There was a big development on the Andrej Sekera front on Monday. He was assigned to Bakersfield for a conditioning stint. As Ryan Rishaug (@TSNRyanRishaug) tweeted out a few days ago, a player coming off of LTIR can agree to a conditioning stint in the AHL for a maximum of either 3 games or 6 days to determine if that player is fit to play according to section 13.9 of the CBA. The Oilers can apply to have the stint lengthened by another 2 games if they need to, but that would be a rare and unlikely circumstance. The Oilers would not pull the trigger on Sekera’s conditioning stint if they did not believe that he is close to returning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5tsBNaQbY
Sekera will remain on the LTIR for the duration of his conditioning stint. Once he is deemed to be fit to play, the Oilers must activate him. February 10 will mark the end of his conditioning stint. The Bakersfield Condors will play two games between now and then (Feb 8 and Feb 9). Sekera will play in those two games. His 6 days will end before he will get the chance to play a third game. That would mean that his Oilers season debut could happen as early as February 13 against the Penguins.
CapFriendly (@CapFriendly) tweeted that the Oilers will need to shed $1,230,834 in salary cap hits in order to activate Sekera. That aligns with the “Today’s Cap Hit” number that is posted on the Oilers page on CapFriendly’s site, which is $80.7 million. However, as I noted in Part 1of my All-Star Break Trade Preview, that number is merely a sum of every player’s Total Cap Hit for the entire season. Those numbers from CapFriendly are accurate, but that $80.7 million number is not the actual cap hit that the Oilers are working with at the moment.
Click Here to find out what the actual number they’re working with is.
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We’re two games back from the Oilers’ bye week/All-Star break and Edmonton hasn’t managed to win a game yet. They’ve gone into both matches with a lead in the 3rd period only to lose it and then give up the 2pts in OT. Hey, getting one point is better than none, especially now, but this team has to find a way to stay calm and collected in the third and hold onto these leads.
Truth be told, I’m starting to 2nd guess Hitchcock right now. I was absolutely jacked during his first month, winning AND losing, but now he’s starting to repeat himself during post-gamers saying things like “that was the best 3rd period we’ve played in a long time”. I swear he says something like this every post-game.
It’s not just the things he’s saying, I’m not enamored with how he’s deploying the players either. Who sends Chiasson out in OT simply because he’s right-handed and the faceoff was on the right-side? Nuge was the right guy to have out but I’m still waiting for Jesse Puljujarvi to get his shot in OT. The guy would boss all that open ice. #FreePulju
It’s my belief that the Oilers are looking at a GM/Head Coach combination of Kris Knoblauch (assistant coach in Philadelphia) and Kelly McCrimmon (assistant GM in Vegas) going into 2019-20. I’d be fine with that and if Hitchcock wants to stay on as a hockey ops advisor, I think that would be fantastic too.
My good friend Ryan from edmontonoildrops.ca has another post up regarding Darnell Nurse that I want to show you! Check out a snippet below and then click the link at the bottom to see the full post!
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How Did Nurse Fare as a 1D?
Oscar Klefbom is set to return from injury against the Flyers on Saturday. When Klefbom went down, that created an opportunity for Darnell Nurse to take over as the team’s #1 defenceman. I wrote an article about how we were about to find out what we have in Darnell Nurse at that time. His level of success during Klefbom’s injury is a strong indicator of just how high his ceiling is because he is nearing that magical 300 NHL games played number, which is usually when you know what you have in an NHL defenceman.
We can’t say that coach Hitchcock held Nurse’s minutes back at all. The strategy was not to distribute the minutes more evenly amongst the entire D group. He averaged 26:50 in ice time per night during that stretch. He played in all situations. In addition to leading the defence group in even strength ice time (as he did when Klefbom was healthy), he took Klefbom’s spot at the point on the top powerplay unit, and he continued to play on the penalty kill as well.
How did he do? Click here to head to Ryan’s website to find out the metrics in which Nurse excelled and performed poorly in and if Darnell Nurse has the potential to be a no.1 defender in the NHL at some point in the future. The answer might shock you.
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It finally happened. The day that Oilers fans have been waiting for has arrived. Peter Chiarelli has been fired.
When he was hired, the fan base was excited that an experienced outside voice was taking over. Add Connor McDavid to that, and the expectations were high that Chiarelli would guide this team towards being a contender.
In his 3.5 years here, the Oilers made the playoffs once.
I have spent a long time defending Chiarelli’s biggest trades. I am not going to change my stance on those now that he has been fired. I still believe that the market values of Hall and Larsson along with the Oilers having a surplus of scoring wingers at the time made that Hall trade more even than the talent level would of the two players would suggest. I believe that Chiarelli and McLellan were not fans of how Eberle played without the puck, otherwise, they would’ve held on to him through last season. They are up against the cap without Eberle, so he still would’ve been moved prior to this season if not when it happened. Considering that it was a cap dump, I liked the return they got from NYI because Strome was a young player with some offensive potential (35-40 pts a year max) that contributed when he was here, and that could’ve contributed for a long time had he not been moved for a chance at an immediate increase in offense that clearly didn’t work out.
Chiarelli’s mandate upon arriving in Edmonton was to fix the defense and goaltending. He also needed to rebuild the team as quickly as possible because McDavid was set to start tearing the league apart, and he needed a team behind him if the Oilers were to become a contender. He signed Sekera right away, which was a major upgrade on what existed. He was a major factor in the success of the Oilers in 2016-17, and the loss of that particular version of Sekera has been an obstacle too large for the Oilers to overcome since. He signed Russell, who has been nothing short of a rock for the Oilers. He has his flaws, but he has brought defending to a team that sorely needed it. He paid dearly for Larsson, but Larsson has been another rock back there for the majority of his time as an Oiler (this past weekend aside). He acquired Talbot during that 2015 draft. Talbot has been inconsistent for Edmonton, but he was great during the 2016-17 season. He took a risk on Koskinen this off-season, but it had worked out well so far. Both are marked improvements over what was here when Chiarelli was hired.
Chiarelli did succeed at improving the defense and the goaltending, although you can certainly argue that both positions aren’t where they need to be just yet. There has been a reliance upon young, developing players like Klefbom and Nurse to take on big roles on the blueline. Klefbom is just now scratching the surface of how good he can be, and Nurse isn’t far behind him, but it has taken time for them to get to where they are.
The thing I’ll say about Chiarelli…
If you’d like to read more about what Ryan (@edmoildrops) has to say about Chiarelli, click HERE. He also goes into what he thinks Bob Nicholson meant about “something being in the water”, future moves, and what he’d like to see in the new GM.
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In part 1, I examined the Oilers current roster situation and figured out how much cap space they have to work with if they want to acquire a scoring forward and be cap compliant upon activating Sekera from the LTIR. Here’s part 2 where I reveal who the Oilers can afford.
To review, the Oilers currently are $1.4625 million over the cap. In order to activate Sekera and add a scoring winger, they need to move two forwards and one defenceman (13 F and 8 D ratio). The goal of this exercise is to figure out how much cap space the Oilers can create to acquire a scoring forward and to see which scoring forwards the Oilers could target.
There are few teams that are far enough out of the race that we can reasonably call them sellers. There are also some players being rumored to be available from teams that are in the mix for a playoff spot still. Remember that the cap hit of a player going to a new team gets smaller by the day, which is why most teams wait until closer to the deadline to make their moves. However, time is not a luxury that the Oilers have in a tight playoff race. The Oilers would be smart to use the break wisely and wait until February 1 (the day before their first game after the break) to acquire their scoring winger.
Here is a list of the cap hits that each of the potential scoring winger acquisitions would have if the Oilers were to acquire them on February 1st:
I speculated that the defenceman that would be most likely to move during the break would be Benning. The three forwards that are the most likely to move would be Spooner, Rieder, and Yamamoto. There are three combinations that involve two of those forwards being moved along with Benning. In order to see who could be acquired during the break, the transactions involving any players moving out will be calculated as if they were to occur on February 1. Here is how much cap space each of the three combinations would leave the Oilers with on February 1:
Yamamoto, Rieder, Benning: $0.7945 million
Spooner, Rieder, Benning: $0.9835 million
Spooner, Yamamoto, Benning: $1.1785 million
In any of the three scenarios, Dzingel would be the player with the highest cap hit that they could acquire on February 1st. The Oilers would have to make their trades a bit earlier in the break if they want to acquire Brassard or Coyle. The players that the Oilers could definitely take on before the break ends would be Dzingel or Ferland.
We know that the Oilers have been reportedly interested in Zuccarello. With $1.1785 million in cap space, the Oilers could acquire Zuccarello on February 18. In the second scenario, they would have to move Benning one day earlier in order to acquire Zuccarello at the deadline. In the first scenario, they would have to move Manning on January 23 instead of Benning just to be able to acquire Zuccarello at the deadline.
My point is that if the Oilers want to acquire a scoring winger…
Click HERE if you’d like to hear how Ryan (@edmoildrops) thinks the Oilers would be able to acquire that elusive scoring winger without breaking the bank.
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Once again, back to back terrible outings from the Oilers has sparked turmoil in Edmonton. There is a lot of pressure to make the playoffs from within the organization and from fans, but the Oilers continue to be consistently inconsistent. The injuries on the back end have really hampered the Oilers, but the reality is that the roster isn’t good enough for a playoff spot right now.
TSN’s Ryan Rishaug’s tweet from last week said that the Oilers staff are in a “full court press” and have been deployed “en masse” to find a scoring forward. He also hinted that the Oilers’ 2019 1st round pick and a young, developing forward are in play. Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman has confirmed that the 1st round pick is in play and that Jesse Puljujarvi could be in play as well, although Bob Mackenzie and others in the local media have since reported that the Oilers aren’t interested in moving Puljujarvi.
As many fans are aware, the Oilers don’t have a lot of cap space to work with, so acquiring a big-name scorer isn’t going to be simple. However, the thing that most people don’t realize is that a team is only stuck with a portion of the new player’s cap hit based on the number of days that he would be on the roster in the current season. If you go to a player’s page on CapFriendly.com, you see four values at the top. You see their Cap Hit, their Daily Cap Hit (their salary cap hit divided by the number of days in the season, which is 186 this year), their Accumulated Daily Cap Hit (their Daily Cap Hit multiplied by the number of days that have passed in the current season), and their Remaining Daily Cap Hit (their Daily Cap Hit multiplied by how many days are left in the season).
That Accumulated Daily Cap Hit is a total of the salary cap hit that has already been paid. Once it has been paid for by the team, it can’t be transferred to another team in a trade. So, if the Oilers were trading Cam Talbot today, then the Oilers would have $2.49 million counting towards their cap for the remainder of the season because that time has already passed. It would save them $1.68 million against the cap. His new team would be stuck with the Remaining Daily Cap Hit for the remainder of the season. That is why teams are able to add players with large cap hits at the trade deadline. The Remaining Daily Cap Hit is small enough for most teams to be able to absorb without going over the cap because there are so few days remaining once the deadline hits.
The Total Cap Hit number you would see on the Oilers page on CapFriendly.com is a sum of the total cap hits for each player on the active roster. It does not include the Accumulated Daily Cap Hit for having Ryan Strome, Chris Wideman, Jason Garrison, Drake Caggiula, and Valentin Zykov on the roster for however many days. It also does not include the subtracted Accumulated Daily Cap Hit for the time that Alex Petrovic and Brandon Manning were not on the roster.
This information is vital when we are looking at what the Oilers can afford to do prior to this deadline. It also provides some clarity on why Colby Cave was claimed on waivers. Cave’s total cap hit is $675k, but he was acquired with 82 days left in the season, making his total salary cap hit for the Oilers only $298k. The Oilers sent Joseph Gambardella down the AHL to make room for Cave on the active roster. Gambardella’s cap hit is $725k. That full amount would be taken off of the salary cap total because he did not switch NHL teams this season. The move created $0.427M in cap space for the Oilers, which will be needed if they really want to add a top scorer. They just need to hope that Cave can bring a solid game while he’s here.
It’s an interesting situation in Edmonton because…
If you’d like to hear why the situation in Edmonton is so interesting CLICK HERE. You’ll be treated to a very informative look into how the Oilers could maximize their trading potential to upgrade the roster with minimal asset usage.
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