The Edmonton Oilers went into the 2025–26 season with Stanley Cup Final appearances in back-to-back years. They had a generational captain in Connor McDavid fresh off a 138-point Art Ross Trophy season and every reason to believe the window was still wide open. But eventually Edmonton got bounced in the first round by the Anaheim Ducks.
So what went wrong? One could point to the leaky defence and you’d be right—Edmonton ranked 25th in the league in goals against during the regular season. One could point to McDavid’s own postgame admission that the team had been “average” all year and never found its identity. Could point to the injuries. All fair.
While the team needs to level up in a lot many areas next season, there seems to also be a structural anomaly that doesn’t get talked about enough. The Oilers have now buried themselves in trade protection clauses and it might be making it hard to actually build a flexible roster.
Oilers have 15 players with trade protection
Right now, 15 Oilers hold some form of no-move or no-trade protection in their contracts. So almost two full roster lines worth of players the front office cannot move without permission.
There are two types of clauses at play here:
- No-Movement Clause (NMC): The player cannot be traded or placed on waivers without their consent. This is the most restrictive.
- Modified No-Trade Clause (M-NTC): The player submits a list of teams they would accept a trade to. The team has some flexibility, but it’s limited.
Here is the full list, as it stands:
| Connor McDavid | No Move |
| Leon Draisaitl | No Move |
| Mattias Ekholm | No Move |
| Ryan Nugent-Hopkins | No Move |
| Jake Walman | No Move + Modified No Trade |
| Trent Frederic | No Move + Modified No Trade |
| Jason Dickinson | No Move + Modified No Trade |
| Connor Murphy | No Move + Modified No Trade |
| Frederik Andersen | No Move + Modified No Trade |
| Zach Hyman | Modified No Trade |
| Ryan Shea | Modified No Trade |
| Tristan Jarry | Modified No Trade |
| Mattias Janmark | Modified No Trade |
| Evan Bouchard | No Move (kicks in 2027) |
| Vasily Podkolzin | Modified No Trade (through 2028) |
There is no debating McDavid and Draisaitl at the top of course. McDavid’s two-year extension at $12.5M per year and Draisaitl’s eight-year deal, which runs a no-movement clause all the way through the 2032–33 season, are commitments you make for generational players. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins being on there as the longest-serving Oiler? Sure. We wouldn’t have it any other way either. Ekholm has been excellent. Bouchard’s clause only kicks in 2027, so there is still runway there.
But as we work our way down the list, it gets a little harder to defend.
The bottom half is where it gets messy
Trent Frederic signed a deal in the summer of 2025 that gives him a full no-movement clause for the first four years, then transitions into modified no-trade protection for the remaining four. He is a depth forward. A fairly solid one but not the kind of player who historically earns that level of contract security, and it has been a talking point all year last season.
Jason Dickinson got a five-year deal at $4M per year with a full no-movement clause through June 2029. He is a competent two-way centre. Again, perfectly fine player. But a full NMC for a fourth-line centre is a lot.
Connor Murphy and Frederik Andersen both hold no-move protection as well. Andersen has battled injury throughout his career. Murphy is a depth defenceman.
Ryan Shea, Tristan Jarry, and Mattias Janmark round out the bottom of the list with modified no-trade clauses. Jarry in particular has had well-documented performance issues over the past couple of seasons. Not the most desirable of situations, really, and Edmonton was reportedly ‘trapped’ by his contract at deadline.
It can be said that Edmonton has been handing out trade protection as a recruiting and retention tool. Mostly as a sweetener in negotiations when they could not always win on pure money or term. And it worked, in the sense that they landed the players. But now those players are locked in, the team is capped tight with only about $4.7M in projected space and the front office has limited ability to react when things go sideways.
Is this a GM problem, a league problem, or both?
The Oilers are not uniquely reckless here. No-trade and no-movement clauses have been creeping deeper into NHL rosters across the league for years. The NHL’s collective bargaining agreement ties clause eligibility to unrestricted free agent status, which means as players age and earn more leverage, more of them push for and receive some form of protection.
So I guess we can say part of this is structural. For the Oilers, these were decisions made presumably with the intention of building a winning team around McDavid and Draisaitl before their respective clocks run out. The execution we feel though has started to create more problems than it solves.
There is a version of roster building where you use short-term, low-clause contracts for your depth pieces and save the protection for your core. The Oilers seemed to have moved away from that model, and the consequences are showing up now in a capped roster that is hard to change by a margin when the results demand it.
Oilers need to learn their lesson
Because right now, Edmonton sits with the most talented core in hockey and a structure around that core that might make it kind of difficult to fix things when they break. Take the Darnell Nurse situation for example that took a lot of maneuvering from the front office and no small show of good faith from Nurse himself to finally work a way out.
The harder question is whether the front office has learned a lesson about how freely it hands out this kind of protection going forward. After all, every summer where you can’t make the right move is a year off the clock.
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It can be looked at in more than 1 way. I definitely adds risks and reduces flexibility for the team. As a player if you want be to sign long term at a discounted rate because I want to play here, then I should be given the security that I won’t be traded. If you want the luxury of being able to trade players it is a lot harder to get them to give discounts
For yes this team couldn’t attract or keep good players. Now good players don’t wanna leave. Not a bad thing at all and almost every player is part of the core group. Ridiculous to say this is a problem.