The Edmonton Oilers have traded defenceman Steve Staios to the Calgary Flames in exchange for defenceman Aaron Johnson and a third round pick.

The trade marks a rare switch between the Flames and Oilers and continues the Edmonton plan of offloading in the process of rebuilding.

Staios heads to the Flames with one year remaining on his contract worth $2.2 million.

The Flames have obviously been overhauled too and the Staios pick-up appears to be an attempt to snag some leadership and grit.

The Oilers receive Johnson, who’ll become an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

The Edmonton Oilers have moved a significant contract today in shifting Lubomir Visnovsky over to the Anaheim Ducks in exchange for Ryan Whitney.

The deal unpacks some space from the Oilers roster and enables them to get a skilled defenceman in return. Both players in this deal were Olympians, too, and it stands at this point as the biggest trade of trade deadline day.

Whitney was selected as a replacement to the injured Mike Komisarek to play on the American men’s Olympic team, while Visnovsky suited up for the Slovaks and has quite a history of international play.

It’s a trade that gives the Ducks a puck-moving offensively-minded defenceman to work with their talent and it allows the Oilers to move in a nice direction with a skilled defenceman of their own.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

The Edmonton Oilers are continuing to court disgruntled forward Dany Heatley despite his earlier refusal of their advances. It’s beginning to look like the Oilers’ organization is resembling a desperate teenager, complete with sweaty palms, pursuing a potential date.

The most recent attempt to get Heatley to notice them came when the Oilers packaged up some videos and sent them along. The organization sent an employee to deliver the videos personally to Heatley’s agent, who happens to be staying in British Columbia. One can only imagine the humiliation the employee must have felt and one can only wonder whether he or she also brought flowers, chocolates or champagne.

For whatever reason, the Oilers organization has struggled to entice big money players to stick around in Edmonton. Chris Pronger wasn’t interested in staying for long and the team had to dangle a bigger-than-necessary salary in front of goalie Nikolai Khabibulin to get him to sign up.

According to reports, the video package featured clips of the offensive “wizardry” of players like Shawn Horcoff and Ales Hemsky. The intention to woo Heatley with these clips is somewhat sad, especially given the fact that should Heatley actually arrive in Edmonton he’ll be much more trouble than he might be worth.

The time for Kevin Lowe to stop the insanity has long passed, but it’s not too late to save face and stop pursuing a player who obviously has no interest in playing for the Oilers. The whole thing is a joke, resembling a monstrous appeal to Heatley’s swelling ego more than an earnest attempt to win a valuable player.

The Oilers already outdid themselves and made themselves look stupid when Steve Tambellini and Lowe headed to Kelowna for a meeting with Heatley at the end of June. It was a waste of their time and made them look, well, pathetic. To follow that mistake up with another one in the form of this video package is just silly.

The Edmonton Oilers used to have a proud history and they used to be THE place to play in Western Canada. With moves like these, it looks as though the Oilers have lost their sense of history and their sense of pride. It’s up to Tambellini and Lowe to save face and give Pat Quinn something significant to work with in the upcoming season. And it’s up to the entire Oilers organization to prove to Edmonton, to the fans and to the league that they’re worth something again.

Screw Dany Heatley.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

It looks like the Edmonton Oilers are moving on up in the world with two top-tier coaches being added to the franchise. The Oilers named Pat Quinn as their head coach and Tom Renney as an assistant today, also retaining former Oiler Kelly Buchberger as an assistant.

On a personal note, it’s nice to see Pat Quinn behind the bench again. It is especially nice that he is yet again coaching a Canadian team, given his history with Team Canada. His most recent coaching assignment came with the 2008 IIHF World Junior Hockey Championships as his squad won gold over Team Sweden.

“If I think of leadership, I think of Pat. If I think of the way you want to be treated as a player, I think of someone like Pat Quinn. I’m very excited that he accepted this job as head coach,” said Edmonton general manager Steve Tambellini.

Having played for the Edmonton Oil Kings in his junior days, Quinn certainly isn’t a coach without a regional attachment. He is also well aware of the tradition of the Oilers hockey club and, at 66 years of age, will bring a wealth of experience to the franchise. With two Jack Adams awards under his belt, it will be interesting to see which direction he takes the Oilers team. The players will respect him and he should be a nice fit.

That he has Tom Renney at his side is quite the added bonus, too.

The decision was not altogether surprising coming from Tambellini, who knows both Quinn and Renney well from his days in the Vancouver Canucks organization. Apparently Marc Crawford was also being considered for the job.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

“I seldom get caught in the moment, but I’m caught there right now,” Edmonton Oilers coach Craig MacTavish said. “I’m going to need a day, at least, to be able to give myself a little bit of a broader perspective than what I can share with anybody today. I don’t have a lot to say. Hopefully, I can reflect on it and come up with something tomorrow. I don’t have a lot to add.”

MacTavish was responding to media questions about the season that was, as the Edmonton squad was eliminated officially from playoff possibility Tuesday night with their loss to the Los Angeles Kings.

Now, the optimism of October seems a long way off.

“I don’t think anyone here at the beginning of the season didn’t expect to make the playoffs,” Sheldon Souray said. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow. No one beat us. We probably can’t say we gave our best efforts and just came up short. We just didn’t get the job done.”

The Oilers are 17-17-6 at Rexall place. Only the Colorado Avalanche, 15th in the Western Conference, have pulled together fewer points at home.

“This is our building and these are our fans,” said Andrew Cogliano. “To lose the games we were losing and not have a good record is really disappointing. That’s a major regret. You’re supposed to have the advantage. We obviously made it much harder on ourselves to play at home than we did on the road. I can’t pin-point anything, I don’t know for sure, but it’s a situation that’s pretty sad, actually.”

So the Oilers will play out the remainder of this season, knowing that the games are essentially meaningless and that their only conceivable role of importance is to play as spoilers to perhaps the Flames or some other club with more to lose than they. And then they’ll look back at the season that was and will doubtlessly find it hard to take comfort in the little details.

The Oilers have been outscored 113-104 at home. Their 22nd-ranked power play is better on the road (12th) than at home (27th). Their penalty killing, 27th overall, is likewise better on the road (25th) than at home (28th). That is cause for concern.

“For whatever reason, we just weren’t able to get the job done at home,” Souray said. “When we got home we just felt, probably, that we could take our foot off the gas a little bit and have that games come to us. That never worked for us. I don’t remember one night when it worked for us.”

Posted by Jordan Richardson

Dwayne Roloson, after making saves in his team-record 31st straight start on Friday night in Edmonton’s game against the Anaheim Ducks, told the gathering throng of reporters that he was just taking it one game at a time. “Every game is like a playoff game for us now,” he said. “You just try to focus on every game from here on. It doesn’t matter who we play.”

It sure doesn’t seem to.

Roloson appears to be the proverbial last man standing in Edmonton, remaining in between the pipes in virtually every single game down the stretch. The season started with a three goalie dilemma for the Oilers and many didn’t think Roloson would be the one to emerge on top. It was thought, even by Roloson himself, that the team was going to go with Mathieu Garon and place Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers in as back-up. Roloson assumed he would be on the trading block during training camp and even left his family in Ontario so as to not uproot them.

But Roloson never quit and never stopped wanting to be an Oiler. He worked hard, day and night, and before he knew it he was The Guy in Edmonton again.

Now, with Edmonton making moves to get into playoff contention and land one of those last precious spots, Roloson will have to morph from The Guy into The Man in short order. That seemingly won’t be much of a problem, as the goaltender has been playing amazing hockey as of late. Don Cherry pointed that fact out on Saturday night during Coach’s Corner, too.

Of course, a little help from his friends wouldn’t be so bad at this point. They’ve virtually turned into the Florida Panthers, sending Roloson out in front of a firing squad. In the last four games, Edmonton has allowed 43, 36, 44 and 54 blasts at Roloson (prior to Sunday night’s game). The guy could use a break!

Roloson, now 39-years-old and in the last year of his contract with the Oilers, is in the middle of his best year ever and could well earn a brand new contract with Edmonton if he keeps this up. If the Oilers can come together around their goalie and give him some much-needed help around the crease, Dwayne Roloson could be Edmonton’s ticket to ride into the post-season.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

Buffalo’s Drew Stafford celebrated a hat trick in a game against the Edmonton Oilers, scoring the first one just ten seconds into a matchup that the Oilers will be struggling to forget.

You see, Stafford’s hat trick might have been marked as a significant accomplishment in its own right. But it came on a night when the visiting Sabres absolutely annihilated the Oilers in a 10-2 beating that currently stands as the single worst loss on home ice in Edmonton Oilers history.

“It was a debacle of monumental proportions. There were plenty of areas of our game plan that could be criticized,” said Oilers head coach Craig MacTavish, leaving nothing to the imagination in his post-game comments. “The effort tonight, we were just chasing our tails all night. We’re not as masochistic as it may seem watching that game. We have to execute our game plan a whole lot better than we did,” he added.

And indeed, after watching the contest it might seen that the Oilers were feeling just a touch masochistic after the 10-2 loss. The performance, disappointing to say the least, marked the end of a three-game winning streak for the club and will certainly deflate some egos.

Perhaps tellingly, the 8 goal differential actually beat the previous record set in a 9-2 loss at home. That 9-2 loss was to Chicago…earlier this very season.

“We didn’t think that this could happen to us again,” said Steve Staios to reporters after the game. “Especially the way that we were playing of late. Hopefully the experience we have from trying to shake it off last time is the way to do it because we started playing better and got ourselves into a playoff position. You can’t sugarcoat how tough a night it was but we have to put this behind us quickly and move on.”

Even Buffalo coach Lindy Ruff knew what the story was. “It was one of those nights where we caught them flat,” he said. “I’ve been behind the bench on a team where you have a night like that and it’s tough. The harder they tried it seemed like the worse it was getting.”

Ain’t that the truth. The Oilers will need to turn things around quickly and forget this game ever happened. Are there lessons to learn from it? Sure. But a loss like this happens because a team just isn’t bringing it, plain and simple. There’s nothing particularly “off” in Edmonton and there’s no reason for the coaches and managers to start thinking about tinkering. Two losses of such magnitude in one season will certainly look bad in the record books, but the team can’t focus on those games.

Instead, one set of statistics stands out as more important right now: 24-20-3. The Oilers aren’t looking too bad currently overall, sitting in a 4-way tie in the Western Conference with 51 points (Vancouver, Columbus, and Minnesota also share the spot). Edmonton needs to pull it together, overcome the tough lost, and get back to holding that playoff spot. The game against Minnesota on Friday has special importance, as the Oilers will be able to prove they belong in the post-season with a win over their rivals.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

2007-2008 Regular Season Record: 40-35-6, good for fourth in the Northwest Division and ninth in the Western Conference.

Leading Scorer: Ales Hemsky led the Oilers in points for the 2007-2008 season, finishing with 71 points, including 51 assists. Dustin Penner led the squad in goals with 23. Shawn Horcoff was second overall on the team in scoring, finishing the season with 50 points in 53 regular season contests.

Goaltending: Dwayne Roloson and Mathieu Garon pretty much split the 2007-2008 regular season in goal. Garon played in 47 games and finished with a GAA of 2.66. He also had four shutouts, tying his previous NHL season personal best in the category. Roloson played in 41 regular season games, finishing the year with a GAA of 3.11 and a save percentage of .900.

Regular Season Summary: The Oilers went into their 28th season in the National Hockey League in need of considerable rebuilding. The team had lost stalwart heart-and-soul player Ryan Smyth in the off-season and traded away captain Jason Smith and Joffrey Lupul to the Philadelphia Flyers as well. The team thought they were going to start the season with free agent Michael Nylander, but the deal fell through in typical controversial fashion. The off-season also marked the controversial offer sheet to Thomas Vanek of the Buffalo Sabres and the successful but equally controversial offer sheet to former Duck Dustin Penner.

With GM Kevin Lowe not making many friends amongst his fellow managers, least of all with Brian Burke of the Ducks, his team headed into the 2007-2008 regular season with mixed emotions. Nevertheless, the team tried their best. They were among the league’s best teams in the shootout, setting an NHL record for 13 shootout wins in a regular season. They also scored eight goals in one game for the first time in five years, taking down the Coyotes by a score of 8-4 in March 2008.

Regardless of how hard the team worked, however, they were just too many missing pieces and too many problems. Shawn Horcoff only played in just over 50 games and Jarrett Stoll’s year was underwhelming, to put it nicely. Still, the squad enjoyed some bright spots from its rookies, with Sam Gagner having a good year and Andrew Cogliano doing the same. Defenceman Tom Gilbert was also a bright spot, as he scored 13 goals and set a new record for rookie defenders.

Playoffs: The Edmonton Oilers did not make the playoffs.

Outlook: Going into the 2008-2009 season, the Oilers will hope to continue to use the energy of their young players to boost the squad. They have arranged a group of hard-working, gutsy players and should be able to crash and bang with the best of them. The team acquired power forward Erik Cole as a free agent, which adds some good size up front. Defenceman Lubomir Visnovsky will add some puck-moving ability on the back end and centre Gilbert Brule has energy to spare.

The Oilers will hope for a better year out of several of their “big guns,” hoping for more from the point out of Sheldon Souray and more energy up front from Stoll. This is a young, talented group. They should be able to ride their energy and their grit for quite some time, but they still lack a strong scoring punch up front. Look for a similar finish in the standings unless something significant happens in the locker room.

Edmonton has hired longtime Vancouver Canucks executive Steve Tambellini as their new general manager. Oilers’ owner Daryl Katz has known Tambellini for a long time, having worked together putting together national teams for the world championships and Olympics.

Kevin Lowe, meanwhile, was promoted to the post at Team President. Kevin Prendergast, the team’s longtime vice-president of hockey operations, was named assistant general manager.

The management shakeup in Edmonton came after Katz told media that depth in management would be part of the success of his hockey franchise.

“We realize that there’s more and more demands in this business at this level,” said Lowe. “In order to get the job done you need many people doing it so it’s really as simple as that.”

It looks as though Tambellini and Lowe will work closely together as a management team. “This guy (Lowe) isn’t going anywhere and I don’t want him to go anywhere,” Tambellini said. “We’re going to work hard as a management team and come up with solutions in how we go forward.”

Despite missing the playoffs, Oilers GM Kevin Lowe doesn’t anticipate being aggressive during the off-season. Last year, Lowe was dominant in the off-season, throwing around offer sheets and signing up free agents like a fire sale.

In an attempt to rebuild the Oilers, Lowe had NHL waters churning with a failed $50-million bid to land Vanek from Buffalo before snatching Dustin Penner out of Anaheim with a $21.25-million offer sheet. Lowe also landed unrestricted free agent Sheldon Souray with a $27-million, five-year deal and traded captain Jason Smith and Joffrey Lupul to Philadelphia for Joni Pitkanen and Geoff Sanderson.

“Not that we won’t look and try to be active, but we won’t go into free agency like we did last year, where we knew we had to bring players in,” Lowe said yesterday.

The Oilers finished ninth in the Western Conference at 41-35-6 for 88 points. They managed that without injured veterans Shawn Horcoff, Ethan Moreau, Raffi Torres and Souray on the way to setting a franchise record for games lost to injury. Their end-of-season charge of 14-5-1 in the last twenty games impressed the GM.

“We’re in a great position. We have lots of depth in the organization. Having said all that, we’ve had positive contract negotiations with all those players, so I don’t think it’s even going to get there,” Lowe said.

Rookies Sam Gagner and Andrew Cogliano, as well as youngsters like Nilsson and Gilbert, stepped to the forefront. The future looks relatively bright in Edmonton and the team hopes to continue to build from within.

Added Lowe: “Our goal going into the season was to try to make the playoffs, and to also be in a development year. We didn’t accomplish the playoffs - it was a good effort by the boys - but we had probably our best development year in 12 or 15 years. I can’t wait for next year.”