The hot news around Edmonton right now is that the team is working on a divorce with Lucic and his albatross contract. The Oilers want to move on, Lucic wants to move on, it seems inevitable. Of course, the Oilers are going to have to take another bad contract in return. This is a getting the best of a bad situation, change-of-scenery type thing for ugly contracts who could potentially be useful in a new environment.

The idea of Corey Perry in an Oilers uniform is partially disturbing and partially hilarious and partially, well, sort of interesting. Perry is already a largely disliked player around the league for his style of play on the ice…

…but he became even more infamous in Edmonton because of the goalie interference call that went his way.

Perry also did this in the series…

… I’m not forcing you to press play.

Perry and Ryan Getzlaf used to be one of the best duos in the NHL. I can vividly remember back during the darkest years of the Decade of Darkness when the two of them would completely dominate some very, very bad Oilers clubs. Over the past couple years, though, Perry has sort of fallen off a cliff. In 2016-17 and 2017-18, Perry has scored just 36 goals in 153 games. That’s a massive drop from the 30- and 40- goals seasons he was putting up consistently for nearly a decade before that.

Perry made an appearance on TSN’s recent Trade Bait List at No. 25. It doesn’t represent any certainty that Perry will be dealt, but there’s reason to assume the Ducks might be wanting to get out from under the winger’s $8,625,000 contract.

That $8,625,000 deal will go on for three more seasons. Perry just turned 33 years old and it’s difficult to say if he’ll ever rebound to being anywhere near the elite scoring power forward he once was. At this point, it seems very unlikely.

Lucic, as we know, is signed for five more years at $6,000,000. He’s 30 years old, so a few years younger than Perry, but his decline has been steeper. Lucic scored 23 goals in 2016-17, more than Perry did, but then imploded in 2017-18, scoring just 10 goals. Was 2017-18 an anomaly? Could he bounce back and be a solid contributor with a change of scenery on a different team? It’s difficult to say.

So, does this make sense? From Edmonton’s perspective, the team would be getting a salary cap increase over the next three years of $2,625,000 switching from Lucic to Perry, but they would also be getting savings on the next two years after that of $6,000,000 after Perry’s deal expires.

From an objective standpoint, Perry is an interesting fit on the Oilers because the team badly needs right wingers who can score goals. While he did only score 17 goals last season, I think he’s more likely to contribute on this team right now than Lucic is based on his skill set and style of play.