The Edmonton Oilers continue to be the talk of the town in NHL spaces.
After a Saturday night hit by Elliotte Friedman on Hockey Night in Canada talking about a potential Jack Campbell call-up, most people thought it was imminent. A few days later and that news still hasn’t come up, so surely there is some more information at hand here?
The latest episode of 32 Thoughts dove into that subject and more:
The Thoughts
Continuing on the discussion around a Campbell recall, Friedman shared some important insight into what happened after his HNIC hit and why the recall hasn’t happened yet:
“I think it’s coming. Now I have to tell you I had a funny exchange on Saturday night, so I had heard he was going to play the game on Saturday and then he was going to come. Now the Oilers are right at the roster limit so I think part of the issue here is that they have to figure out how to make it work because they save a little over a million dollars on the cap because he is in the AHL, if they are going to bring him back up they don’t save that money anymore and they will have to figure out how to make room for him on the roster…
Saturday night was eventful, to say the least. Their game [Bakersfield] against Texas starts at 7 local, 10 eastern, I do my Headlines/32 Bit on Saturday night just after 9 o’clock and not long after 10 I get a text from a scout I know who’s at the game…He said to go on the internet and look at the first goal of this game. So I do, and I’m not going to lie to anybody that was a rough one. It was a rough one. Campbell battled back and made some good saves and I think they won 6–4…the game was a bit of an adventure. There was one really ugly goal, there were some great saves, there was one really weird goal, the fourth one was a really weird goal, but I think the Oilers are committed to this and I do expect to see him.”
Tough to see that the team is committed to this move, but also apparently not committed enough to ignore the bad start. The duo debated what the cost would be to move Campbell right now, to which Jeff Maret guessed a high pick and/or a top prospect, but Friedman continued insight into why the team is committed to making this work:
“If the idea is to buy him out, it’s going to cost you $10M. The Oilers are looking at a situation where they will either have to keep him and buy him out at the end of the year, $10M, or they are going to have to trade a high pick and or a prospect to get it done. So I think the Oilers say ‘We are stupid if we don’t give this one more run.’ Now the challenge with them is that they don’t have a huge runway. They don’t have a lot of time to be patient with this. But I believe their choice was, especially as he started to play better in the AHL… we are not doing ourselves enough justice if we don’t give him one more shot. That is what I think they are going to do. Once they figure out the roster, that’s what I think they are going to do.”
“First of all, I root for Campbell because I root for the person. I want this to work. I want this to work. I was talking to a former goalie the other day and he said to me ‘You have to work it into his head that you don’t have to be prime Dominik Hasek, you just have to be one save better than the other guy.’ The problem is he said to me that it all depends on how you take it cause lets say you give up a goal, now all of a sudden you think ‘oh man now I have to be two goals better than the other guy’ it piles up on you. It’s all between the ears. He said to me ‘the thing you really have to do is convince Jack Campbell you don’t have to be Hasek, or Roy, or whoever. Just say Jack we need one more save than the other guy at the end of the ice, can you do that?’ He has to buy in. He has to buy into that.”
The news didn’t stop there though as they picked up on the thread from last week that saw the Oilers looking to make a deal with the Columbus Blue Jackets:
“This Columbus thing is pretty interesting…I don’t think they are the only team that has been around Columbus a bit…the one thing I would say about Edmonton is that they didn’t want to do anything that was just lateral. “A” was they we to find a way to give Campbell one more chance, and secondly are we just going to make a trade for the hell of it or if we do anything is it going to be significant.”
“I’m not even saying that, I know they have been following Columbus around a lot and I know I said on the last podcast they weren’t necessarily looking at goalies they were looking at everyone. I just am not convinced there isn’t anything close between them. Edmonton just thinks [Connor] McDavid is healthy, [Mattias] Ekholm is healthy, and we need to see if Campbell is any better. We are not rushing into anything.”
From all accounts, it sounds like the Oilers are first committed to getting Campbell back in the NHL. From there, they are going to be patient, but not too patient, about making any additional moves even though they are running out of runway. Seems extremely simple and not complicated to most.
That being said, the team is trying to not spend significant assets for the sake of making a move and that is something that is calming to note during a season of such volatility.
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