The Edmonton Oilers will certainly be making a trade or two before the season is up, and the Pittsburgh Penguins would be the ideal team to target.
We already know that the Oilers have been looking around Penguins defenceman Marcus Pettersson. Given the team’s lack of a proper, everyday player on their second pairing beside Darnell Nurse, an eventual trade for a defenceman makes sense.
However, one of the other issues plaguing the Oilers is a lack of scoring. The big guns, Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid, aren’t having trouble putting the puck in the net, but the supporting cast has been lacklustre, to say the least. Outside of those two, Corey Perry and Jeff Skinner are tied among Oilers forwards for third place in goals with four apiece.
The struggles of Zach Hyman and Ryan Nugent-Hopkins have been well-documented, but those are two players who will be sticking with the Oilers. The hope is that they will eventually remedy their scoring woes in some way or another. So, with that in mind, it may make sense for Oilers GM Stan Bowman to take a look at adding some scoring punch into the middle-six of the forward group.
As luck would have it, he may not have to leave the same aisle that he’s also shopping in for a defenceman, as the Penguins have an ideal target to fill that need as well.
#Oilers may not have to look further than Pittsburgh if they want to nab a package for both a defenceman and a middle-six scorer
M.Pettersson has been connected to EDM… but 26-year-old Drew O’Connor is one year removed from a 16-goal season.
Could he shake loose as well?
— Preston Hodgkinson (@NHLHodgkinson) November 25, 2024
Drew O’Connor, 26, is one year removed from a 16-goal season with the Penguins and currently has three goals through the first 23 games of this season. His cap hit is a very affordable $925,000, and he is set to be a UFA at the end of the year.
Pittsburgh has been using O’Connor in a third-line role alongside Kevin Hayes and Valterri Puustinen. For comparison, that would probably be a spot occupied by one of Mattias Janmark or Kasperi Kapanen on a fully healthy Oilers lineup. Right now, O’Connor has more goals than both those players combined.
The current boxcars may not be encouraging, but you have to consider that he is playing bottom-six minutes on a team that may end up drafting within the top-five picks in the next NHL draft. Edmonton is a much more offensive-forward atmosphere and he has shown that he can thrive in those types of conditions.
Ideally, Edmonton would be able to add both Pettersson and O’Connor in one trade package. This would take a minimum of a first-round pick and probably a good young asset like Matthew Savoie or, perhaps, 2024 first-round pick Sam O’Reilly. Even then, it’s not a slam dunk that Penguins GM Kyle Dubas would settle for that, as a bidding war for their assets is likely to erupt as the trade deadline draws closer.
It may be a tad premature to start theorizing on potential trade packages for the Oilers, but the Penguins offer intriguing solutions to a few of Edmonton’s issues that may not be available elsewhere.
We’ll see if the Oilers feel the same way as the trade winds start to pick up.