We got our first trade of the NHL offseason Tuesday as the Toronto Maple Leafs traded 27-year-old goaltender Joseph Woll and defenseman Simon Benoit to the Philadelphia Flyers in exchange for goalie Sam Ersson, defenseman Emil Andrae and a third-round pick. Both players that the Leafs acquired are pending restricted free agents.

The Leafs gained a mid-round pick and freed up a little bit of cap space in the move but Woll is still pretty young and while he battled injuries this season, he still had an above-average save percentage and in each of the prior two seasons, he put up some really solid numbers.

The reality for Toronto is that with Anthony Stolarz signed long-term and Dennis Hildeby no longer being waiver-exempt, the Leafs were going to have to expose one of their three goalies to the waiver wire next fall, so this move gives them some flexibility for the summer and cleans up an issue that they would have had to deal with anyway next season.

Why couldn’t they get more for a relatively young goalie, signed to a pretty good contract?

Well, that’s the reality of the goaltending market. There are a lot of goalies out there and not a lot of jobs.

Even after this Toronto move, there are still teams that have too many goalies.

The Sabres have four goalies in their system that will all want cracks at NHL jobs next season, the Red Wings have a cluster of young goalies in their system, Montreal will want to move on from Sam Montembeault at some point this summer, and Vegas will likely be trying to get out of the Adin Hill contract.

The free agent market features Freddie Andersen, Connor Ingram, Stuart Skinner, Cam Talbot, Eric Comrie, Vitek Vanacek, and potentially Sergei Bobrovsky, although I still think he winds up back in Florida on a short-term deal.

Even if Andersen were to call it a career after winning the Stanley Cup this season, which might not even be likely, there would still be five other pretty quality options on the market for teams looking for 1B or backup options between the pipes.

Combine that with the four teams that have too many goalies, and you can see just how flooded the market could be and that doesn’t even include players like Mikey DiPietro, Clay Stevenson, and Akira Schmid who will all need to go through waivers next fall if they don’t crack an NHL roster.

How many teams, other than the Edmonton Oilers, are even in the market for a goalie? The list is short.

I went through every team on PuckPedia to find the teams that have fewer than two NHL goalies signed or under team control for next season and here’s the list:

Detroit, Edmonton, New York Rangers, Pittsburgh, Utah, and Winnipeg.

Detroit and Pittsburgh both have young goalies that they could be looking to elevate next season as well.

The list of teams that really need a goalie is pretty short, and again, there are lots of names out there. That should mean that prices to acquire players on the trade market should be pretty low, like what we saw with Woll.

The Oilers could simply go the free agent route and bring back Connor Ingram or look at a veteran like Cam Talbot, but maybe there’s a chance for them to aim higher.

What if a team like Ottawa looks at Linus Ullmark, who there was a lot of off-ice noise around this past season, and decides that they can get cheaper between the pipes?

Could he be had for a lower acquisition cost than what we’d traditionally expect? If that’s the case, then maybe that’s a route the Oilers look into. Could a piece like Tristan Jarry, who carries a high cap hit but has a very low base salary for next season, actually make sense as a backup for the Sens?

Of course, there would have to be other pieces going back the other way, but this could be a summer of big changes in Ottawa.

I’m also curious if Seattle still wants to pay north of $10.9m for a duo of Philip Grubauer and Joey Daccord. That could be another team interested in getting cheaper in net.

I’m not sure if a deal would work between the two sides, but my point is that there could be some names on the market that we weren’t expecting, and with so many goalies looking for a spot and so few places on NHL teams available, there could be a chance for the Oilers to get a quality goalie for a much lower price than you’d think.

That might be where the Oilers could really target a team like Buffalo, who needs to shed cap space and also needs to move on from one of their four goaltenders that are jamming up their system.

Ukko-Pekka Luhkonen, anybody?

The market could be working in Stan Bowman’s favour; he just needs to find a way to go out and take advantage of it, which is what a good GM would do.

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