Cuopom: That one crucial ingredient Edmonton Oilers need to have for a winning trade

Oilers goaltender Jack Campbell makes a save against Rangers’ Vincent Trocheck on Saturday. Photo by Jessica Alcheh /USA TODAY Sports

Jack Campbell is having as ugly a run in Edmonton’s net as we’ve seen in more than a decade.

Former third-pairing ace Brett Kulak has struggled to contain more skilled attackers in his new role as a second-pairing d-man.

Key forwards like Evander Kane, Kailer Yamamoto, Warren Foegele and Ryan McLeod are all out with injury, Kane for several more months to come.

But when the Oil enter their playoff stretch run in March and April, do you know who might be kicking butt for the team? Jack Campbell, Brett Kulak, Evander Kane, Kailer Yamamoto, Warren Foegele and Ryan McLeod.

If you doubt this assertion look no further than the 2021-22 Oilers, who eventually made it to the Final Four of the NHL playoffs.

Mike Smith spent much of the year muffing shots, so much so that more than 90 per cent of Oilers fans had seen enough by the end of March and wanted Smith moved out. I was one such fan at that time.

Veteran d-man Duncan Keith struggled to find his groove with the Oilers for the first third of the season but came on strong as the season went along, finding his game as the sharp and steady partner of young Evan Bouchard.

Kane wasn’t with the team to start last season but was picked up for a bargain basement price by Oilers GM Ken Holland in a signing as gutsy as it was critical to the team’s fortunes (I might add that as wrong as I was with Smith, I thought the Kane signing was a good one, and was also patient with Keith and thought it the deal could well work out for the Oil, which it eventually did).

Things can change fast for an NHL team. Obviously they can change for worse, as we’ve seen with Campbell and others so far this year, but also for better, as we saw with Smith, Keith and Kane last year.

My point in this lengthy pre-amble? That the one crucial ingredient Edmonton Oilers need to have for a trade is patience.

At this point we don’t really know what the team’s most critical need will be in that final playoff stretch. Will it be another goalie? A gritty forward or two? A fierce and crafty shut-down d-man, someone to bring what the Oilers used to get from Adam Larsson and Kris Russell.

But we do know Holland has little cap space and tradable assets to play with. He’s going to be limited in what moves he can make.

Move too fast, and move out a player like Philip Broberg or Dylan Holloway before you’re sure of what you’ve got, and it may haunt you. You may be filling a need that could have been filled by Broberg or Holloway themselves if only you had been more patient.

Move too fast and you may blow whatever cap space and assets you have bringing in a player who doesn’t turn out to be what you really need on the squad.

This doesn’t mean that Oilers shouldn’t shuffle players in and out of the line-up, and move them up and down from Bakersfield, all in the hope of finding useful skaters who can fill some critical role on the team.

Nor does it rule out the possibility of a small trade for an overlooked NHL or AHL player who might help out, as Klim Kostin is so far doing.

But there’s no rush here.

Jay Woodcroft’s Oilers are hanging in the playoff race. Their differential on goals for and against is weak, -0.2 per game, but that’s largely because of Campbell’s woes in net and some iffy play from many of the d-men, as the absence of Keith and Russell is hurting this squad just now more than most observers, including me, expected.

The team’s Grade A shot differential is good, +1.6 per game. That’s not that far off from the +1.8 per game differential in 2020-21 when the Oilers were so good under Dave Tippett in the Canadian division. It’s not even that far off the +2.1 per game that the Oilers posted last year in Woodcroft’s wildly successful run of 38 games to end the year.

Bottom lines

It’s not fun for a team to suck it up, hang tough and bank on internal improvement.

It’s much fun to endlessly speculate about trades, and insist the Oilers must bring in this or that player if they are to succeed.

But, as I see, Holland’s best play is the play he’s now made his name with in Edmonton, acting in a patient manner and seeing if internal improvement will be the answer, and if some unexpected player might fall to the Oilers, someone keen for a Stanley Cup run with Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl who will take up a key role on this team.

Make sense?