We’ve officially reached the point in the NHL off-season where the news has mostly dried up and the excitement of free agency is long behind us. Even so, the Edmonton Oilers still have plenty of burning questions surrounding them at this point in the summer, and today’s article will walk through the five biggest thoughts I have on my mind with the new NHL season only 81 days away.

When Stan Bowman spoke to the media during his post-season availability, he mentioned that forwards and goaltending would be his primary focus this summer. Now that we’re through free agency and into the off-season dead zone, we’re still rocking Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard as our goaltending tandem, and there’s not much happening in the way of rumours or names associated with the Oilers. No movement, no news, nada. Logically, you’d assume every other team wants to charge the Oilers a premium for any goaltending swap, but finding a way to overcome the cost of acquisition is part of the gig. Does that mean Bowman won’t be able to get a goalie before the start of next season? Is he happy to run it back for a third straight season?

Of course, not having a new goalie locked in on July 19 doesn’t mean a whole lot when there are still two-plus months to go until the 2025-26 season starts, but that doesn’t mean the situation in net isn’t at the forefront of everyone’s minds. Given that we’ve just had three consecutive playoff runs with sub-.900 goaltending, the noise isn’t going to stop until some kind of solution or adjustment is made. The question I have isn’t necessarily about whether or not the Oilers need an upgrade in net, but whether we can reasonably expect different results going forward, even though we have a healthy sample size of results to draw from. Are we getting a new goalie at some point, or are we really going to run it back and expect that this time will be different?

With the Oilers being in their Stanley Cup contention window over the last handful of years, it’s been a minute since I’ve really gotten excited about prospects. Drinking the Kool-Aid on prospects was what we lived on during the Decade of Darkness, but we haven’t had to do that much over the past few seasons. This season, however, is different. This season, we have two young players in Matthew Savoie and Isaac Howard who will be expected to not only play with the Oilers, but to make a difference while they’re at it. While they don’t necessarily face the same pressure as Taylor Hall or Ryan Nugent-Hopkins did when they were first drafted, the reality is that these are two names everyone will be watching with great anticipation.

The question I have is: how excited am I allowed to get about these two young men? I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t exactly kept track of what’s going on in the minors since the NHL club has been competitive, and that has me in the dark on what are reasonable expectations for these two. We all know the Edmonton Oilers have never had a Calder Trophy winner, so I’m wondering if this is the year we can expect the drought to end. Is that too much? Are these two young men even going to stick with the Oilers for the full season for reasons beyond the simple fact that we kinda need them to? I need your help understanding how much Kool-Aid I’m allowed to crush here because it’s been a long time since we’ve had two young first-round picks poised to make the jump to NHL hockey.

Outside of maybe finding a new goaltender, are the Oilers done with their roster construction changes for the summer? Is there still a tweak or two yet to come? Yesterday on Oilersnation Radio, Tyler Yaremchuk asked everyone if we thought Stan Bowman is done with the roster pieces already, and the thought that they’re done hadn’t really occurred to me. Are we done? I know there are enough players to fill every spot on the roster, there are scratch tickets like David Tomasek we need to understand, and that the Oilers only have $225,000 in cap space, but we can’t actually be done looking for improvements this early — can we? I mean, the job’s not done, is it?

While I personally believe the roster as it’s constructed today is good enough to get the Oilers into the playoffs, it certainly seems like we have more unknowns heading into the season than we did a year ago. Instead of having supposed sure things like Viktor Arvidsson, Jeff Skinner, and Adam Henrique coming to town, we’re going into 2025-26 with two rookies in prominent forward roles and a goaltending tandem that’s taken us to the Final but hasn’t been able to get the job done. Maybe it’s just me, but I think there’s more coming and that there will be at least one other minor move. Sure, I’m basing that guess on absolutely nothing but vibes, but I also can’t help but think we’re going to need more than this if the team is going to get back to the Stanley Cup Final for a third consecutive season.

I don’t think I’m talking out of school when I say that the Oilers have had messy starts to their seasons over the last two years, and I’m fascinated to see how they’ll avoid the trend for a third time, given how tough the start of their 2025-26 schedule is going to be. Not only are seven of their first 10 games on the road, but that turns into 17 out of 26 games on the road by the time the calendar flips to December. Almost half of their entire road schedule will happen in the first two months of the year, and that’s going to be a tough slog for the Oilers to get through while keeping their heads above water.

Then again, maybe kicking off the year with a few extended road trips is exactly what the team needs to gel and get everyone on the same page. There’s nothing like bopping around airports and hotels with the boys to get the group chemistry building up, and maybe having two-thirds of their games happening away from home is the remedy we’ve been looking for to get everyone engaged earlier than the Christmas break. Am I overthinking this, or is anyone else wondering how the Oilers are going to avoid a third straight slow start with this many games on the road? Just me? Can’t be.

Do other fanbases know the name of their goalie coach, or is that mostly an Edmonton thing? It has to be an “us” thing, right? The stories of the goalie coach in this market have been happening for years, and there would be no end to the noise until changes were made. Many of us were hanging our goaltending frustration on Dustin Schwartz since he came aboard in the role for the start of the 2015-16 season. Coaches came and coaches went, but our man Schwartzy hung around like a Teflon Don. For better or worse, his spot in the org was locked in. Of course, I don’t really know what the goalie coach does or what types of things they change with the players, but in our minds, Dustin Schwartz had to be part of the problem.

So, now that Stan Bowman brought in Peter Aubrey to work with the goalies after Schwartz’s contract expired, we’re going to get a look at what difference a new guy can make. In Gregor’s interview with Kevin Woodley from InGoal Magazine, we learned that Aubrey is a strong communicator who connects well with his goaltenders and works to understand them on a human level. We also learned about some of the holes in Skinner’s game that Aubrey will want to work on, but only time will tell whether this new goalie coach can affect the results we get on the ice. It’s all well and good to be a coach everybody loves — maybe that was the case with Schwartz — but there’s also tremendous pressure on the guy to help turn things around. I don’t know how many other markets care who the goalie coach is, but we certainly do here, and there are a lot of eager eyes that will be watching to see what the new guy can do. Tick tock, Pete.

When: Friday, August 29th, 2025
Where: Millwoods Golf Course

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