Edmonton Oilers 20-Man Quarter Century Team
September 29, 2025
Knoblauch signs three-year extension
October 3, 2025
October 1, 2025 by Ryan Lotsberg
The Edmonton Oilers announced that they have acquired goaltender Connor Ingram from the Utah Mammoth in exchange for future considerations on Wednesday. The Mammoth will retain $800,000 of Ingram’s $1.95 AAV, which makes his contract fully buryable in the AHL.
Ingram has a 3.14 goals against average and a .902 save percentage in 102 career NHL games with the Nashville Predators, the Arizona Coyotes, and the Mammoth. Last season, he struggled with a 3.27 GAA and an .882 sv% in just 22 games. Ingram spent time in the NHLPA’s Player Assistance Program last season while dealing with mental health issues after losing his mother in December of 2024. He also spent time in the Player Assistance Program in 2021. He nearly retired due to obsessive compulsive disorder that led him to a drinking problem. Ingram won the 2024 Bill Masterton Memorial Trophy because of his ongoing battle with mental health. The 28-year old had two consecutive seasons with a .907 sv% prior to last season, and he has been considered a goaltender that could become a successful NHL starting goaltender in short order.
Ingram is set to resume his playing career this season. He became available when the Mammoth signed Vitek Vanecek this summer. Ingram’s wish was to play for an organization that’s closer to his hometown of Imperial, Saskatchewan (which is also Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch’s hometown). Speculation linking the Oilers to Ingram had been out there for several weeks, including when Ingram cleared waivers last week since Edmonton is close to home for Ingram and the Oilers had a desire to add a goaltender.
This is literally a risk-free move by the Oilers. It cost absolutely nothing to get Ingram, and his contract is fully buryable. The Oilers will not carry a cap hit for Ingram as long as he is in the AHL. It was a smart decision to not claim Ingram on waivers because the Oilers are now acquiring a player that doesn’t need to clear waivers again to go to the AHL right now, and they were able to negotiate salary retention in a trade.
The AHL is exactly where he will start. He will form a tandem with Matt Tomkins on the Bakersfield Condors. He will have to work his way up to the NHL if he wants that opportunity.
There are many Oilers fans out there that have been critical of the current goaltending tandem, claiming that goaltending is the reason the Oilers have not won a Stanley Cup in the Connor McDavid era. Calvin Pickard is adored by his teammates and he wins games consistently, but his regular season usage has primarily been against non-playoff teams and his underlying numbers have never leapt off the page. He isn’t the source of the problem though. Those fans have been BEGGING for the Oilers to add a goaltender because it would mean the end of Stuart Skinner’s time in Edmonton. Not a day goes by without reading Skinner slander on my timeline.
Let’s not get this twisted. Ingram and Skinner have both played three seasons in the NHL. Skinner has had a better save percentage than Ingram in two of those three seasons, and he was just .002 behind Ingram in 2023-24. Skinner has had a better GAA than Ingram in all three of those seasons.
Related: Like it or not, Skinner is in
We have to remember that Ingram has never played on a team as good as Skinner’s Oilers. If you take that into consideration by looking at metrics in relation to expected performance on MoneyPuck, you can see that Ingram and Skinner were pretty much even in 2022-23. In 2023-24, Ingram’s performance compared to expected was better than Skinner’s. Last season, Skinner did better than Ingram compared to expected. We also have to remember that Skinner has played 160 NHL games in those three seasons compared to Ingram’s 97. Skinner has a much larger body of work.
There’s no evidence in the numbers that suggests that Ingram is an obvious immediate upgrade over Skinner, and there’s no evidence to definitively suggest that Ingram will be the superior goaltender going forward. Ingram was not brought here to save the team’s goaltending situation. He was brought here to make the crease a bit more competitive. The contracts of Ingram, Skinner, and Pickard all expire at the end of this season; so the three of them will compete for playing time this season and for jobs next season. Ingram supplanting one of Skinner or Pickard is not a guarantee.
Related: Deep Dive: Skinner vs Gibson & Vejmelka
The other implication that adding Ingram to the mix will have is in regards to where Connor Ungar, Nathaniel Day, and Samuel Jonsson will play this season. One of them was slated to back up Tomkins in Bakersfield, but that won’t happen now. Ungar was the starter for the Ft. Wayne Komets, the Oilers’ ECHL affiliate, last season. Day got two shutouts in three games for the Komets after his junior season finished last season, and he started all five playoff games for the Komets over Ungar. Jonsson put up great numbers in Sweden’s second league last season, and is expected to play in North America this season. There are three goalies vying for two spots in the Komets crease this season. All of them need to be playing games so they can develop. Maybe there’s a spot for Jonsson in Sweden, but he has nothing left to prove in Sweden’s second league. That will be a challenge that the Oilers have to navigate in the coming days.
Adding Ingram is a risk-free bet by Oilers GM Stan Bowman. It improves the organizational goaltending depth chart, it gives Skinner and Pickard reason to look in their rear view mirrors, and it will improve the odds of getting the organization’s prospects into some playoff games with the Condors this season.
