The Edmonton Oilers acquired Chicago Blackhawks veteran defenseman Duncan Keith and prospect forward Tim Soderlund on Monday in a trade for defenseman Caleb Jones and a conditional 2022 third-round pick, a source confirmed to ESPN.
Which side comes out ahead in the deal? We grade both GMs here:
Duncan Keith has three Stanley Cups, two Norris trophies and one Conn Smythe Trophy to his credit. He has 1,192 NHL games and 625 career points to his credit. He’s never averaged fewer than 23 minutes per game in his 16-year NHL career. These are all impressive numbers.
Less impressive: He turns 38 years old on July 16. His traditional and advanced stats have all fallen off significantly in the last few seasons, to the point where he’s been a sub-replacement-level player defensively for five straight seasons. But the most important number, when it comes to this trade: $5,538,462 against the salary cap.
For the Oilers to have acquired a player at this age, with this decline, without any semblance of cap relief from a team with limited options to remove that contract from their own cap, is frankly negligent.
The Oilers reportedly tried to include goalie Mikko Koskinen, who has another season at $4.5 million against the cap, in the deal for Keith. Didn’t happen. The Oilers have other contracts they could have offloaded, like the $1.65 million Kyle Turris carries into next season. Again, didn’t happen.
Edmonton, a team without a playoff victory since 2017, didn’t get a single cent retained by the Blackhawks for a player who, according to Chicago GM Stan Bowman, “came to us with a request to be traded to a team closer to his son and we were happy to work something out.”
That’s wild.
The trade has expansion draft implications, too. Keith’s no-movement clause was waived for the trade but remains in place with Edmonton. That means he has to be protected in the expansion draft. Now, they have to protect Keith, and will do the same for Darnell Nurse and Ethan Bear. You could make the argument that Jones would have been lost to the Seattle Kraken, so better to move him for something before the draft.
As for Tim Soderlund? He is a 23-year-old forward that’s spent the last two campaigns in the AHL, and had a four-season pro career in Sweden.
The spin coming out of the Oilers’ media proxies is pretty clear on this one. From a cap perspective, it’s bad! But from a budget perspective, it’s a “win” for ownership.
Keith signed his contract in 2009, a time before deals with dramatically plummeting base salaries in later years were outlawed under the collective bargaining agreement. Keith’s salary decline wasn’t as steep as players like Marian Hossa or Roberto Luongo, but it does “back dive” into its lowest salary seasons for Edmonton: $2.1 million in 2021-22 and $1.5 million in 2022-23. The argument is that Keith is much better than Jones, and making only $1.2 million more in real dollars. But let’s not confuse cost-effective with effective.
According to ESPN Stats & Information (via Natural Stat Trick), at 5-on-5 last season the Blackhawks with Keith on the ice earned:
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44.8% of shot attempts
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44.9% of shots on goal
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45.1% of scoring chances
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41.9% of expected goals
That was while he was averaging 23 minutes and 25 second per game. It’s expected that Oilers coach Dave Tippett will play him fewer minutes behind Nurse on the left side of the Oilers’ defense. Will less ice time yield better results, considering how below average Keith has been defensively?
Keith is a complementary player at this stage of his career. Ideally, he would be the veteran former champion playing a depth role on a contender with a stacked blue line. You could imagine him filling that need for the Colorado Avalanche or Vegas Golden Knights, for example.
But neither of those teams could ever make that acquisition work given the cap hit. Not without the Blackhawks taking on part of the cap hit or taking on a different contract in return to lessen the impact.
Yet the Oilers, who are a good distance away from that tier of contention, just did it. Even if Keith has more left in the tank than the metrics would indicate, and even if his experience and intangibles are an asset to the dressing room, bailing the Blackhawks out of this contract without any salary cap relief to the acquiring team is just specious management.
Keith still had value on the trade market. Even though he is in steep decline, there was always going to be a team that believes adding a veteran defenseman with multiple Stanley Cup rings and a Conn Smythe to their lineup could be the last piece of a championship puzzle.
But he also had a full no-movement clause with a clear destination in mind: Western Canada, to be closer to his family and, specifically, his 8-year-old son. He has a $5,538,462 cap hit. There was a time when that was seen as one of the league’s better bargains, but no longer: Not when Keith is in a multi-year tumble from elite status, or when he’s pushing 38 years old or when the salary cap remains set at $81.5 million.
In other words, to get anything of value for Keith at this point is a win for Chicago.
It removes a player who had a minus-8 goals scored above average over the last two NHL seasons (third-worst in the league, minimum 100 games) from their lineup. It removes $5,538,462 from their cap, which can be allocated to helping improve the team’s several glaring weaknesses or to acquire a veteran impact player — like, for example, defenseman Seth Jones of the Columbus Blue Jackets, whose brother was just added to the Chicago dressing room via this trade.
On top of all of it, the conditional pick favors the Blackhawks, too: The conditional third-round pick becomes a second-round pick if Edmonton wins three rounds in the 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs and Keith is among the top-four Edmonton defensemen in total ice time through those rounds.
(Granted, there’s a much better chance of the latter condition than the former.)
Keith was one of the main reasons the Blackhawks experienced their recent Stanley Cup dynasty. His No. 2 will likely ascend to the rafters one day. But as Jonathan Toews returns and Patrick Kane continues to be one of the NHL’s top players, it was time for this other franchise standard-bearer to go. That they got anything tangible in return, given the context, is frankly remarkable.