The Oilers have cleared enough cap space to match the offer sheets to Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg
In the wake of the St. Louis Blues tenuring offer sheets to Dylan Holloway and Philip Brobeg last Tuesday, it became clear the Oilers were going to have to perform some surgery if they had any hopes of matching.
Finding a way to unwrinkle $6.7-million in salary cap space from their jeans seemed like something that simply might’ve been too challenging to do. Fast forward five days later, and all of a sudden Stan Bowman and the Oilers have found a way to do just that.
Evander Kane is set to land on the long-term injured reserve due to surgery for a sports hernia/hip injury he played through last season, meaning there would be $5.125-million in cap space opening up. While the acquisition of Vasily Podkolzin Sunday evening made many, myself included, think that he was coming in to be the replacement for Dylan Holloway, another trade hours later of Cody Ceci suddenly flipped the script.
As highlighted by the excellent salary cap resource website PuckPedia, the Oilers have a clear path to matching both offer sheets and retaining their 2019 and 2020 first-round picks. In order to do so, the Oilers would need to place Kane on the long-term injured reserve and assign one played with a cap hit of $801,000 or more to the American Hockey League. The caveat is that in this situation the team would need to make another trade to become cap-compliant whenever Kane were to return, if it were in the regular season.
If the Oilers chose to match Broberg, but not Holloway, PuckPeida added, they could be cap-compliant upon Kane’s return without the need for another trade.
