March 7, 2026 by Ryan Lotsberg

The 2026 NHL trade deadline has come and gone. Now the stretch drive begins. The Edmonton Oilers find themselves in the thick of the playoff race. Their position isn’t anywhere close to as comfortable as they want it to be: up just one point on the Seattle Kraken for the final wild card spot and three points ahead of the San Jose Sharks, who have three games in hand. They trail the division leading Anaheim Ducks by five points with one more game played. The division crown isn’t out of reach, but they have to pass two teams to get it.

The Oilers acquired three players in two trades with the Chicago Blackhawks prior to the trade deadline. To recap, here they are:

There was a clear strategy to this deadline for Oilers GM Stan Bowman. The Oilers are near the top of the league in goal scoring, but they can’t keep the puck out of their net. The Oilers had allowed 48 goals in eleven games between their back-to-back shutouts culminating with a 5-0 win in Ryan Nugent-Hopkins’ 1000th NHL game on January 18 and the time they started making moves this past week. 

They were bleeding goals against, and they needed to do something to stop the bleeding. They brought Paul Coffey back to the bench to run the defence during the Olympic break, and their pre-deadline trade acquisitions were all defensively focussed. 

Murphy is a shutdown defender who was the leader of the best penalty kill in the league entering the trade deadline. That’s a deviation away from the type of defenceman that Bowman usually covets, which is a mobile, puck moving defenceman. But, Bowman traded for Murphy once before and knows the player well. The hope is that Murphy will stabilize the second pairing and the penalty kill, both of which have been leaky at best this season. 

Related: Oilers acquire Murphy

I think the cost of the 2028 second round pick was fair for Murphy considering the Blackhawks retained 50% of his salary, albeit for just 40 days. The move didn’t excite me, but I understand the logic.

I’ll talk about Dach before I get to Dickinson because I have lots to say on Dickinson. Dach’s biggest strength is his physicality. He entered Saturday tenth in the league with 191 hits. Vasily Podkolzin isn’t far behind him in thirteenth with 186 hits. At 6’4”, 218 lbs, Dach adds a ton of size as well. The Fort Saskatchewan native loves to play a physical style, which is something the Oilers generally lack. The 23-year old has a chance to find a home in Edmonton’s bottom six if he can continue to bring that physicality and be reliable defensively.

Dickinson also has a clearly defined role. He played nearly half of his five-on-five ice time against elite competition entering the NHL trade deadline, which led the NHL. That’s crazy usage! The rationale we were sold by Bowman and the Oilers is that Dickinson will be able to take some of the tougher minutes away from Connor McDavid and Leon Draisiaitl in a third line centre role.

However, he has been outscored 6-10 (37.5%) against elite competition, and his dangerous Fenwick For percentage (DFF%)against elite competition was 40.9% according to PuckIQ. He ranks 130th out of 225 forwards with at least 200 minutes of five-on-five ice time against elite competition in goals against per 60. He ranks 55th in DFA/60 and 212th in DFF%.

His decent ranking in DFA/60 suggests that he’s strong defensively, but his near bottom ranking in DFF% says that his defensive game isn’t strong enough to compensate for his lack of offensive production. He’s trusted with the assignment of taking on the league’s best players every night, but the numbers say that he’s often on the wrong side of the ledger.

That’s an expected outcome unless we’re talking about the league’s best players playing against their peers. Dickinson is not in that category. The reality is that Dickinson has only scored more than nine goals once in his NHL career. His 22-goal season as a member of the Blackhawks in 2023-24 is a clear and mysterious outlier. If you play Dickinson against the league’s best players as often as the Blackhawks did, then there is no other outcome aside from him being outscored, outchanced, and outshot. I don’t care how good of a defender he is, he can’t score enough to not get outscored by the league’s best players.

I would have time for the rationale of Dickinson centering a shutdown third line, but he needs some wingers that can put the puck in the net to turn it into a line that can outscore their opponents. That’s ultimately what the Oilers need because as NHL Sid has pointed out many times throughout the season, the 2025-26 Oilers bottom six forwards are getting outscored at the highest rate of any group in the McDavid era.

The Oilers are trying to tell us that they acquired a third line centre, but I don’t see it that way. Dickinson is a fourth line centre in my eyes. I feel that a quality third line centre should be able to produce at a 30-35 point clip over 82 games while being reliable defensively. Dickinson has consistently been unable to match that set of criteria in his career.

The strategy is quite clear here, and it’s no different than it has ever been in the McDavid era. Rely on McDavid and Draisaitl to do the heavy lifting offensively, and round out the forward group with forwards that you hope don’t get outscored. They found a group of forwards that were just good enough to get them to the Stanley Cup Final in back-to-back years, but depth scoring eluded them in both series. The offence from the superstars went dry, and the Florida Panthers got scoring from all over their lineup. The third line for the Panthers was the biggest difference in last year’s series.

I’m sure you know the definition of insanity. You can’t expect different results if you do the same thing over and over again.

My initial reaction to this trade was surprise and disgust that the Oilers included a first round pick in this trade, even though it’s a 2027 first round pick that’s top twelve protected. Neither of these players merit a first round pick, nor does the combination of the two.

The factor that made it make sense to Bowman was the fact that the Blackhawks were willing to take all of Mangiapane’s contract for next season in addition to retaining 50% of Dickinson’s salary. Bowman had options to move Mangiapane’s contract, but different picks would’ve been attached. He claimed that including the first round pick in this trade made it cheaper to get a third line centre than moving Mangiapane and getting a third line centre in separate deals.

I also have to note that the market value for bottom six forwards has seemingly skyrocketed based on what the Toronto Maple Leafs got for Nicolas Roy.

Having said all of that, I still don’t like the price paid to make this trade. It was essentially the cost of fixing the mistake that was Mangiapane. I was alright with signing Mangiapane to his two-year contract at $3.6 million per year, but I also felt that he was delusional if his expectation was to play in the top six. I thought it was silly of the Oilers to expect him to work out in the top six. Now, they used a prime trade chip that could’ve been used more intelligently when the team will have more cap space to work with this coming summer.

Given the context of the Mangiapane situation and the fact that the Oilers were bleeding goals against leading into the trade deadline, we have what appears to be a panic trade in my opinion. It’s clear there was pressure to do something at the deadline, and moving Mangiapane was the only real way to make something happen. This ended up being the most economical solution apparently. I’m not sold that waiting until the summer to move Mangiapane and running with Adam Henrique at third line centre wouldn’t have been the more prudent path here. Dickinson and Henrique are basically producing the same amount of offence, and Henrique is also good defensively. Dickinson is just younger and faster.

If I had to give Bowman’s trade deadline a letter grade, I’d go C. The Murphy trade is a B in my opinion, and the Dickinson trade gets a D from me. 

I needed to wait until the trade deadline to give my final verdict on how I think the Oilers will fare this spring. This trade deadline did little to inspire more confidence in a positive outcome. You never know what can happen if McDavid, Draisaitl, and Bouchard get hot, but I’m not optimistic about a deep playoff run happening in Edmonton this year. I sincerely hope to be proven wrong.