A delay in finding a doctor to perform surgery on Evander Kane has caused a delay in the Oilers forward going under the knife this offseason, according to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman.
That issue, Friedman said on the 32 Thoughts Podcast this week, has now been solved, and the Oilers winger is expected to be out for a number of months:
I believe Evander Kane is going to have surgery. I think that one of the reasons it has taken until this long was because I think there was some conversations about who was going to do it, which doctor, and I think they had to work that out. And I think secondly, I also believe that sometimes in the summer, doctors schedules, they take vacations like everyone else, and I think that also kind of affected it. They had to decide who was going to do it, and when was this doctor available.I believe that decision has been made, eventually, he will have the surgery, and he’s going to be out months. I’m not talking one or two months, I’m thinking it’s going to be longer than that.
Kane, 33, was injured at some point during the season last year, revealing to the media just before the playoffs he had been dealing with a sports hernia injury. The winger appeared in 77 regular season games last year, scoring 24 goals and 44 points, but most of that production came during November, when he scored nine goals and 14 points in 14 games.
He drew in for 20 games in the playoffs, scoring four goals and eight points, but as the playoffs got longer and longer for the Oilers, his game became less effective, eventually missing the final five games of the Stanley Cup Finals.
Him landing on the long-term injured reserve, at least for some period of time, could be a huge boon for the club, who are navigating offer sheets from the St. Louis Blues to two of their youngest players, Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg. It would clear up $5.125-million in cap space, an amount that would go a long way in retaining the aforementioned pair.
While some in Edmonton are clamouring for the Oilers to pull a “Kucherov,” and keep Kane on the long-term injured reserve right up until the playoffs, Friedman isn’t sure the injury timeline could last that long.
Now the one thing nobody knows at this point in time — I can hear all the Oilers fans are saying ‘bring him back Game 1 of the playoffs, bring him back Game 1 of the playoffs,’ like any team would — I just don’t know, at this point in time, and I’m not sure anyone does, if the injury is going to last that long. I had some people say to me ‘There’s no guarantee if Kane is going to be out that long.’ But at the very least, what you can do is you can go over the cap 10 percent during the summer, and then you can punt this decision into the year. At the very least, the Oilers could do that.
Zach Laing is the Nation Network’s news director and senior columnist. He can be followed on Twitter at @zjlaing, or reached by email at zach@thenationnetwork.com.
