Trade: Oilers Acquire Sam Gagner from Canucks in Exchange for Ryan Spooner

Well, you can unpack your Sam Gagner jerseys, the roster turnover continues.

This isn’t a blockbuster by any means, as both players have been in the AHL as of late. Their salaries are almost identical with the Rangers retaining 900k of Ryan Spooner’s contract.

Now a lot of the roster moves here are going to start getting a little complicated with the cap space factored in. None of it is overly difficult, as cap problems are not a real thing and mostly fans just thinking they are, but let’s go through some of the moves.

Matt Benning has been placed on IR retroactive to the the 7th, and Sam Gagner has been called up from the AHL. He was loaned to the Marlies to be closer to home, and has been close to a point per game player.

The we had the Cam Talbot for Anthony Stolarz trade from last night. Personally I didn’t know anything about Anthony Stolarz, so I reached out to Kelly from over at BroadSteetHockey for a few comments about the trade.

Here is what she said of Stolarz:

He’s shown flashes of being quite good. He’s huge, which helps him a lot.

But he has a bad injury history. The same knee has taken him out twice. His ceiling is probably and NHL backup.

I think he’s played 19 games for the Flyers, so not a lot of time to get a real handle on him.

When asked if she was happy with the return:

I’m good with the trade because I don’t think any of us were comfortable with Stolarz backing up Hart full time next season, and Brian Elliott has been good but also keeps getting hurt, and Talbot and Hart are buds so this seems good.

Hopefully (Cam Talbot) signs, if he doesn’t it’s not great.

I honestly think this is one of those trades where both teams can be like “yeah okay, that’s fine”

Also should be noted that Stolarz was never going to get enough time here to remain RFA so he’d definitely have been a UFA at the end of the season here.

Right, that last point, more cap stuff.

So he has to play at least 30 minutes for ten more games this year, or he’ll be a UFA at season’s end. So, I take that to mean that we’ll be seeing a lot of him.

Now as for Andrej Sekera.

The Oilers have been granted permission to extend his AHL conditioning stint by an extra two games. But with the salary from Cam Talbot’s contract cleared, there is more than enough room to do it without issue.

As for Sam Gagner getting called up, with Sekera soon to be available, some roster spots are up for grabs.

Yesterday when Jesse Puljujarvi’s agent went public, it sure made it seem that his time in Edmonton is coming to an end. And the speculation is that after this weekend, he’ll be sent down to the Condors.

Anyway, there’s more coming, and I’m going to need to slap something together to show all salary cap implications here. Puckpedia has a great tool, that hopefully works really well, I’ll try to have that up on the site as the trade deadline approaches.

Key to all this though, there’s more coming. I will be surprised if more than half the roster returns to the team next season. I’m definitely not an insider, and I don’t claim to be, but when you keep hearing the same things over and over again, you tend to believe it. The locker room is a mess, that’s what I’m comfortable publishing, and it’s going to result in some bigger move. Enjoy.