The goaltending position has long been the Edmonton Oilers’ Achilles heel. Despite back-to-back runs to the Stanley Cup Finals, they’ve dealt with tremendous inconsistencies in net, leaving everyone to believe that changes were finally going to come this summer.
However, as of right now, Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard remain the only two goalies on the roster just over a month out from the start of the 2025-26 season.
There is still time for general manager Stan Bowman to bring in an outside option, though it feels like that would be a minor move at this point in time.
Plenty of netminders have been linked to the Oilers as trade targets in recent years, and former NHL executive, now analyst, Pierre McGuire wonders if they dropped the ball by not acquiring one of the stars from the Boston Bruins’ old tandem of Linus Ullmark and Jeremy Swayman.
“I’m just wondering… did they miss out on Ullmark, and did they miss out on Swayman? The only reason I bring it up is I was living in Boston, and it was volatile beyond belief with what was going on with the goaltending situation there. And I just wonder if they didn’t miss out on hitting a homerun with Boston to solidify their goaltending,” McGuire said (21:15).
Ullmark was, of course, traded to Ottawa during the 2024 offseason, while Swayman signed an eight-year, $66 million extension in Boston just prior to the 2024-25 campaign.
Who are the Oilers’ options now?
It’s very unlikely that the Edmonton Oilers are going to swing a trade for a big-name goalie in the next month, so who else could they target?
Alexandar Georgiev and Ilya Samsonov remain UFAs that the Oilers could look to take a flier on, while Michael DiPietro, Nico Daws, and Connor Ingram have all surfaced as potential trade possibilities.
Should nothing come to fruition, it will be up to Stuart Skinner in the final year of his three-year, $7.8 million contract to prove that he’s capable of being a reliable starting goalie in Edmonton.
As we’ve seen, all the Oilers need is consistent league-average goaltending, and their superstars will take them about as far as they can go.
