June 25, 2025 by Ryan Lotsberg

Evander Kane took to social media on Wednesday morning to announce that he has been traded to the Vancouver Canucks. According to Rick Dhaliwal, Kane’s agent, Dan Milstein, had been working on finding this trade since the Oilers’s final game of the season last Tuesday. According to Frank Seravalli, he Oilers will receive a fourth round pick that originally belonged to the Ottawa Senators in this week’s draft. That was the pick that the Oilers sent to the Canucks in exchange for Vasily Podkolzin last summer.

As my time with the @EdmontonOilers has now come to a close, I want to take a moment to sincerely thank the entire organization, my teammates, and the incredible community of Edmonton.

To the Oilers Ownership, front office, coaching staff, and trainers—thank you for believing in… pic.twitter.com/huOxax5FxK

— Evander Kane (@evanderkane) June 25, 2025

Kane got 111 points in 161 regular season games with the Edmonton Oilers, along with 42 points in 68 playoff games over four seasons. He has 617 points in 930 NHL games with the Atlanta Thrashers, Winnipeg Jets, Buffalo Sabres, San Jose Sharks, and the Oilers.

Kane burst onto the scene mid-way through the 2021-22 season after his contract was terminated by the Sharks. He had sat out the entire season before joining the Oilers in January of 2022. Kane got 39 points in 43 games down the stretch, and he had a blisteringly hot playoff run with seventeen points in fifteen games.

Unfortunately, Kane started running into injury troubles the following season. His 2022-23 season was shortened to 41 games due to a horrific freak injury to his wrist along with a separate rib injury. His production fell to 28 points in 41 games, and he only got five points in twelve playoff games in 2022-23.

He played through the majority of the 2023-24 season with a major core injury, and it hindered his production even further. Kane got 44 points in 77 games. It was a dip in production, but it was also impressive that he did that well while playing through his core injury. Kane got eight points in 20 games in the playoffs before being scratched for Game 3 of the 2024 Stanley Cup Final. He went -4 in the two games he played in that series, including a -3 performance in Game 2. It became clear that the injury was too much to play through.

Kane got surgery to address his core injury on September 19, 2024. He also had a knee scope done on January 9, 2025. The sum of those two recovery times cost Kane his entire 2024-25 regular season. He returned for Game 2 of the first round of the playoffs. Kane scored a huge goal that turned the tide of that first round series against the Los Angeles Kings in Game 3. All in all, he got six goals and twelve points in 21 playoff games this spring. Eleven of those twelve points came in the fifteen games played before the Stanley Cup Final. 

He was impressive in the first three rounds of the playoffs, but he was ineffective when the lights were the brightest. Kane only got one goal in the six game series, and he took multiple stick penalties in Games 2 and 3. He had several big hits in the series, but that didn’t outweigh the penalties and the lack of offensive production. Kane’s final moments as an Oilers saw him leave Game 6 of the Stanley Cup Final after receiving a misconduct penalty for slashing Matthew Tkachuk away from the puck. Kane left the ice and didn’t come back out for the handshake line.

I’m sure that didn’t help the relationship between Kane and the Oilers. I can only draw conclusions from information that is publicly available, but the Oilers are being investigated for their handling of Kane and his LTIR relief this past season. Multiple Stanley Cup winning teams have had players on LTIR to end the regular season that started Game 1 of the playoffs without further investigation. All LTIR situations are monitored by the league, but an investigation after the fact is a different story. Kane’s situation is a little bit different than previous situations though. 

One major difference is that Kane got in front of a camera and talked about his status before the end of the regular season. The interview took place on April 14, 2025 after a morning skate in which Kane participated. Jason Gregor asked him what the final steps would be for him to get back into the lineup. Kane smirked and said “I don’t know exactly what the final step might be or maybe I don’t want to share it, but I think we’re really close… I’m feeling really good on the ice. If you ask me if I’m ready for Game 1, I think I could barely skate and I played in the playoffs last year, so if you’re comparing how I feel now to last year, I’m ready to go”.

Related: Bowman’s “million dollar mistake” involving Kane

Kane played through most of last season with his core injury, but the surgery didn’t occur until September 19, 2024. Oilers GM Stan Bowman told the media that the reason for the delay in scheduling the surgery was partly due to Kane taking some time to decide how he wanted to handle the injury, and partly due to the doctor’s schedule. It was odd to have a second procedure done four months after the first surgery. Kane also shared that the knee injury occurred about ten days after his core surgery. I’m not a medical professional, but I would imagine that his body needed time to heal from one surgery before having another surgery. I also assume that the delay in getting the knee surgery was also due in part to scheduling complications with the doctor. I’m not privy to any information, so that is purely speculative.

Regardless, I can’t imagine that the Oilers organization was happy with Kane’s words prior to the end of the regular season. I also can’t imagine that Kane was happy about not getting into some regular season games before the playoffs. Kane playing the playoffs and being traded at the end was a likely outcome here.

Kane came to the Oilers with some baggage from other teams he had played for. To his credit, Kane didn’t seemingly have any locker room issues and he was fantastic in the Edmonton community. That included annually buying Christmas gifts for hundreds of underprivileged children in Edmonton and visits to children’s hospitals. His friendship with 12-year old cancer patient Cecily Eklund was one of the most heart warming stories during Kane’s time with the Oilers. It genuinely seemed like Kane enjoyed playing in Edmonton, and that came across in his farewell message to Oilers fans on social media on Wednesday. I have all the respect in the world for the way Kane conducted himself as an Oiler.

Having said that, I feel that this was a necessary move by the Oilers. Kane will turn 34 years old before the season starts, and he has had significant injuries over the past three seasons. He will still have hot streaks here and there, but I don’t think he will be productive enough to warrant his $5.125 million cap hit next season. The Oilers weren’t going to have much cap space to use on improving the roster once the impending contracts of Evan Bouchard and Trent Frederic are considered. That $5.125 million will help the Oilers upgrade their roster over the coming weeks.

Kane is viewed as a playoff performer because of his physical style of play, but the numbers say otherwise. His amazing 2021-22 playoff season has been the only season in which his production increased over that season’s regular season offensive output throughout his entire career. While he mentally thrives in highly emotional and tense pkayoff games, his production goes down. Kane isn’t the huge difference maker that everyone says that he is. I’m not saying that he isn’t an effective player, but the impact of his physicality and style of play are overblown.

I also feel that Kane wasn’t a good fit alongside Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl. Natural Stat Trick’s Line Tool shows that both McDavid and Draisaitl performed significantly better without Kane than they did with him over the last three seasons. McDavid and Kane played 418:24 together in 2021-22. While McDavid’s actual five-on-five goal share was inflated playing with Kane that season because of Kane’s hot streak, his expected goals for rate was actually higher away from Kane. The same can be said for Draisaitl and Kane in 2021-22, but their expected goals for rate together was only 43.32%. Kane wasn’t a good fit in the Oilers top six, and his cap hit is too high to warrant playing him in the bottom six.

While losing a player that is viewed as a top six winger and that has been such a positive member of the Edmonton community sucks, moving Kane was the right thing to do right now. I wish Kane the best of luck playing for his hometown Canucks, and I thank him for all he did for the Edmonton community.