Does new Evander Kane surgery signal a monster trade deadline for Edmonton Oilers?

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This in from the Edmonton Oilers, news that power forward Evander Kane had knee surgery this week, which will delay his return to the Edmonton Oilers.

Said the Oilers in a statement: “Edmonton Oilers forward Evander Kane underwent successful knee surgery on Thursday in Edmonton. It is expected that he will require four to eight weeks of recovery time. While this procedure is unrelated to his abdominal surgery in September, it will require him to pause his current rehabilitation schedule to recover from Thursday’s operation. His rehabilitation will continue to take place in Edmonton under the supervision of the club’s medical staff.”

At the salary cap website, Puckpedia reported: “If Kane is out for rest of regular season, the Oilers can exceed the cap by $5.1M. Because they already set their LTIR pool at start of year with Kane on LTIR, they won’t be able to effectively add accrued cap space + use LTIR pool, it’s 1 or the other.

“Their roster right now has an annual cap hit of $88.05M. If they use LTIR, this can go up to $93.1M, meaning they can add $5.05M annual cap hit compared to roster right now. At the deadline, without LTIR, they can add $1M of annual cap hit and still be under cap. But if they do that, the annual cap hit is $89M, leaving only 93.1-89= $4.1M available to add if they use LTIR. So, the most they can add, even with Kane on LTIR, is $5.1M total more annual cap hit than the current roster. Had they waited to add Kane to LTIR, they could have used accrued space to add cap hit, then added Kane to LTIR, and then had another $5.1M available to add.”

My take

1. As Edmonton Oilers fans know, if Kane is out for the entire regular season that will free up roughly $5 million dollars at the trade deadline. If Kane comes back and plays in the regular season, it sounds like Edmonton would have more like $1 million in cap space at the deadline. That’s a huge difference, $4 million.

Obviously there’s a massive benefit to the Oilers, and also possibly to Kane, in him making sure he’s fully healthy and not returning until the start of the playoffs, thus allowing the Oilers to make one or two monster moves at the trade deadline.

2. Talking with Bob Stauffer of the Oilers radio network, GM Stan Bowman dug into how things would go with Kane and with possible trades.

“So as far as like next steps, I think still don’t have that mapped out quite yet, and I think we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes… As far as, like, when he’s going to return, we don’t have that info yet,” Bowman said.

Bowman suggested the Oilers will know more in a month.

Asked about salary cap issues and considerations, Bowman said, “Yeah, I would say it’s still status quo. Ever since the summer, we’ve been planning to accrue cap space. I think we’ve been able to do a good job of that this year. You know, fortunately, we haven’t had many injuries. So we’ve been we’ve had a lean roster, intentionally, nothing’s really changed on that front.”

He added: “We’re still operating under the assumption that Evander will be back. If he’s not back then, that that calculus changes, but right now, we don’t have enough information to make that judgment.”

3. If Kane is out for the regular season, the limiting factor for the Oilers at the deadline won’t be cap space so much as it will be sending out assets in trade to pick up useful players.

Edmonton’s prospect pool is limited and its draft pool is depleted. The Oilers have already traded away their first, fourth and fifth round picks in the coming 2025 draft. That said, they do have second and third round picks as compensation for the Blues signing Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway.

Edmonton’s top prospects ranked by the Cult of Hockey this past summer are Matt Savoie, Sam O’Reilly, Beau Akey, Maximus Wanner, Noah Philp, Roby Jarventie, Olivier Rodrigue, Maxim Berezkin, Jayden Grubbe, Phil Kemp, Shane LaChance and Matvey Petrov. Since that ranking, LaChance has shot up in value due to his excellent play at Boston University.

4. In an interview Kane said he hadn’t yet skated, but is feeling good about his return to play sometime this year. But he hasn’t yet put his mind to whether he’ll come back at the end of the regular season or in the playoffs.

Said Kane: “To be honest, that timeframe from if I play a handful of (regular season) games or 15 games before the end of the regular season, or I come back in the playoffs, I haven’t really given much thought to that. My focus has been getting back to 100%. That’s why I got that procedure done yesterday, so I could feel 100% when I get back, and there were no issues moving forward. Whenever I’m 100% I will make myself available and intend to play hockey, so we’re not there today. I’m not exactly sure what date that will be, but what I can promise everybody is I’m doing everything I can to make sure that’s possible.”

5. Teams like the Vegas Golden Knights and the Tampa Bay Lightning have been able to make major additions at the trade deadline and go on to win Stanley Cups in recent years in large part because they’ve had big salary players on LTIR, as might now happen with Kane. Vegas had Mark Stone on LTIR only to see him return for the playoffs, while Tampa had Nikita Kucherov on LTIR.

In 2022-23, Vegas put Stone on LTIR on February 20 2023 and used the available cap space to acquire Ivan Barbashev from St. Louis and Teddy Blueger from Pittsburgh, then went on to win the Cup. In 2023-24, Vegas placed Stone on LTIR, using the cap space to acquire Anthony Mantha, Noah Hanifin and Tomas Hertl, but they failed to advance in the playoffs.

In the 2020-21 season, Tampa placed Kucherov on LTIR for the entire regular season due to hip surgery, and used that money to bring in Marian Gaborki and Anders Nilsson, the team going on to win the Cup.

6. Talking to reporters today, Kane said he was glad to have the knee surgery. “I’m not frustrated at all. I’m actually really happy that we were able to fix that to me… It’s great to get this cleaned up, and I plan to be 100% and ready to go at some point this season.”

The normal recovery time for a healthy player for this kind of knee surgery is four to eight weeks, Kane said. It will delay his ongoing rehab from previous core abdominal surgeries by a few weeks.

He had yet take the ice in his rehab, and was instead focused on swimming and off-ice training, Kane said.

Kane said he expects to be fully healthy when he returns. “Obviously feeling 100% healthy and in great shape and ready to rock. So whatever that time is, you know, I’m looking forward to being a big contributor.”

It was tough to play injured last season, Kane said.

“when it comes to the injury and what it affects the most, last year, you know, was skating through pain. You know, every time you take a stride, you feel like you’re terrible, four or five different things. So, you know, just walking around, just being able to lift your leg off the ground six inches, you know, that was a struggle last year. So, you know, as I sit here today, you know, I can barely jog or run last year, so as I sit here today, I feel 1000 times better.”

At the Cult of Hockey

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