Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Oilers at the Deadline: Part 4 - The Rest of the Roster/Summary

In parts 1, 2 and 3, I assessed the majority of the Oilers roster with respect to classes of "tradeability" for the upcoming deadline. This brief, final section will feature those who are not easily tradeable (for one reason or another) along with players who have little trade value coupled with a low cap hit. I'd be pretty surprised to see the Oilers move any of them.

Horcoff and Khabibulin are players that probably generate no interest on the trade market, due to their cap hits and health. Hemsky is out for the year and therefore unlikely to be of interest at the deadline.

The remaining roster players (Stone, Potulny, Pouliot, Jacques, Deslauriers, Dubnyk) group fairly similarly, in that none of them seem like players you'd really expect to see a contender pick up, and aren't the kind of guy you expect to see moved at the deadline. I suppose it's possible that one of them might be a body moving back in some sort of deal, but they are unlikely candidates for a move since they are probably more valuable to the Oilers going forward than they would be to an aspiring Cup contender at the deadline.

To summarize all 4 parts, it would be in the best interests of the Oilers to discover whether they can re-sign Pisani and Comrie to reasonable extensions. If they can, great, if not move them at the deadline along with whichever of Moreau, Souray, O'Sullivan, Staios, and Nilsson prove movable. Moving all 7 would be a difficult, if not impossible, task (as MC suggests here), even if it were management's goal, but doing so would open up ~17.5 mil in cap room heading into the summer.

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