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September 22, 2026Formenton is the worst of the Oilers’ “second chance” personnel decisions
EDMONTON, AB - July 24, 2024: Edmonton Oilers GM & EVP of Hockey Operations Stan Bowman (left) and Oilers CEO Jeff Jackson (right) address the media at Rogers Place. Photo Credit: Oilers TV
September 10, 2026 by Ryan Lotsberg
If an NHL team is going to make a controversial personnel decision, odds are that it’s the Edmonton Oilers. They have made multiple such decisions in recent years, but their latest one has surely come with the most scrutiny.
Alex Formenton, who was one of the five players that were charged and acquitted in the sexual assault trial stemming from an incident following the 2018 World Junior Championships, signed a one-year deal for the league minimum $850k cap hit on Wednesday.
I’ll get the hockey perspective on this signing out of the way because it’s a much simpler perspective. The 2017 second round pick has 39 points in 109 NHL games over parts of four seasons, the best of which saw him score 32 points in 79 games as a 22-year old in 2021-22. Formenton may have had some promise at that time, but four full seasons have passed since then. He spent one of those years working in construction after being charged, and he spent the last three seasons playing in Switzerland. He didn’t exactly thrive in Switzerland’s National League, which is a great league, but a far cry from the NHL.
The bottom line is that this is a player that may once have had potential, but missed a critical year of development and has not been playing NHL-level hockey during the early years of what should be his peak. At 26 years old, fans should not be hoping that Formenton improves much over what we saw from him last season, which was 23 points in 42 games in Switzerland. That’s lower production than former Oilers Markus Granlund, Jesse Puljujarvi, Toni Rajala, Gaetan Haas, and Drake Caggiula had in that same league last season. Obviously each individual has different results and experiences playing in different leagues, but the list of players that fared better than Formenton did last season isn’t exactly star studded.
Perhaps Formenton could fare just fine in a bottom of the roster penalty killing role, but there was no need for the Oilers to add such a player. Yes, two of the team’s most utilized penalty killers from last season (Matt Savoie and Mattias Janmark) will both miss time to start the regular season. Teams typically use three penalty killing pairs at most. There are seven other regular forwards that were trusted with penalty killing ice time on their respective teams last season starting the season healthy (Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Connor McDavid, Jason Dickinson, Vasily Podkolzin, Kasperi Kapanen, Mathieu Joseph, and Josh Samanski). Note that does NOT include Savoie or Janmark, which would make nine penalty killing forwards available at full health before signing Formenton. There was genuinely ZERO need for the Oilers to sign a player with Formenton’s penalty killing ability, especially one that hasn’t played NHL hockey in four years and was never an impact player.
On to the more important perspective of this signing, which is the off-ice component. The most consistent argument from supporters of this signing is that the players were acquitted and therefore people shouldn’t have a problem with the signing. I FULLY understand that Formenton and all the other players involved were acquitted. That doesn’t excuse his and their actions.
I’m aware that Judge Maria Carroccia ruled that the plaintiff’s testimony was unreliable. The problem I have with the characterization of EM’s testimony as being “unreliable” is that the court does not consider how the human brain processes trauma and the impact trauma has on memory. Read this excerpt from the GOVERNMENT OF CANADA’S DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE (the irony of the source is not lost on me) titled “The Impact of Trauma on Sexual Assault Victims”. The piece cites several scientific studies outlining how a survivor’s recollection of traumatic events becomes fragmented. We also have to consider the fact that multiple years passed between the incident, EM’s initial statement to the police, and her testimony in the trial. Of course her recollection of the exact details of the night wasn’t exact, that should have been expected. The unfortunate truth is that trauma responses impair memory, and inconsistent or inaccurate details make a testimony “unreliable” in court.
The problem with simply accepting the court’s ruling as gospel is that the way a judge evaluates evidence is black and white, but a situation like this is not so simple. The judge can only rule based on facts. Without video footage, it becomes a battle of “he said, she said”. When the evidence presented is inconsistent and murky at best, the judge can’t find a defendant guilty. That’s just how it works. That is a MAJOR obstacle that faces ANY survivor of sexual assault that seeks justice the way EM did.
Any explanation of why EM acted the way she did that night wasn’t relevant to the court either. EM claimed to have experienced dissociation during the incident. Peritraumatic dissociation is the type of dissociation that happens during a traumatic event such as sexual assault, and it is “characterized by feelings of detachment from oneself and/or one’s environment, out-of-body experiences, altered time perception and/or emotional numbness.” (Kreis I, Ottesen AA, Rustand A, Wentzel-Larsen T, Thoresen S, Blix I (2026)).
The behaviour of encouraging the players involved to have sex with her is an example of the “Fawn” or the “Submit” trauma response. We typically think of “Fight” or “Flight” when faced with a traumatic situation, but “Fawn” is a related response type where the person basically submits to the threat as a survival mechanism. According to PsychCentral, the “Fawn” response is described as “a response to a threat by becoming more appealing to the threat” by Pete Walker, a family therapist that is credited with coining the “Fawn” terminology. Think of it like people pleasing as a response to a threat.
I’ve just presented scientific evidence that EM’s testimony of having an out of body experience and the behaviour of submitting to the men in the room are biologically common trauma responses. Her testimony did not matter though because it was deemed to be unreliable, which we now know is largely due to how the brain processes trauma. Scientific data explaining that the trauma responses she told the court she experienced are valid and common experiences did not matter. All that mattered to the court were the black and white actions of EM that night.
So sure, Formenton was acquitted. That was an expected result. That’s how sexual assault cases usually go. I’d argue that the result of the trial has little to no bearing on how the events of that evening should be interpreted because it was an inevitable result.
One could argue that he didn’t knowingly commit sexual assault because he truly believed that EM was consenting based on her actions. I highly doubt a 20-year old would know about peritraumatic dissociation and the “Fawn” response and put two and two together in that situation. However, if you strike someone in the head without the intention of killing them and they die as a result of the blow, you can be found guilty of manslaughter despite that not being the intended outcome. Formenton might not have intended to assault EM, but it is my belief that he did based on all the information at hand despite the result of the trial.
I encourage people to exercise critical thinking and objectivity when forming their opinions on this trial rather than simply accepting the court’s ruling as gospel because the thinking required in the court of law is not a full or complete analysis of the situation. The goal of the court is to determine who did what and when. That way of thinking completely ignores important factors like how the human brain responds to trauma.
Honestly, this signing isn’t about the results of the trial. They were what they were. As TSN’s Rick Westhead noted, Justice Carroccia said that “it was not the role of the courts to weigh in on morality.” THAT is the debate at hand in regards to the Oilers signing this player.
Here’s where my biggest problem with Formenton’s actions lies: according to Paola Loriggio of The Canadian Press, Brett Howden testified that Formenton “made a comment along the lines of ‘should I be doing this?’ to a few of the other players in the room” as he was walking to the bathroom in the hotel room with EM that night. He knew deep down that what he was doing was wrong, and he did it anyway.
To be perfectly honest, I don’t think any of the men in that room that night acted in a way that could be considered moral. Formenton was one of the two players that crossed the line the most that night because he had sex with EM. Being honest and transparent about it as Formenton claimed to have been while chatting with Edmonton media on Wednesday does not absolve him of his actions, nor does being acquitted.
So no, I do not support the Oilers signing Formenton. This was already the least excited I’ve ever been for a hockey season, and this signing has drained what little bit of excitement I may have had.
Honestly, I’m exhausted from all of the “second chance” personnel decisions the Oilers have made recently. I was extremely disappointed that Jake Virtanen was offered a PTO in 2022. I accepted the Evander Kane signing (although I’ve come to realize that perhaps that didn’t go as swimmingly off the ice as it may have initially appeared). I didn’t balk at the Corey Perry signing, mostly because there was no concrete information shared about why his contract with the Chicago Blackhawks was terminated. I was never on board with bringing Stan Bowman on as GM, but I also feel that John MacIsaac and Joel Quenneville were by far the two most wrong in how they handled the Kyle Beach incident in 2010. I did not support hiring Mike Babcock because of his past interactions with many players over the years (and because his most recent body of work in the NHL wasn’t inspiring to me and he’s FAR removed from his greatest successes).
The situation with Formenton is MUCH different than any of those other situations though. What he did is public knowledge, and it is the worst offence of the bunch in my opinion.
According to TSN’s Ryan Rishaug, Bowman cited Hockey Canada’s decision to reinstate Formenton recently as a guide for his information gathering prior to signing him because they had the most information about the subject. Hockey Canada paid EM a settlement as a result of this situation, and they kept a slush fund used to pay sexual assault victims out for many years. Using Hockey Canada’s decision making in regards to the handling of anything to do with sexual assault as any sort of guide is a complete joke. It’s pathetic.
The Oilers did not need to do this. Savoie is expected to miss about a month. The Oilers have enough penalty killing forwards to survive until Savoie returns. The Oilers have cap space for the first time in years and they have enough NHL quality depth. They don’t need to be shopping in the bargain bin like they have had to in years past and they just did with Formenton. They don’t need to take a chance on a 26-year old former second round pick that hasn’t played NHL hockey in four years. This isn’t even an impactful player expected to have a meaningful role. This is a bottom of the roster player at best. It was a totally needless signing.
This is just another example that shows just how little Oilers owner Daryl Katz, Oilers CEO Jeff Jackson, and Bowman care about bringing in quality people and how their organization is perceived in the community. Bowman’s response to Rishaug’s question about that perception in the embedded post below feels empty.
I understand that their MO is to win hockey games, but they aren’t even doing that. The Oilers have won zero Stanley Cups in the Connor McDavid era with their current personnel hiring patterns, the team’s results are trending downwards, and they’re losing fans along the way.
This is a professional organization that represents the city of Edmonton and its people. This is not the way that I believe such an organization should represent itself. Ultimately, my hope is that the reality of more empty seats at Rogers Place and lower television ratings will serve as a wakeup call to upper management that they need to look in the mirror and reevaluate how they choose to run their team.
