October 4, 2025 by Ryan Lotsberg

Multiple younger, unproven players have shown well at Edmonton Oilers camp, which is an encouraging development for the organization’s long-term viability as a contender. It poses an immediate problem that will take some creativity to solve though.

Bob Stauffer said that he “could foresee a scenario” where the Oilers have all of Matt Savoie, Ike Howard, David Tomasek, Noah Philp, and Alec Regula on the season opening roster, which is due on Monday.

Can forsee a scenario where the @EdmontonOilers carry Matt Savoie, Isaac Howard, David Tomasek, Noah Philp and Alec Regula on their opening day roster.
EDM needs internal growth and development from those players and for that matter Vasily Podkolzin and Ty Emberson as well.

— Bob Stauffer (@Bob_Stauffer) September 28, 2025

The first three were expected to be on the roster. Philp and Regula needed to have good camps to plop themselves into the mix, and they have delivered. The Oilers would risk losing them by trying to pass them through waivers to send them to the Bakersfield Condors. They seem keen on keeping these two players around to start the season.

26 players remain at Oilers camp. They will need to get to 23 or less by 3 pm MT on Monday. Hyman’s injury will keep him off the roster. Max Jones is not expected to make the team. He has been dealing with an injury since the September 23 game in Winnipeg. Injured players can’t be waived, so he’s still with the team. Jones is expected to be healthy in time for the season opening roster submission according to Daniel Nugent-Bowman, so he could and will likely be waived on Sunday. Jake Walman is also expected to be ready for opening night, so he will likely avoid the IR. Mattias Janmark is expected to be ready to go late next week, but he could be placed on IR for Monday’s season opening roster submission.

Based on the current players left at camp, the Oilers’ cap hit sits at $97,824,166, which means that they need to shed at least $2,324,166 for Monday’s roster submission. As noted above, Jones ($1M) is likely to be waived and sent to the Bakersfield Condors. I’m going to write this piece under the assumption that Jones will not be on the roster. That leaves the Oilers needing to shed $1,324,166.

$1.15 million is the absolute most of any one player’s cap hit that can be buried in the minors, so two players aside from Jones will have to be removed from the roster to get under the cap. Let’s take a look at how this is likely to go down.

LTIR

The LTIR rules are slightly different this season. If a player is going to return to the lineup at some point during the season, the maximum amount of LTIR relief that a team can get for an individual player is equivalent to the league average salary from the previous season, which is $3,817,293. Hyman’s cap hit is $5.5 million, so that $3,817,293 figure would be the maximum potential LTIR relief that the Oilers could get by putting Hyman on LTIR.

That amount gets added to whatever the team’s cap hit is when they place the player on LTIR to arrive at the team’s new upper limit and their LTIR relief amount. That’s why teams planning on using LTIR will try to make their season opening rosters as close to the salary cap as possible without going over. Doing so maximizes the amount of relief they could get.

Another new wrinkle to the league’s roster management rules for this season is that teams can’t do “paper transactions” anymore, meaning that if a player is sent to the AHL, they have to get on a plane and play at least one game in the AHL rather than being called back up the same day. Of note, this rule will not kick in until October 10 according to PuckPedia. That means that teams can do paper transactions to navigate difficult roster situations within the first business week of the season.

Tomasek ($1.2M), Howard ($950k), and Savoie ($886,666) are the three players listed on PuckPedia’s current Oilers active roster that are exempt from waivers. Only $1.15 million of Tomasek’s contract could be buried, so burying him alone wouldn’t get the job done. Burying Tomasek plus sending another player down wouldn’t maximize the amount of LTIR relief that the Oilers could get, so it’s unlikely that Tomasek will be involved in any paper transaction.

Howard and Savoie both have potential performance bonuses that they could earn this season. When a player is placed onto LTIR, the sum of all of the performance bonuses of all players on the active roster is placed in a performance bonus pool. If the amount of potential performance bonuses on the active roster surpasses the amount in the performance bonus pool at any point while the team is using LTIR, then the performance bonus of the player that pushes the total over the amount in the performance bonus pool gets his potential performance bonus tacked onto his cap hit.

So if my understanding is correct, if Howard and Savoie were to be sent down before Hyman goes onto LTIR and then called back up afterwards, their potential performance bonuses would be added onto their cap hits. The Oilers would have enough LTIR relief to accommodate their cap hits with their potential performance bonuses added on, and it would only be for the duration of Hyman’s stint on LTIR.

Those moves would put the Oilers at 24 players on the active roster, so one player would have to be removed from the roster to get to 23. Janmark is the only injured Oiler expected to not be ready for opening night aside from Hyman, so Janmark is likely going to show up on the IR on Monday.

Janmark is not going to be out for very long though, so the Oilers would need to come up with another solution to get to 23 players once Janmark is ready. More on that in the next section.

The advantage of using LTIR to get all of the players listed by Stauffer on the roster is that the Oilers would only have to create one roster spot rather than two; but in reality, a second player would have to be demoted or otherwise removed from the roster once Hyman is ready to return to the lineup. Using LTIR to get Philp and Regula on the roster would just kick the can down the road by about a month in this situation.

Going into LTIR would prevent the Oilers from being able to accrue cap space for however long Hyman is out, which would impact the amount of salary that they could take on at the trade deadline. That didn’t stop Oilers GM Stan Bowman from utilizing Evander Kane’s LTIR relief pool by recalling Philp, Drake Caggiula, and Josh Brown at various points last season though. It also didn’t stop Bowman from making deals at the trade deadline.

Players that could be waived

Putting Janmark on IR to start the season is a temporary solution because Janmark is not expected to miss much time. Unless the plan is to send one of Tomasek, Howard, or Savoie down when Janmark comes back, the Oilers will have to waive and demote someone once Janmark returns.

That player could well be Janmark. Teams rarely claim players whose AAV’s are over $1 million, especially ones that that have term left on their contracts. Janmark ($1.45M) has a year left on his deal after this season.

Janmark is trusted by the coaching staff because he’s reliable defensively and he’s a strong penalty killer. He has more speed than he gets credit for. According to NHL Edge, he had the NHL’s sixth highest top speed burst last season (24.36 mph), and he was in the 88th percentile for speed bursts over 20 mph. His issue is that he doesn’t score anymore. The 32-year old got two goals in 80 games last season, and he only got four goals in 71 games the year before.

It should be noted the Oilers waived Janmark just prior to his first season with the Oilers (October 7, 2022) only to bring him back up on November 9, 2022. It was a different management regime, but it wouldn’t be an unprecedented move.

Curtis Lazar hasn’t been all that noticeable in camp, but he’s a reliable right-handed centre that can take faceoffs and kill penalties. That’s pretty much the same role Philp would have. Is it necessary to have two players that essentially serve the same function? Philp is bigger and younger than Lazar. Lazar has always been fast, but he’s coming off a knee injury that slowed him down last season. Philp isn’t exactly slow. I would put the odds of Lazar getting claimed if exposed to waivers at 50/50. It would be nice to keep Lazar for organizational depth, but losing a 30-year old depth forward wouldn’t be a crushing blow.

The Oilers are currently carrying eight defencemen, which is excessive. Ty Emberson ($1.3M) also has another year left on his deal after this one, which would likely deter other teams from claiming him on waivers.

Emberson signed a two-year deal with an AAV of $1.3 million on April 19, 2025, which was two days before the Oilers opened their first round series against the Los Angeles Kings. The 25-year old only played in nine playoff games before sitting in the press box for the team’s other eleven playoff games. I don’t think the Oilers would’ve signed Emberson to a two-year deal if they didn’t see value in him, but the playoffs didn’t help his cause. 

Neither has Regula’s emergence in this camp. The Oilers also signed Regula to a two-year contract this past spring, albeit for a lower AAV than what Emberson got. Regula and Emberson are the same age and the same hand. Emberson essentially has one more season of NHL experience than Regula has, but Regula has the higher ceiling and is a better puck mover than Emberson. He’s also bigger than Emberson.

Related: 2025-26 Oilers training camp preview

Emberson has been playing with Brett Kulak on what is likely to be the third pairing, which is a bit of a tell indicating that Emberson likely isn’t going to be waived. I can envision the two of them rotating into games early in the season. Don’t dismiss Emberson being waived and demoted as a possibility if Regula gets into the lineup early and shows well though.

Troy Stecher got into eight playoff games after Emberson found himself in the pressbox, but he was really good in those eight playoff games. He got taken out of the lineup after playing five games because Mattias Ekholm came back, but he got three more games in the Stanley Cup Final. You know what you’re getting with Stecher, which is a steady presence that moves the puck well and battles his tail off. He’s a great teammate and a valuable player to have in the organization and it would suck to lose him, but the organization might have to weigh that against the potential of losing a 25-year old that they’re high on.

Wrap

Breaking in Savoie, Howard, Tomasek, Philp, and Regula all at once could come with growing pains in the first month of the season. The Oilers could really use a strong start this season after two consecutive poor starts, but they also need to inject the team with youth for the good of the team’s future. The best time to do that is early in the season while teams are still finding their rhythm and the Oilers would have time to dig themselves out of any potential hole they might dig themselves. 

We also have to remember that a lack of experience doesn’t always lead to a lack of results. Experienced players make mistakes too, and sometimes the inexperienced player is better than the experienced player.

Placing Janmark on IR then waiving him and burying him in the AHL once he’s healthy makes a lot of sense in this situation. Ideally, Janmark and another player would be waived and demoted to avoid LTIR; but Janmark’s injury makes that an impossibility for Monday’s roster submission.

To recap, I believe that we will see the following moves for Monday’s roster submission:

• Max Jones waived on Sunday and sent to Bakersfield on Monday
• Ike Howard and Matt Savoie sent to Bakersfield
• Zach Hyman placed on LTIR
• Mattias Janmark placed on IR
• Ike Howard and Matt Savoie recalled from Bakersfield

Those moves would put the Oilers exactly $13,500 under the cap prior to placing Hyman on LTIR. After placing Hyman on LTIR and recalling Howard and Savoie, the Oilers would have a cap hit of $96,824,166 without their performance bonuses included and $98,074,166 with their potential performance bonuses included. 

Both figures would fit under the upper limit with the $3,817,293 LTIR relief for Hyman added to the $95,274,166 value of the cap hit without Howard and Savoie included before placing Hyman on LTIR with enough space to make a recall should injury necessitate:

Once Janmark is deemed fit to return, I believe that he will be waived and sent to Bakersfield because he is the most likely player to clear waivers based on his contract. That will buy the Oilers time to evaluate some of their younger players in regular season action. When Hyman returns in November, the Oilers will have to send someone else down to Bakersfield. The team will have more information on the younger players to inform a potential roster decision involving one of them by then.

For what it’s worth, PuckPedia’s latest iteration of the Oilers roster has the Oilers at $600,834 under the cap with Philp and Regula included, and Jones, Tomasek, and Lazar not included. This scenario would allow the Oilers to avoid having to use LTIR. I don’t think the Oilers will bury Tomasek, but Puckpedia’s scenario is plausible.