Should the Edmonton Oilers bring back Evander Kane on a cheap deal?
Does Evander Kane have another NHL season left in the tank?
The Edmonton Oilers are in need of some scoring depth throughout the lineup, and a few good options are still available on the free agent market. Guys like Vladimir Tarasenko, Eeli Tolvanen, and Patrik Laine are all players who have a history of putting up good offensive numbers and shouldn’t break the bank.
So, should the Oilers look at bringing in one of those guys, or should they go with a more familiar player like Kane? The 35-year-old power forward is coming off a brutal season with a dead-last Vancouver Canucks team that saw him post his lowest goal totals in over a decade with just 13.
Before that, however, he had a four-season run with the Oilers where he had varying degrees of success and became a fan favourite in the process.
The interest is likely there from Kane’s perspective, but would it be a good idea to bring him aboard for a second tour of duty in the Alberta capital?
Let’s weigh the pros and cons of such a move…
Why it could work
There are a few reasons to believe that bringing back Evander Kane could potentially work out, but it requires an optimistic outlook.
The most obvious is that Kane has a history with the Oilers and was a very good fit at one point in time. With the Oilers needing to find a top-nine winger to play with either Connor McDavid or Leon Draisaitl, they do not need to wonder how a guy like Kane will fit on those lines because they’ve seen him do it before.
Kane also appears to be healthy again after missing the entire 2024-25 NHL regular season with a litany of issues. He returned for Edmonton’s 2025 Stanley Cup Final run and may have been shaking off some rust with the Canucks this past season.
If he can get back to staying healthy while also jumping onto a much better Oilers squad, who says he can’t provide Edmonton with another 20-goal season as a plug-and-play scoring winger that could get additional minutes on the second-unit power play?
On top of that, he is likely to be dirt cheap given that he’s unsigned going into August and will probably be fielding PTO offers any day now.
Why it’s a bad idea
If the above is an optimistic view of how Kane could fare in a return to Edmonton, the flipside is likely the more realistic perspective.
The fact of the matter is that the past year wasn’t the first season where Kane showed signs of decline. That came almost immediately after he inked a four-year extension with the Oilers back in the summer of 2022.
Kane absolutely lit it up after signing with the Oilers midway through the 2021-22 season. He picked up 22 goals in 39 games, and then proceeded to tear up the playoffs with 13 goals in 15 games. That is about where the good times ended.
Between the 2022-23 and 2024-25 seasons, Kane saw his play start to fall off in a big way. His point production failed to keep up with his initial hot streak, and his on-ice impacts took a nosedive.
A look at Kane’s player card on HockeyStats.com shows a continual decline that saw his overall wins-above-replacement (WAR) plateau at 46% in 2022, all the way down to a dismal one per cent in 2023-24, his last full season with the Oilers.
Just this past year, he bottomed out with the Canucks at zero per cent.
Hockeystats.com
A lot of that has to do with injuries over the years. Kane suffered a major wrist injury in November 2022 that required artery repair as well as a vein graft. He also suffered a sports hernia, core issues, and required major knee surgery in recent years.
All those issues aren’t necessarily his fault, but they’ve helped accelerate his decline as he enters his late 30s. It raises massive question marks around his health and whether he can effectively get through another full season without issue.
Verdict
Bringing aboard Kane is likely an idea the Oilers should leave on the drawing board.
There is a history between the two sides, but that saga came to a definitive end when the Oilers opted to trade him to the Canucks in a cap-clearing move last summer. Kane may be a lot cheaper on his next deal than he was on his last, but it’s clear that a combination of injuries and aging has accelerated his decline as an elite NHL goalscorer.
He could barely hack it on a bad Canucks team last year, and although the Oilers would be able to provide him with better linemates, he didn’t exactly wow anybody in Edmonton during his last few seasons in the Alberta capital.
At this point in time, Kane would be lucky to even tread water on Edmonton’s third line and probably shouldn’t be a serious option inside the top six.
Giving him a PTO is relatively harmless and gives Edmonton the excuse of saying they gave Kane a shot at redemption, but it feels wholly unnecessary to commit anything further than that.