January 16, 2023 by Ryan Lotsberg

You can find part one of this piece, The Decade of Darkness, here.

Peter Chiarelli was the man hired to build the Edmonton Oilers around Connor McDavid and their young core. Expectations were high and Chiarelli was under a lot of pressure to win. The panic trades started early in the Chiarelli era:

June 26, 2015: 2016 1st round pick (Matt Barzal) and 2016 2nd round pick (Mitchell Stephens) to New York for Griffin Reinhart.

Reinhart was a former fourth overall pick, and Chiarelli thought that he was NHL ready. As it turned out, Reinhart wasn’t NHL material. Losing the Barzal pick for nothing really hurt.

McDavid’s first year didn’t go well at all. They got 70 points and finished seventh in the Pacific Division. They were 25th in goals for and goals against. The problems were many and deep. That season went particularly poorly for one Oiler, and he was shipped out of town before the trade deadline:

February 27, 2016: Justin Schultz to Pittsburgh for 2016 3rd round pick (Filip Berglund)

Schultz was a promising offensive defenceman that was making a lot of mistakes that ended up in the back of his net, much like Evan Bouchard did early in this season. Schultz took a ton of heat from fans and the media, and Chiarelli dealt him away. Schultz was 25 years old at the time of the trade. He scored 51 points the next season and won Stanley Cups with Pittsburgh in each of the next two seasons. There was no room on the Oilers for him because they needed to win right then, but Pittsburgh won with him twice immediately after the trade. Schultz had too big of a role in Edmonton, but he had to play that same role with Kris Letang out of the lineup for the Penguins during the 2017 playoffs.

The trade that Chiarelli will be remembered for the most happened in his first offseason:

June 29, 2016: Taylor Hall to New Jersey for Adam Larsson

There were a lot of reasons that this trade happened, but pressure and panic certainly played their roles. Chiarelli was under pressure to add a right-handed defenceman since the team had Darnell Nurse and Oscar Klefbom on the left side already and the team was porous defensively. Chiarelli got the guy he wanted, but we’ll never know if he could’ve got more for Hall if he wasn’t under such pressure to fix the defence.

The Oilers got 103 points and finished second in the Pacific Division in 2016-17. They lost to Anaheim in the second round of the playoffs. This “panic trade” happened shortly after that season:

June 22, 2017: Jordan Eberle to New York for Ryan Strome. 

Chiarelli said that he wanted cap space in case Leon Draisaitl was to get an offer sheet. He was panicking over the possibility of losing Draisaitl. That seemed like a thinly veiled excuse to hide the fact that Eberle was in then coachTodd McLellan’s dog house in the playoffs, but that was Chiarelli’s story.

Related: The History of Oilers Panic Trades: Part One – The Decade of Darkness

The Oilers took a step back in 2017-18 by missing the playoffs after being a game away from the Conference Finals the year before. Chiarelli didn’t like the team’s start, so he made a trade:

November 18, 2017: Jussi Jokinen (1 point in 14 games with Edmonton) to Los Angeles for Mike Cammalleri (7 points in 15 games with LA)

Jokinen only got five points in 18 games for LA that year while Cammalleri got 22 points in 51 games for the Oilers, so the trade was a win. It didn’t get the team into the dance though.

2018-19 was another rough year for Chiarelli’s Oilers. Chiarelli was fired halfway through that season, but not before he made some “panic trades” to try to save the season:

November 16, 2018: Ryan Strome (2 points in 18 games) to New York for Ryan Spooner (2 points in 16 games)

November 22, 2018: 2020 6th round pick (Cole Reinhardt) to Ottawa for Chris Wideman

December 30, 2018: Chris Wideman and 2019 3rd round pick (John Ludvig) to Florida for Alex Petrovic; Jason Garrison and Drake Caggiula to Chicago for Brandon Manning and Robin Norell

The Strome for Spooner trade was perplexing. The fact that Chiarelli turned Eberle into Strome because he was scared of an offer sheet and then turned the return for Eberle into Spooner (who played himself out of the league that season) because the team had a bad start and he was feeling the heat was maddening. None of Wideman, Manning, or Petrovic magically solved the team’s defensive issues, so those trades were all futile.

Let’s come back to the current situation in Edmonton. The Oilers have the two best players in the world in the primes of their careers, and they’re fighting for a wild card spot because their defence has made several costly mistakes and young players haven’t progressed as expected. The solution from most fans and pundits is to fix the team with a trade. There’s panic in the air in Edmonton and the pressure to win now is high, so any major trade right now would qualify as a “panic trade”.

“Panic trades” have proven to be ineffective at fixing defensive issues in Edmonton. Pitkanen, Visnovsky, Schultz, Reinhart, Wideman, Manning, and Petrovic are all examples of defencemen acquired via trade while the GM was feeling pressure to improve the defence that all fell flat.

Jakob Chychrun is a bit different from the names above in that he’s younger at the potential time of acquisition, but I don’t think he can solve the team’s defensive issues all on his own. Acquiring Nick Schultz, a veteran shutdown defenceman, didn’t help the Oilers lower their goals against as a team; so I don’t see how adding Joel Edmundson, Valdislav Gavrikov, or Luke Schenn would solve the issue now.

Ken Holland didn’t panic when the team was in a tailspin last season, and they got to the Conference Finals. Last season was different because Holland was able to add Evander Kane and he made a coaching change. Those things won’t happen this year. That doesn’t mean that making a “panic trade” is the answer this year.

Philip Broberg has dealt with multiple injuries this season, but he’s starting to elevate his game now that he’s healthy again. Bouchard has calmed his game down substantially. Nurse isn’t making as many of the major mistakes as he was making in December. Vincent Desharnais has shown that he belongs during his short stint with the Oilers thus far. This defence group can be much better than it was in the first half of the season.

Given the history of “panic trades” in Edmonton, perhaps the best course of action this season is to relax and let the current group figure it out instead of spending assets that have a high probability of contributing now and/or down the road on players that likely won’t have a major impact on the team’s results this season.

Thanks to CapFriendly for the trade information, and to Hockey Reference for the season results statistics used in this piece.