[Sylvanfan]

Well in what will hopefully be the first of many deals that rate above the typical For Simmer type of trade the Oilers and Flyers have hooked up.

Flyers get
Henrik Zetterberg and Andrew Ebbett 280k cap this year

Oilers get
Michael Cammalleri, and Kevin Bieksa

If the Oilers make the playoffs this year the Flyers also get 500k for next year in cap. If Cammy or Bieksa are injured in games today, the trade is undone.

Oilers make this deal because....
Zetterberg just wasn't producing for us the way we had hoped. Was having trouble staying healthy and couldn't seem to get good chemistry with any players consistantly. He's also due a new contract this summer and as a 28 year old if you add up his 6.75 salary he made this year plus 2 years as a 10 million dollar grid player after that...we anticipated he'd need 8.5 million a year on a 3 year deal. With several players being free agents this summer we were going to be in tough. Still it's hard to trade off a superstar like Zetterberg, and add in a guy like Ebbett, who's produced well in half a season for the Ducks.

Coming back we get Cammalleri who's 26 and signed for next year at a good rate of 4.2 and will be RFA again. He's scored more than Zetterberg in the SIM this year with 34 goals and 81 points and can play center or wing. We also get Bieksa who at 74 will be able to move into our top 4 on the backend right now. He's also got the potential to have his rating go up next year as he's come back nicely from an injury plagued season. For next year we needed to get defenceman badly. So for 6.95 million we now have what we hope is a 78 forward and a 76-77 defenceman.

We hope that Cammy can match Zetterbergs production this year and Bieksa will add depth to our back end. For next year we get 2 postions filled for the price of one so the downgrade was worth the added depth. Thanks to the Flyers for the trade talks and his patience as I tried to calculate out a number of scenarios to see if I could make it work.