The Oilers have traded Sam Gagner for Right Winger Teddy Purcell of the Lightning.
Now about 20 minutes later the Lightning turned around and traded Gagner to the Arizona Coyotes, presumably to clear Cap Space for Tampa Bay and to replace the behaviourally deficient Mike Ribeiro. However, according to Pierre LeBrun the Lightning are retaining a full 1/3 of Gagner's salary moving forward.
Sigh.
I don't hide that I am a big believer in Gagner and it's going to take me a little while to get used to him not being a part of the team. Sam Gagner was drafted after the Death March that followed the trading of Ryan Smyth. He was the prize for enduring so much terrible hockey AND he was the first part of Rebuild 1 for the team.
He arrived as an 18 year old and while most people now look back on it and say he was rushed, at the time he was performing well. As it turns out that Rookie season for young Sam turned out to be his high water-mark for points in a season, though not for points per game.
His best season was the Lockout shortened year and he was set to build off of that but had his faced caved in and then came back weeks early to help the team try to win. It was all for not because Dubnyk imploded and there was no recovering from that, but it would be a disservice to Gagner to overlook the fact that he risked further injury to try to save this team.
I know very little about Teddy Purcell except that he looks like an overall good player with very good possession numbers. Purcell's last 3 years look like this:
2011-2012 81GP, 24-41-65 15.8sh% 2012-2013 48GP, 11-25-36 11.7sh% 2013-2013 81GP, 12-30-42 7.6sh%
This year Purcell shot about half the percentage he did 2 years ago and I don't expect he will get back to being a 15% shooter but even still he isn't lost in the offensive end.
More importantly than that though is that he was one of Tampa Bay's best possession players. He had a CF% of 53.6 this past year and was +3.5% CorsiRel which was 2nd only to Hedman. In fact he has either been 2nd or 1st in CorsiRel for the Lightning in each of his last 3 seasons.
It's obvious that the Oilers want to keep adding quality possession players and with Purcell they do that. It also doesn't hurt that he's 6'3" and 203lbs. He might be big but he doesn't appear to be a punishing physical player, perhaps using that size to protect the puck instead of hammer opposition.
The Oilers depth chart that I posted yesterday wasn't deep enough down the middle to keep Draisaitl away. Now it's really thin.
It looks like the team got that shiny new young toy and replaced the old one they got tired of.
And for the Lightning, I think they'll regret paying 1/3 of Gagner's salary when he bounces back next year under Tippett.
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