April 12, 2025 by Ryan Lotsberg

As if the injury issues for the Edmonton Oilers weren’t piling up enough already, the bad news keeps getting worse. The team’s championship hopes took a big hit the day after clinching a playoff spot for the sixth consecutive season. Mattias Ekholm played 1:52 in his return to the lineup on Friday night against the San Jose Sharks after missing seven games with what was believed to be a core or a groin issue. Ekholm fell down twice on one shift, one of which involved clipping skates with a Sharks forward in the neutral zone, and immediately went to the bench for a brief conversation with Oilers head athletic therapist T.D. Forss before heading down the tunnel.

TSN’s Ryan Rishaug has reported that best case scenario will see Ekholm miss a significant amount of time. The worst case scenario is that his season is done.

It’s been a tumultuous couple of months for Ekholm. He missed the February 1 game against the Toronto Maple Leafs due to an illness that was going around the team. He played the team’s final three games before the 4 Nations Faceoff break, but he was at less than 100%. Then he played in the 4 Nations Faceoff. A bug of some kind was also swirling through Sweden’s dressing room at that event, so who knows how he was feeling during the tournament.

Ekholm played after that tournament, but he was taking maintenance days rather than practicing on non-game days. That pattern only lasted so long before Ekholm hit the shelf for six games between March 4 and March 18 due to an undisclosed injury. Then he played in four games before heading back to the press box for seven more games between March 26 and April 11. As noted above, he played 1:52 before exiting Friday’s game.

In a piece that I wrote on March 28, I suggested that Ekholm has likely been dealing with a core or a groin injury since the start of last season. The Oilers held captain’s skates for two weeks prior to the start of the 2023-24 training camp. Ekholm missed a significant portion of that training camp due to a groin injury, but he only missed one regular season game as a result of that injury.

Related: Is it more than maintenance for Ekholm?

When asked if that injury would be something he would have to monitor going forward or if he was fully past the injury before returning to the lineup on October 14, 2023, Ekholm said that “… a groin is not like you break a bone and it’s healing, then it’s fine. It’s something you’ll have to monitor. I’ve never had it before, so I’m probably the wrong guy to ask, but I would be shocked if it just was one day it’s 100% and it’s all over and never coming back.”

He played 79 regular season games plus 25 more in the playoffs after returning from that injury. Then he played in 72 more games this season including preseason, the regular season, and the 4 Nations Faceoff. The regular season schedule was more gruelling this season due to the 4 Nations Faceoff, and the Oilers played in the hockey game that occurred the latest into the calendar year ever on June 24, 2024. That’s not a recipe for long-term health for a 34-year old defenceman with a nagging groin injury.

The way that Ekholm’s injury situation has been handled is fair game for criticism. I’m not a doctor, but there’s information out there that says core and/or groin issues linger. 

Look at Evander Kane. He struggled with his core/groin issues for the majority of last season. Then they let him keep playing until it got so bad that he required surgery that forced him to miss the entirety of the 2024-25 regular season.

Related: 2025 Oilers trade deadline wrap

I don’t know if the injuries to Kane and Ekholm are the same or not. We know that Kane had surgery to address issues in both adductors and his core on September 19, 2024. We know that Ekholm classified his own injury as a groin injury on October 13, 2023. The injury that he missed time with in the last two months is believed to be a core injury of some kind, but no formal announcement was made by the team. The video from the last of Ekholm’s two falls on Friday night made it look like a core or a groin issue. Whether these are all different injuries or the same injury is a mystery, but my belief is that it would be unlikely for all those injuries to not be related.

My point is if you know a player has a nagging injury, then why rush him back into the lineup? It’s about winning games right now, not about the long-term health of the players. It’s hockey. If you can walk, then you can play. Players play through injuries all the time. The pressure to do so from organizations has gone down in the last couple of decades, but teams still believe that a star player at less than 100% is better than a lesser player at 100%.

Kane started experiencing issues around the time the coaching change was made early last season. The Oilers had dug themselves a massive hole to climb out of early in that season. How can you justify taking one of your best scoring wingers out of the lineup when you need to claw your way out of the league’s basement and into playoff contention, right? Then how could you justify taking that scoring winger out of the lineup when the team was rolling through the league during the middle portion of the season, right? Shutting him down earlier might’ve meant that he could’ve played this season, but that’s not how it was handled because they had tunnel vision on the here and now.

The Oilers were in contention for the Pacific Division crown in early February. Then they lost six of seven games. The proper move might’ve been to take Ekholm out of the lineup on that Eastern road trip where he was taking maintenance days, but the team was mired in a losing streak. How can you justify taking your best all around defenceman out of the lineup when the team is on a losing streak in the middle of a race for the division title, right?

Leon Draisaitl missed four games between March 18 and March 29 after taking an awkward fall in a game against the Utah Hockey Club. The team lost three out of four games while Draisaitl was out, including a 6-1 drubbing at the hands of the Seattle Kraken in the last of those games. Draisaitl came back and basically put the team on his back by scoring his 50th goal of the season to tie the game against the Calgary Flames and his 51st in overtime. The Flames are the team that could’ve bumped the Oilers out of the playoffs had things gone a certain way, so that was a big game. Draisaitl played in three games, and left the third game approximately halfway through after taking a couple more awkward falls in a game against the San Jose Sharks on April 3. He hasn’t played since.

Then came the Frederic situation. The Oilers were in a situation where they only had 11 healthy forwards entering a pivotal game on April 5 that may have ultimately decided who gets home ice advantage in the highly likely first round series between the Oilers and the Los Angeles Kings. Included in the list of scratches for that game were Draisaitl and Connor McDavid. No replacement could match the impact of either one of those players. They could’ve played short for a game then made an emergency recall for the next game; but no, that’s not what they did. They inserted Frederic into the lineup. He was expected to return for the next game, but he was pressed into action early because the team was short for an important game.

How did that play out? Frederic played 7:10 in the game, reaggravated his high ankle sprain during his game-opening six second shift, and is now going to be out until either Game 1 or Game 2. Oh yeah, they lost the game. They lost the game, home ice advantage in round one, AND Frederic.

McDavid suffered what is believed to have been a core issue of some kind against the Winnipeg Jets on March 20, just a game after the Oilers lost Draisaitl to injury. He missed eight games before returning last Wednesday against the St. Louis Blues. It didn’t look like he was going to play that night until a few hours prior to puck drop. 

The team was once again faced with a situation where they were only going to have eleven forwards available to them that night. McDavid clearly wanted to play because he wanted to play, but he also noted that he “wasn’t taking anybody’s spot”, so he figured he would give it a go. It was a situation where the Oilers could have clinched a playoff spot with a win and a Flames loss, so it was another important game where a star player was inserted into the lineup earlier than anticipated because the game was important. McDavid has an impressive seven points in the two games he has played since coming back. He’s not a guy you want to risk losing long-term though.

I understand that the Oilers are in a championship window. I fully understand the “win now” mentality. I also understand that teams need to ice the best rosters possible to give themselves the best chances of winning. The idea of star players playing at less than 100% being better than replacement level players playing at 100% isn’t lost on me. 

The short-sightedness that comes along with that mentality drives me absolutely INSANE though! Decision makers get tunnel vision, and they don’t see the implications of their short-sightedness.

If the idea is to have the player play in as many games as possible, shouldn’t the correct course of action be to shut them down early to prevent situations where they miss months or entire seasons while recovering from surgeries? I would be inclined to say so. The hard decision is to pull the player out of the lineup before you’re forced to because he needs surgery. The hard decisions in life are often the right decisions.

I also understand that soft tissue injuries like the ones that Ekholm, Kane, Draisaitl, Frederic, and McDavid have dealt with or are dealing with are difficult. Core and groin injuries linger for a reason, especially with repeated use. High ankle sprains are also notoriously difficult to heal.

I wasn’t in the room, so I can’t tell you what Ekholm said about how he was feeling before Friday’s game. He could’ve been feeling perfectly fine. For all I know, the injury Ekholm sustained in Friday’s game could be a totally new injury. I just don’t believe that though. All the information we have about Ekholm’s recent injury history and about the nature of such injuries makes me think it’s not a new injury. They had Cam Dineen available on Friday though. He isn’t Ekholm, but he more than handled himself in the one NHL game he got earlier this season. I would rather have played Dineen against the league’s worst team than risked the outcome we got with Ekholm.

We don’t have all of the information, so it isn’t totally fair for me to lambaste the organization for the way they have handled injuries recently; but they’re playing with fire.

I acknowledge that this is a crazy rash of injuries, but is home ice advantage really worth losing important core players to long-term injuries over? I don’t think it is. It was important to clinch a playoff spot, but they could’ve held Ekholm and McDavid out until the last couple games of the season and still clinched the playoffs comfortably. The odds of the Flames, the Minnesota Wild, and the St. Louis Blues all passing the Oilers and pushing them out of the playoffs entirely would’ve been extremely slim. If that was shaping up to be a possibility in the last week of the season, then they could’ve taken the risk.

Injuries happen in hockey. They can happen in any game or practice situation. They can also happen off the ice. It’s a reality that everyone has to live with. The risk of injury is higher if the player has a pre-existing soft tissue injury though. The Oilers have taken short-sighted risks with injured stars in games deemed to be important down the stretch. I don’t feel those risks were necessarily worth potentially risking longer term injuries that could impact the team in these playoffs and potentially next season as well.

HInsight is 20/20 and these circumstances are unusual to say the least, but when you play with fire, you’re bound to get burned eventually. They’ve already suffered a burn with the Kane situation, and the Ekholm situation is turning into a serious burn. The Oilers organization clearly hasn’t learned its lesson yet.

Jake Walman’s importance to the team is greater now than it was when he arrived in Edmonton because of the injury to Ekholm. Oilers GM Stan Bowman was smart to get Walman at the deadline. He wanted a lefty just in case something happened to Ekholm, Darnell Nurse, or Brett Kulak because he wasn’t comfortable with the left-handed replacement options in the organization. Walman was acquired in the early hours of March 7. Ekholm was already out with his injury. Bowman had been aggressively pursuing Walman since January. I don’t know if Bowman’s aggressive pursuit of Walman was because he knew Ekholm had a nagging issue or not, but that isn’t a far leap to make.

Now Walman is dealing with an injury right now as well. I don’t know what that injury is, but I don’t want to see Walman back until the playoffs at the earliest now that they have clinched a playoff berth.