Edmonton Oilers’ forward Jordan Eberle’s name seems to come up in trade talks quite often. He recently appeared at No. 6 on TSN’s first edition of “Trade Bait,” and the belief is that moving the 20-goal scorer this season makes the most sense as the Oilers must free up cap space to eventually lock up both Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to extensions. The hope is they can use Eberle to acquire a top-four defenseman the team needs. Several key defensemen are on TSN’s list, including Anaheim’s Sami Vatanen, Minnesota’s Jonas Brodin and Mathew Dumba, and New York Islanders’ Travis Hamonic – all right-handed defenseman, exactly what the Oilers need.
However, while Edmonton Journal’s David Staples believes that while moving Eberle will be inevitable, trading him before the expansion draft is a big mistake. If the team trades Eberle for a defender, that would force Edmonton to switch from a 7-3-1 protection scheme to a 4-4-1 scheme, meaning the Oilers would have to sacrifice one extra forward to the Las Vegas Golden Knights. The Oilers then would be only be able to protect Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Draisaitl, Milan Lucic and Patrick Maroon (McDavid is exempt). The team would then have to protect four defensemen, including the new acquisition, Andrej Sekera, Oscar Klefbom and Adam Larsson.
That would likely expose veteran enforcer Zack Kassian to the Golden Knights, something that they wouldn’t have done in a 7-3-1 scheme. Kassian was critical to the team in the playoffs as he stood up for his teammates and protected the likes of McDavid and Draisaitl. Staples believes that general manager Peter Chiarelli would prefer to keep him as he’s playing the best hockey of his career. A loss at wing of Kassian and Eberle might also force Draisaitl to stay at the wing, rather than move to center like the Oilers want.
So even though there may be quite a few defensemen available over the next two weeks, there are few scenarios in which trading Eberle for one makes any sense until after the expansion draft. Staples even hints that Las Vegas is likely to be overloaded in defenders after the expansion draft and looking there for a top-six defenseman would make more sense, although that does not solve the problem of unloading Eberle’s $6MM contract.