Will Edmonton Oilers trade Jeff Skinner before the deadline?
It has not been the type of season that the Edmonton Oilers had envisioned for free-agent signing Jeff Skinner.
In the months after the team inked the former Calder Trophy winner to a one-year deal, it was widely expected that Skinner would be a mainstay in the top six. He is a veteran scoring winger in the NHL who was coming off two seasons with the Buffalo Sabres where he scored 24 and 35 goals, respectively.
That’s the type of numbers you expect to only get better when moving from a lowly Sabres team up to a cup contender like the Oilers. Yet, four months into his first season in Edmonton, Skinner isn’t even a regular in the lineup.
Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch has opted to scratch Skinner in four of the team’s last eight games. When he is playing, it’s usually limited to the bottom six minutes. All this for a player who carries a $3 million cap hit begs the question as to whether or not the Oilers should entertain trading the 32-year-old Toronto native.
It would be far from an ideal scenario, but the reality is that Skinner carries a high cap hit for a player who doesn’t play consistently. That money would be better utilized to bring in a player at the trade deadline than a player sitting in the press box.
Skinner should still have value on the trade market as a scoring winger. Despite the issues in Edmonton, he still has eight goals, which ties him for fifth on the Oilers. Since the calendar has flipped to 2025, he has also looked much better, creating chances on a nightly basis (when he’s playing) and seemingly having some chemistry with players like Adam Henrique.
It might not be a ton of value, but there should be enough to facilitate a trade without Edmonton having to retain any salary or add a sweetener. That being said, any trade involving Skinner would have to get his approval.
Skinner arrived in Edmonton with the expectation that he would finally be able to get a taste of NHL playoff hockey for the first time in his career. To ensure that, he baked a no-movement clause into his contract with the Oilers.
This means that the Oilers would have to ask Skinner to waive that NMC for any sort of trade that comes up involving him. This severely limits possible landing spots and probably only leaves other potential contenders as trade partners.
An argument could be had that Skinner is on an expiring contract and that he could waive to a lower-seeded team just to play more minutes and maximize the salary on his next deal this summer. That makes sense, but considering Skinner has made an estimated total of $100 million throughout his career, it’d be safe to assume that being on a winning team is at the top of his priority list.
The flip side of this argument would be to keep Skinner, who has proven he can still be a depth scorer for this team. He may not be in Knoblauch’s good graces right now, but it’s hard to say that he’s been given a fair shake at the top of the lineup.
According to Natural Stat Trick, he has a combined 122 minutes at five-on-five with Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid so far this season, which is a drop in the bucket when it comes to the 500 minutes he has played all season.
The results in that limited time have been pretty encouraging as well. With Draisaitl, that duo produced a xGF% of 56.45 and out-chanced opposition by a 37-22 margin. It seems to be plain rotten luck that they were somehow out-scored 3-1 during that span as they also held the advantage in high-danger chances by a 15-5 margin as well.
Edmonton seems to like Vasily Podkolzin in that spot right now, but it would be interesting to see Skinner get a run there. That would also allow the team to see if Podkolzin can energize the bottom six a bit. If it doesn’t work out, they can simply revert to what they had.
The Oilers should probably at least test the market for a guy like Skinner to see if there are any obvious fits. The parameters of such a deal, however, make it seem unlikely that he’s shipped off before the deadline.
A better solution would be to try a bit harder to find a fit for Skinner higher in the lineup. The only way to do that is to give him some runway in the top six.