freelancer

Edmonton • Canada • 25 Years Old • Male

The Hypocrisy of the Eberle Trade

I don't like the Eberle for Strome deal as of today. Full Stop.

The rest of the summer can change my mind but as of right now I view this as a massive step back for the team and in my opinion is an example of Oilers management mishandling their assets.

We are going to ignore the fact for a moment the Strome's best year was 1 point less than Eberle's worst year. We are going to forget for a second that the Oilers traded their best RW (Draisaitl should be playing centre) for a guy who had issues cracking the top 6 on an Islander team that couldn't even protect 4 forwards.

Last year Chiarelli traded Taylor Hall for Adam Larsson. It was a move that I did not like but overall I could understand the logic. The team knew that they were going to acquire Lucic and gambled that they could trade from an area of strength and address an area of severe weakness. Yesterday we witnessed the Oilers trade from an area of weakness and become even weaker.

Of course with Jordan Eberle we have to talk cap and this is where the hypocrisy is. McDavid and Draisaitl will be getting new and expensive contracts and the team is going to have to find value contracts to surround these guys with. From that standpoint, having a 2.5 million dollar RFA makes complete sense and now the team has 3.5 million dollars extra in cap.

It's what they are going to do with that extra cap that has me furious.

I do not hate Russell as much as some fans do. Russell is an effective defender who can work well in limited minutes in a third pairing role as well as a very effective PK player. He is not worth 4 million a year and certainly not for 4 years.

This blog has begun to enter "rant mode" so I will end with this. If the entire point of this trade was to move a player that was causing cap issues, don't use that cap to sign a player who is going to be an even bigger cap headache.

Thanks for reading

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