To understand what is to come for the Edmonton Oilers at this year’s trade deadline, it’s vital to understand the team’s salary outlook for this summer.
GM Peter Chiarelli has made firm commitments to much of the Oilers’ roster, and even with the salary cap’s upper limit expected to rise to $80 million or so next season, Edmonton doesn’t have a lot of money to play with as it attempts to improve on a group that has underperformed this year.
Let’s start with the players under contract for next season, with figures courtesy of the indispensable CapFriendly.com:
(Note: Jesse Puljujarvi’s full cap hit with bonuses is included here. Although it’s technically true that the Oilers could defer bonus payments forward, both prudence and their practice this past season suggest they will plan to absorb the entirety of the cap hit in the year it occurs. With both Puljujarvi and Cam Talbot needing new contracts in the summer of 2019, Edmonton will have enough cap difficulties without carrying bonus overages.)
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The above roster of signed players carries a total cap hit of $64.6 million (including Benoit Pouliot’s $1.33 million buyout) against our $80.0 million projected cap. Most of those players either cannot or will not be moved.
Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are obvious franchise cornerstones. Replacing Cam Talbot would require picking up a new starting goalie, while Adam Larsson’s status as the team’s only bona fide top-four right-shot defencemen should make him safe, too. Puljujarvi and Kailer Yamamoto are both young, cheap (-ish, in Puljujarvi’s case) right-shot right wings who are beautiful fits for long-term team need.
Meanwhile Milan Lucic, Andrej Sekera and Kris Russell all have no-move protection.
This is a big part of the reason Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Oscar Klefbom tend to show up so frequently in trade speculation. If Edmonton wants to shed money, those are the easiest big tickets to move. Additionally, the Oilers have depth at centre and on the left side of the blue line. It’s easy to see either move backfiring on the team and this is not an argument in favour of shopping either player; it’s merely an acknowledgement of reality.
Zack Kassian is interesting because in many ways he’s a prototypical Chiarelli player. Nevertheless, if he can’t secure a top-nine role, Edmonton could save more than $1.0 million annually by replacing him with a cheaper fourth-liner. The same is not true of Jujhar Khaira, whose contract is a bargain even if he spends all of next year on the fourth line.
Restricted free agents use up much of the remaining money. After signing their key RFAs, we may expect the Oilers’ cap hit to come in around $77 million with three roster spots left to fill.
All of these contracts are projections, and deserve a bit of a walkthrough:
- The assumption here is that Darnell Nurse will be signed to a long-term deal. The $4.85 million figure represents splitting the difference between an earlier Athletic estimate of $4.6 million and the output of Matt Cane’s model, which comes in around $5.1 million.
- Ryan Strome’s qualifying offer is $3.0 million, based off his actual salary (not cap hit) from this season. The argument was made on this site that trading him at this year’s deadline might make sense given that figure and the Oilers’ salary cap situation.
- Matt Benning is a hard player to figure, because there just aren’t that many 23-year-old defencemen coming off entry level deals. One of the few recent examples is Ben Hutton in Vancouver, who plays more minutes and scores more points and secured a two-year, $2.8 million AAV deal. Benning’s figure here essentially represents a compromise between that contract and his much lower qualifying offer. Benning might be vulnerable to trade, too, because he would presumably have value around the league and is leaving his dirt cheap years; the Oilers might reasonably conclude that they can get by just fine with a third pair consisting of one of their big lefties and a dirt-cheap partner, which could save them $1.0 million or more against the cap.
- Brandon Davidson’s qualifying offer is north of $1.5 million, which is just too much for a player currently in his slot on the depth chart. The assessment here is that his camp will realize this and sign for less with an organization where he’s comfortable. The $900,000 figure is a slight increase on the projection from Cane’s model of $870,000.
- For both Drake Caggiula and Iiro Pakarinen, these are qualifying offers rounded up to the nearest $5,000. Caggiula is a player the organization clearly likes but who simply hasn’t done enough to warrant a raise, while Pakarinen is a fairly typical end-of-roster option and is getting paid like one.
- Anton Slepyshev is not included here because it seems unlikely that he’ll be an Oiler next season.
Needless to say, the Oilers’ situation would be improved if any of Caggiula, Khaira or Slepyshev establish themselves as firmly capable of handling a third- or (if we really dream) second-line role next season. Khaira is probably the closest to doing so, though his history as a low-offense player means it is healthy to be skeptical about this year’s bloated 18.6 shooting percentage. Nevertheless, with Edmonton out of the postseason race, this is a good time to further test all the members of that young trio, looking for bargains.
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There isn’t much to say about two of the three pending unrestricted free agents. Mark Letestu or Mike Cammalleri could presumably return to the Oilers at ages 33 and 36 respectively, but only on dirt-cheap deals. Edmonton would be better-served finding younger players with more upside to fill those slots, but with few internal options that may not be possible.
The other unrestricted free agent is Patrick Maroon, and there is a lot to be said about him.
The short version is that he’s a good player, and it has to be awfully tempting for the Oilers to see if they can get him signed to something resembling Russell’s four-year/$4.0 million AAV pact. The problems are primarily that he’s going to be 30 in April and that his skillset is largely duplicated in that of the immovable (in several different senses) Lucic. For a team with speed issues and a young core, spending $10 million or more annually on a pair of 30-year-old tanks for the next half-decade represents a less than ideal scenario.
To this combination of pros and cons we must add Maroon’s value at the trade deadline. Patrick Eaves fetched a conditional first-round pick at last year’s deadline in large part because of his relatively tiny salary, and Edmonton stands a chance of getting greater value than might otherwise be expected out of Maroon because of their modest $1.5 million commitment to him.
Assuming the Oilers opt to trade Maroon and maintain the status quo above otherwise, they’ll have about $3.1 million to add two more skill players and a reserve player to the roster. That’s a tough trick to pull off and would almost certainly necessitate the compromise approach the team took last summer: untested youth and past-their-prime veterans.
A particularly ruthless GM who didn’t want to move big pieces could goose that up to $8.5 million for three skilled players and one reserve guy by moving the trio of Strome, Kassian and Benning and replacing the latter two with league-minimum types. In the past, this has not been Chiarelli’s modus operandi. In both Edmonton and Boston he has shown a penchant for spending money on his fourth line and third pairing and his three-year commitment to Kassian falls neatly into that existing pattern.
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The other option here is moving out big-ticket guys, with Nugent-Hopkins and Klefbom the likeliest candidates based on both where the Oilers have quality and who has no-move clauses. That could inject another $10 million-and-change into the summer conversation, creating more flexibility to rework the roster.
Regardless of the approach taken, careful maneuvering will be required by either Chiarelli or his replacement as the Oilers try to accomplish two conflicting tasks: complying with salary cap and increasing the skill level of the team.
(Photo credit: Derik Hamilton-USA TODAY Sports)