Lubo out for the year. Preliminary thoughts:
1. The defence is a mess. Staios or Smid playing top four is a huge dropoff from Lubo. I stand by my argument elsewhere that there isn’t really any one player who is going to completely gut a team but the Oilers strike me as having a significant dropoff between the top four and the bottom two.
2. The Oilers seem to suffer more devastating shoulder injuries than young pitchers do in baseball. Moreau missed 75 games in 2006-07 with a shoulder injury, Horcoff missed 29 games last year with labrum surgery, Souray missed a ton of games last year with his shoulder and now Lubo misses the rest of this season with a labrum injury. It’s like they’re being coached by the reanimated corpse of Billy Martin circa. 1980.
3. MacT has probably developed a pretty healthy dislike for the 2003-04 London Knights over the past 50 days or so.
There’s no way that they’re going to be sellers at the deadline and I suspect that they’re still a reasonable shot to make the playoffs but this isn’t going to make things any easier.
Oh - and according to David Staples, the Oilers are now in the process of locking down Jaromir Jagr with the money that’s now available under the cap. That might explain the seemingly lengthy time to diagnose and announce this, if the Oilers were using the delay to cut some sort of a deal with Jagr. If I was a professional hockey player and member of a union run by Andrei Kovalenko, I’d be trying to get out as fast as humanly possible, so it at least seems plausible, although if I was Jaromir Jagr, Pittsburgh would look pretty attractive to me, given that they desperately need wingers.
Update: And, like a warm spell in February in Omsk (or Edmonton), it was false hope:
Oilers hockey ops boss Kevin Lowe is indicating that Czech hockey ace Jaromir Jagr isn’t coming to Edmonton — at least not this season, reports Euro-hockey expert Peter Adler.
“Jaromir is under contract in the KHL,” Lowe told Adler.
Jagr has also told Czech national team coach Vladimir Ruzicka he will be playing for the Czech team at the world championships in May.
Nonetheless, a source close to Jagr has told Adler that Jagr is close to finalizing negotiations for Jagr to play with the Edmonton Oilers.
Lowe’s comment isn’t exactly “No. Full stop.”, particularly given that signing a contract in Russia seems to be somewhat akin to making a contract with a minor to commit an armed robbery for you in terms of enforceability and it doesn’t really make any sense that the Oilers and Jagr are doing a deal now - Jagr has a contract in Russia for next season too - but I don’t know how they were planning on him clearing waivers if he came here, unless there was a big ticket for next year that they figured would scare teams off. Plus, and I hate to be cynical, but committing to play in the world championships in May is in no way inconsistent with signing with the Oilers for the 2008-09 season now.
Curious stuff.
Add a dman to the wish list, I guess.
1: I’m with you on the multi-year deal to scare off other teams and to get him over here for the stretch run to boot.
2: that league’s a mess and as you said, the contracts aren’t set in stone
3: oilers chased Jagr last summer
4: Oilers have new money with 71 being out
5: Lowe didn’t dismiss the rumor entirely
6: Staples has used his source before and he’s been solid.
Could we sneak him through waivers if he threatened retirement if anyone claimed him? That team would be stuck with his contract, no?
He can make whatever threats he wants but he’d still be stuck playing in Columbus, or wherever, if they took him, or going back to the KHL. If the KHL is bad enough that he wants out, does he want to run the risk of having to choose between there and a less desireable NHL city?
There are pitfalls that I see but there are also enough signs that there’s something here that I wonder.
He can make whatever threats he wants but he’d still be stuck playing in Columbus, or wherever, if they took him, or going back to the KHL.
Further, the cap hit would only count against Columbus (for example) if Jagr retired. So if Jagr decided not to report and went back to the KHL, whoever claimed him would have lost nothing, and in fact gained something by preventing the Oilers from getting him.
It’s a moot point anyway. Both of Jagr’s agents have denied it, and Sportsnet has a quote from a high-level Oilers’ executive calling it “bogus”.
Copied and pasted from the LT thread discussing same matter:
Maybe - and most likely - I’m seeing more from this rumor than what there really is considering today’s a terrible news day with 71 down for the year.
Still, Katz is probably a guy who believes you can solve most anything with money and if Lowe’s cell phone indicates he’s in Europe and we know for a fact we’ve had interest in 68 in the past, would anyone bet against Katz throwing around some dollars to convince Jagr’s KHL team to loan us Jagr and thus we find our way around the waiver wire? Or maybe there’s another way we can get him over here.
I’m not really swayed by a “bogus” refrain; there’s been too much past interest from the Oilers in this player and Staples source has been reputable enough that something’s going on here somewhere.
but committing to play in the world championships in May is in no way inconsistent
Ha ha!
Why does the waiver rule work this way? Any team can block Jagr coming here by matching the deal?
Don’t know about the waivers — but Jagr was a UFA when he left, sign a new Standard Player’s Contract — why would waivers apply?
There’s a specific article in the CBA that deals with players who sign in outside leagues and then try to come back to the NHL in the same year. Short version: If you sign a contract with the KHL for this season, get released, and then sign with the NHL, you have to clear waivers.
Whats this business about signing him to a big year deal and scaring off other teams trying to grab him through waivers? To my understanding at least, it doesn’t work like “Hey, Good Team wants to sign this guy for this deal, do you want to match it?” to every team below them in the standings. It works where the worst team gets approached and says “Hey, do you want to claim this guy and sign him?” and if they pass, it goes to the next team, and so on. It shouldn’t matter if the Oilers have a 100 year deal with Jagr’s name on it, if someone below them wants to claim him.