I could be wrong, but this actually seems like a situation where the Oilers spent a bunch of time negotiating with their own player, only to have their fawning, obsequious media leak a bunch of information about the state of those negotiations, and someone else said, "actually that's a pretty good deal, we'll outbid them by a few bucks" and got the player signed.
... I mean, I have no evidence that that's how things went down, but it would be funny and very Oilerish, so I choose to believe it on those grounds.
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