In the wake of the St. Louis Blues tendering offer sheets to Dylan Holloway and Philip Brobeg last Tuesday, it became clear the Oilers were going to have to perform some surgery if they had any hopes of matching.

Finding a way to unwrinkle $6.7-million in salary cap space from their jeans seemed like something that simply might’ve been too challenging to do. Fast forward five days later, and all of a sudden Stan Bowman and the Oilers have found a way to do just that.

Evander Kane is set to land on the long-term injured reserve due to surgery for a sports hernia/hip injury he played through last season, meaning there would be $5.125-million in cap space opening up. While the acquisition of Vasily Podkolzin Sunday evening made many, myself included, think that he was coming in to be the replacement for Dylan Holloway, another trade hours later of Cody Ceci suddenly flipped the script.

As highlighted by the excellent salary cap resource website PuckPedia, the Oilers have a clear path to matching both offer sheets and retaining their 2019 and 2020 first-round picks. In order to do so, the Oilers would need to place Kane on the long-term injured reserve and assign one played with a cap hit of $801,000 or more to the American Hockey League. The caveat is that in this situation the team would need to make another trade to become cap-compliant whenever Kane were to return, if it were in the regular season.

If the Oilers chose to match Broberg, but not Holloway, PuckPeida added, they could be cap-compliant upon Kane’s return without the need for another trade.

Seemingly backed into a corner, the Oilers have done well in mitigating their losses no matter what shakes out. Podkolzin, 23, fell out of favour in Vancouver, looking for a fresh start to try and find his game that landed him as the 10th overall pick in 2019. Despite his struggles, he’s carved out time in the NHL as a strong defensive winger, similar to how Holloway has.

Emberson, meanwhile, played under Kris Knoblauch with the AHL’s Hartford Wolf Pack, being named that league’s Eastern Conference shutdown defenceman of the year. The 24-year-old has carried that over to the NHL for his rookie season last year, managing to tread water and hold his own on an abysmal San Jose Sharks team.

If the Oilers do match both offer sheets, they’ve been able to not only retain the young talent they’ve spent the last number of years developing but also add more youth to a team that’s one of the oldest in the entire NHL. That’s been a clear modus operandi of the team this summer, looking back to the aggressive move to trade up and draft Sam O’Reilly, swapping Ryan McLeod with Matthew Savoie, and, to a lesser extent the swap of Xavier Bourgault and Jake Chiasson for Roby Jarventie.

Staying competitive while also getting younger isn’t always the easiest of things to do, but the Oilers are toeing the line this summer. They’ll need to answer the offer sheets by early Tuesday morning at the latest.

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.