Former Oilers teammates razzed Foegele for signing with Kings
One of the more interesting developments last summer was a swap of sorts of players between the Edmonton Oilers and LA Kings.
While the Oilers signed former Kings forward Viktor Arvidsson to a multi-year contract, LA did the same with Edmonton forward Warren Foegele. Normally, this type of transaction wouldn’t be too peculiar, but because these two teams have met in the first round of the playoffs for three straight seasons, it’s a little curious.
Arvidsson stated in the preseason that it was strange to pull on the Oilers jersey for the first time and, more recently, Foegele has broken his silence on the interesting choice of going to LA.
In an interview with Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas, the 28-year-old Foegele gave some insight on how his former Oilers teammates reacted to the news that he would be signing with one of their fiercest playoff rivals.
“It was more my Oilers teammates giving me a hard time,” Foegele said with a laugh. “When I signed with LA on July 1, I had a couple of them come over up in Muskoka. I had [Evan] Bouchard and Ryan McLeod come over, my neighbour up there is Adam Henrique so then he came over.
“They’re like ‘You had to choose the Kings out of anyone?’ It was pretty funny, but they obviously understand it’s a business and it was some funny laughs that night.”
Warren Foegele talks about his journey from the Oilers to the Kings and his teammates' reactions to him joining a division rival during free agency. 👑
Watch the full interview with @FriedgeHNIC and @sportsnetkyle on https://t.co/ebFtzljTvo
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It hasn’t been quite the start to his Kings tenure that Foegele may want. After putting up career highs across the board with the Oilers last season, scoring 20 goals and 41 points, he has been unable to get on the scoresheet in his first four games with LA.
During that career year, he also helped the Oilers get within a single win of the Stanley Cup before coming up short in Game 7 against the Florida Panthers. An iconic moment from that final was included in Amazon’s latest FaceOff docuseries and showed Oilers captain Connor McDavid ripping into the team following a Game 2 loss.
Foegele relayed his vantage point of that moment in the interview as well.
“That game I was kicked out early on so I was just hanging out with some of the other players that weren’t playing that game and all you could just hear was loud noises,” Foegele said. “I wasn’t really in the room to hear all that, but he is just trying to win like the rest of us, but it was a good message from him.”
There will certainly be a few on-ice conversations when Foegele lines up against the Oilers for the first time on December 28.