrepiece, of course, is the Bison King, who would be a depth player for the Coyotes with a lot of upsides – they might be able to discover some cheap top-six scoring help or worst case scenario create competition in the bottom six. Either way, they’d have the rest of this season to evaluate what to do with him and they can bring him back if they want to or let him walk after the season if they don’t.

Fun fact – If the Oilers did end up making a trade like this, the Coyotes would own a lot of the Edmonton Oilers draft picks. Between the Zack Kassian trade and this one, the Coyotes would own all our draft picks from rounds 2-5 this year, our third and fifth rounders next year, and our second-rounder in 2025. That’s a lot of draft picks sent the Coyotes way.

Gostisbehere would then slot in on the second pairing in Brett Kulak’s spot now, moving Kulak down to the third pairing and Broberg down to the taxi squad for the post-deadline period plus playoffs. This would create a super puck-moving tandem with SG paired with Tyson Barrie on the right side, or SG could also play on the right side with Kulak moving Bouchard to the taxi squad and Barrie into Bouchard’s spot on the third pairing (he can play both the left and right sides, giving Woodcroft some options).

From a puck-moving standpoint, it would certainly create an opportunity to take some heat off the first pairing in terms of puck moving.

The big downside to Gostisbehere is he’s not great defensively – he’s finished as a minus player seven out of nine seasons, although his years with the Coyotes can probably chalk up to him playing on bad teams. Mind you, those teams in Philly weren’t all that great either…..still better than the Coyotes, though. Maybe Dave Manson can weave some magic with Gostisbehere just like he did with Tyson Barrie. Personally, I’m hoping that just going to a better team will help those numbers get better.

Gostisbehere has played 511 NHL games plus another 17 playoff games, the latter mark all for Philly.

What else does SG do? 

Despite being slightly undersized for an NHL player – 5’11” and 180 lbs, Gostisbehere does have some physicality in his game – he’s currently sitting at 13th on the Coyotes in hits with 34 in 48 games and is still fourth on the Coyotes in blocked shots with 67, so he could certainly help out Darnell Nurse in that regard, who right now leads the Oilers in blocked shots with 91, 14 more than his next closest competition (a tie of 76 between Ceci and Kulak). He’s also top 10 on the Coyotes in PIMs, 28, which is good enough for eighth on the team. As you would expect, he plays a lot on the Coyotes PP, currently tied for the top spot with All-Star Clayton Keller at 3:13 per game on average. Whether the Oilers would upset the personnel makeup of their PP as it’s currently tops in the league to incorporate SG on it is another story, but it’s certainly an option open to Woodcroft and his staff.

He does also play a little bit on the PK for Arizona, 0:47 per game – 13th on the team. Maybe he could slot in on the second unit and shore up that area of the team – the Oilers certainly need some help on the PK, which is ranked 24th in the league right now. The team is going to have to buckle down and improve on that if they hope to have success in the postseason and not give teams a chance to expose it and chase them out of their playoff run.

The X factor

The Oilers are rumoured to have a lot of interest in Gostisbehere, but it’s worth noting he’s currently injured, out 4-6 weeks with an upper-body injury as of Jan. 26. That means if the Oilers do want Gostisbehere they’re going to have to wait to make this trade. The best case scenario is Gostisbehere will be cleared to play the week before the trade deadline, or he might not be available at all. So it’s a roll of the dice that’s completely out of the Oiler’s control.

We’ll have to see if this plays out.

Going back to this same article, they mentioned that St. Louis and Tampa Bay also responded back to Ken Holland’s shopping of Puljujarvi, but it sounds like neither team is ready to give up anything significant, certainly not to anyone who’s as much of a game changer as Shayne Gostisbehere or Anthony Duclair.

The name Noel Acciari was bandied about, but as you can see he’s not exactly an impact player. St. Louis has struggled this season in part because they’ve had issues with injuries. Acciari is currently their second-line center but only because Ryan O’Reilly is injured.

Acciari reminds me of Alex Chiasson, he put up 20 goals once and has dropped off the map since then. I would consider a trade like this only as a last resort – if you can get better players in trade for JP, why would you trade for a player as vanilla as Acciari?

As for Tampa Bay, they’re having cap issues as well so it’ll have to be a dollar in, dollar out. In this price range, I don’t see a lot of guys I’d want back.

I doubt they’d want to part with Alex Killorn, and Nick Paul and Vladislav Namestnikov are rather vanilla players. Would you want decent bottom six players in return such as Corey Perry or re-acquiring Patrick Maroon? Perhaps, but I guarantee you they’ll make the Oilers retain the salary on JP so I’m not sure that would be worth it.

On D for Tampa, it’s a similar story. I highly doubt we’d want 33-year-old Ian Cole back when Brett Kulak is already performing the same job for $250,000 less and four years Cole’s junior. I doubt they’re interested in parting with Erik Cernak considering that he was signed to an extension at $5.2 million a season starting next year. The names below in terms of salary on D for the Lightning are all fairly unimpressive and again they’d probably ask us to retain the salary on JP were we to trade for any of them.

We don’t need a goaltender and they probably won’t send us one anyway.

Now for some comic relief. Kostin continues to impress everyone here in Edmonton, both on the ice and off. I stumbled across this article in the course of my research on this blog.

The fact that a Flames fan had the audacity to come to an Oilers meet-and-greet to troll the whole event was pretty laughable in and of itself.

But the fact that Kostin got the last laugh by not only refusing to take a picture with that Flames fan but making him put on his own Kostin jersey over his Flames jersey before he would take a picture with him meant we all get the last laugh.

Suck on that, Calgary. Don’t troll our team events or we’ll make you become one of us. Unsurprisingly the Flames fan got booed by everyone in attendance at this event.

Erik Karlsson to Edmonton rumours is just the disease that never goes away.

Why the Oilers would even consider the Kings ransom the Sharks are asking for in exchange for a high-risk contract that is unlikely to be finished at the same high level by a player with a history of injuries I don’t know. Yes, he’s having a good season now and yes he’s a candidate for the Norris trophy this season, and yes he’s playing on a bad team and wants to come to a contender.

But what about the other four seasons he’s under contract for? Karlsson already has a lot of hard miles on his body, and he’ll be 36 by the time the contract ends, with a good chance it’ll bottom out by the time he’s 34 or 35.

And that’s not even getting into the cap gymnastics the Oilers would have to perform to even afford 25% of his $11.5 million cap hit, having to trade further high draft picks to another team in exchange for keeping $2.875 million of cap space for this season plus four after that. Good luck trying to convince another team to take that on – Arizona might, but that’s the only team I can think of that would even consider it.

Anyway, the initial story was that San Jose hadn’t heard about the Oilers interest in Karlsson, now Frank Seravalli has changed the narrative and is reporting that the Sharks offered Karlsson to us with – who else – Jesse Puljujarvi as the centrepiece coming back to San Jose, but the Oilers said no.

I know this is the silly season, but I really wish professional sportswriters would think before publishing this kind of bird droppings for content.

If Karlsson was a must-have for every other team around the NHL, he would’ve already been traded by now. The fact that he remains in San Jose probably indicates several factors to consider:

1) In the age of young players ruling the roost, most teams are probably a bit nervous by the fact that Karlsson is 32. A lot of teams have been burned by trading for high $$ figure contracts for players on the wrong side of 30 – ask Vancouver Canucks GM Patrik Allvin if he’d like to go back in time to yell at Jim Benning for making that trade for Oliver Ekman-Larsson right about now, as just one example. GMs have likely learned their lessons and don’t bite on this as much as they used to.

2) The NHL is hurting for cap space post-pandemic right now. Most of the teams who have the cap space to take on Erik Karlsson are rebuilding teams that Karlsson wouldn’t want to play on, and very few of the contending teams would have the cap space to take him on. The only playoff-contending team with cap space to take on this massive contract – even at 50% retained – would be Buffalo. Winnipeg might be interested too, but even then they only have $2 million in cap space and would have to unload one of Josh Morrisey, Nate Schmidt, or Neal Pionk to make the cap work. If I were to guess I’d say they probably feel the same as the rest of the league – too much long-term risk in the player to trade for him.

3) In this day and age, depth is king in the NHL. A big fish that you bring in trade or free agency isn’t necessarily going to move the needle for you. The NHL is not the NBA, where a big name can transform your team overnight. The teams that go the furthest in the playoffs are the teams that have good scoring and team defence in the forward ranks and on D as well as two goalies capable of playing, not to mention good prospects to taxi in case of injuries. This means rather than going big game hunting in trade or free agency it often makes more sense to stick with what you have instead of spending huge cap space $$ or emptying the prospect coffers for a player.

The Vegas Golden Knights are the perfect example of this. Look at all the big game players they’ve landed in trade or free agency, and yet what has it got them? A single-cup appearance in their entire four-plus year history. They’re hurting hard from the depth they’ve had to trade away because of this, have only won two of their last 10 games, and at this point look more likely to miss the playoffs than to make them.

4)  San Jose is asking for too much in trade for the player. Yes, I get that GM Mike Grier is probably trying to cash in on the season Karlsson is having now, but he doesn’t seem to realize that for his counterparts across the NHL, it’s not that simple. They have to consider the long term as well as the short term, and in the long term Karlsson is a risk that could alter a franchise’s direction negatively. He needs to read the market and lower his asking price to get more teams interested.

5) GMs who are easily fleeced in a trade like Peter Chiarelli and Jim Benning are no longer employed as GMs for apparent reasons.