This in from Ira Cooper, the Cult of Hockey contributor and an expert on the rules around NHL transactions, his take on the possibility that the Edmonton Oilers might trade for a goalie, such as Buffalo’s Alex Lyon, in the aftermath of Tristan Jarry leaving Thursday night’s game with an injury.
“Roster freeze is in like 26.5 hours – executing a Lyon trade seems unlikely,” Cooper said right after Edmonton’s 3-1 win over Boston. “We don’t know what Buffalo is demanding/requesting or their position at all.”
Said Gene Principe of the Oilers: “Kris Knoblauch on Tristan Jarry who left Thursday night’s game ‘we’ll see not sure how serious it is.’”
And the Journal’s Jim Matheson: “If Jarry is out for weekend games in Minnesota and home to Vegas at minimum for leg injury, better bet they recall G Tomkins than Ingram from Bako. Tomkins has .893 save% and 3.30 avg. in 15 games. Ingram has .856 save % and 4.04 avg. in 11 games.”
There’s been speculation for a few weeks now that Edmonton might be targeting Bufffalo’s Alex Lyon with a trade. Last Thursday, a day before the Oilers acquired Jarry, Elliotte Friedman of Sportsnet in his 32 Thoughts column where he mentioned Lyon, 33, as a goalie of interest for Edmonton.
Wrote Friedman: “In addition to Tristan Jarry, I believe the Oilers poked around Alex Lyon. Not as seriously as Jarry, but it was there.”
Lyon’s name had also come up earlier that same week on Oilers Now when former NHL goalie and Sabres broadcaster Martin Biron mentioned him as a trade possibility, given that Buffalo has three NHL goalies on the roster, including Colten Ellis and Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen. “If I was a team interested in a goaltender, I would look at Alex Lyon. He’s got one start in the last 10 games and when he played a lot early in the season, he was really good. He was the brightest spot of the Sabres early season despite the win-loss record. So if I’m a team looking to add something, I would definitely look at Alex Lyon.”
On The Sheet podcast with Jeff Marek on Thursday morning (before the Jarry injury), former Oilers goalie Devan Dubnyk said he hoped to see a Jarry and Skinner pairing in Edmonton, so both goalies could compete but also support one another.
“I’ve talked about this too much and I don’t like doing it because I love Calvin Pickard because he’s a great teammate and he works his butt off and everything, but they’re in the exact same situation where they’re not comfortable playing him multiple games in a row, and if Tristan Jarry struggles, they’re now forced into a situation where they have to play Jarry because they have to, not because they want to, and Tristan Jarry has no pressure release valve on the other side of it, and you’re in the exact same snowball… If things go off the rails, you’re in the same spot you were before.”
Marek added he could see the Oilers making another trade in net. “That’s why I don’t think anyone thinks that Stan Bowman is done with his goalies.”
Marek said that new Buffalo GM Jarmo Kekalainen said the three goalie situation in Buffalo did not work and they were going to have to make a decision. “I think everyone in Edmonton kind of went, ‘Alex Lyon? Really?’
On Real Kyper & Bourne podcast, commentator Steve Valiquette, a former NHL goalie and a leader in goalie analytics, noted that his system of studying the game indicated based on Jarry’s play last season and this season that if Jarry had faced the same shots as Edmonton’s goalies did, he would have saved 15 more goals against, five more than Skinner, 10 more than Pickard.
“Edmonton is known for giving up a lot of breakaways and the goalies not performing well on breakaways,” Valiquette said. “Jarry is a very strong breakaway goalie. The same goes for rebounds. However, Jarry in that net is going to face more broken plays, more screens where he underperforms Skinner’s level on those two shot categories. It will be a different look. The goals will look a little different, but you’re getting close to the same result. But the change itself in this case was needed for both Skinner and Jarry. That’s my feel.”
Alex Lyon
My take
1. Lyon has played the most games of any Sabres goalie, 18, and has the highest save percentage .904. He’s got one more year on a deal that pays him $1.5 million. Luukonen has three more years at $4.75 million. The salary cap price is close to being right for Lyon.
2. The downside of Lyon? He’s bounced around between five organizations. In 128 career NHL games, he’s got a .902 save percentage, which isn’t great considering the NHL average was well above that most of those years. He’s also 33 years old.
3. Lyon doesn’t come across as someone who could seize the starting job but could maybe hold it down for awhile. But it’s worth noting that Calvin Pickard has done much better in recent starts.
With the NHL’s roster freeze coming up fast and not ending until Dec. 28, I suspect that Cooper is correct, and it’s unlikely Edmonton will pull of a trade, not unless Bowman already has something done with another GM, and it’s in their back pockets, so to speak, ready to be enacted.
That said, with the threat of injury to Jarry, it’s hard to imagine the Oilers don’t need to do something more in net, especially as Tomkins and Ingram in the AHL don’t look like starting NHL goalie material just now.
At the Cult of Hockey
STAPLES: Top ex-Oilers forward killing it in Boston, but won’t play tonight against Edmonton