The Edmonton Oilers have never exactly been a club that flinches at a messy headline. They hired Stan Bowman after his Chicago tenure came with heavy baggage.
They brought in Mike Babcock despite a long, well-documented track record. Evander Kane landed in Edmonton amid a contract fight with San Jose.
Jake Virtanen got a PTO in 2022 after being found not guilty in a sexual assault case.
If you want to go back even farther, Craig MacTavish spent a year in prison after a drunk-driving incident in 1984 before later becoming a coach and executive in Edmonton. Some of those bets worked.
Some didn’t. That’s the gamble with controversial moves: the club hopes the hockey outweighs everything else, but sometimes the noise takes over.
So now comes the latest name being tossed around in Oil Country: Alex Formenton.
David Staples of the Edmonton Journal wrote about why the Oilers should consider signing him, and Bob Stauffer discussed the idea on Oilers Now. Both sounded open to it. But the bigger question hangs right there: why?
Formenton is one of the five players linked to the 2018 Hockey Canada sexual assault scandal. All five players have been acquitted, and Formenton has been reinstated to play internationally.
Still, reinstatement doesn’t make the controversy disappear. Any team that signs one of these players is choosing to bring a fresh wave of attention on itself, and Edmonton already has plenty of that with Babcock in the picture.
The fit gets even harder to justify when you look at what the Oilers passed on before. If they weren’t willing to go after Carter Hart - the best player in that group, and a goalie at a position they badly needed help in - why would they chase Formenton, who plays a position they already have in abundance?
On the player side, the argument starts with a few obvious traits. Formenton is 26, he’s big, he’s fast, and in his last NHL season he scored 18 goals and 32 points in 79 games. But that was five years ago.
Since then, he hasn’t played an NHL game.
He’s now with HC Ambrì-Piotta in the Swiss National League, and if he were truly pushing his way back toward the NHL, the production would need to look louder than this. Last season he had 13 goals and 23 points in 42 games.
The year before, he didn’t play professional hockey at all. In the two seasons before that, also in Switzerland, he scored 10 goals in each year.
There’s no real surge there. No clear climb. Nothing that screams a player forcing his way back into NHL conversation.
That’s why the idea doesn’t make much sense from either angle. On the ice, the upside is tough to see.
If a team is going to take on the baggage that comes with a controversial player, the payoff needs to be meaningful. With Formenton, that payoff is hard to find.
His numbers are modest in a league that’s well below NHL pace, and Edmonton’s bottom six is already crowded with players battling for spots - all of them with far more recent NHL experience than Formenton.
Off the ice, the reaction would be immediate and loud. Edmonton doesn’t need another storyline.
It doesn’t need another distraction. It doesn’t need another controversy piled on top of Babcock.
Stauffer giving the idea airtime matters, since he’s the most connected insider in the city. But this still feels like the kind of thing that surfaces in late summer when there isn’t much else to talk about, not something with real traction.
There are also plenty of other free agents who bring more value, more talent, and more NHL experience.
In the end, there just doesn’t seem to be a fit here. Not on the ice, not in the depth chart, not in the locker room, and not in the public eye.
This reads like speculation filling a quiet August, not a move with real momentum. And if the Oilers have given Alex Formenton anything more than a passing thought, it would be a surprise.
In Other News...
Oilers Linked To A Top Six Winger Worth Watching Closely
Kirill Marchenko has quickly become one of the more interesting names on the winger market, and the Oilers are among the teams keeping close tabs on the Columbus forward. Montreal has been mentioned too, but from Edmontons side the appeal is easy to see. He is a top-six type who can help a contender at a premium position, and any player with that profile is going to draw attention when the trade chatter starts to pick up.
The catch is that Marchenko does not sound like a simple rental situation, which is why this one bears watching rather than assuming. Columbus has plenty of reason to proceed carefully with a young winger like that, especially if other front-office business around the league keeps changing the market. Between Connor Hellebuycks confirmed trade request and the speculation swirling around Winnipeg, the wider NHL landscape is shifting fast, and Edmonton will have to decide how aggressively it wants to stay in the mix if Marchenko ever becomes available. [Read more 🡒]
Oilers Face A Core Question As Their Cup Window Tightens
As Edmonton looks for a way to keep its championship window open, the contrast with Montreal is hard to miss. Juraj Slafkovsky recently described the Canadiens mindset as one centered more on winning than on maximizing paydays, and Montreal has backed that up by locking in a growing core with long-term contracts for Nick Suzuki, Cole Caufield and Slafkovsky himself.
For the Oilers, the question is whether they can create that same kind of stability while dealing with a more individualized approach to negotiations. With the window tightening, the challenge is not just finding talent, but keeping enough of it together long enough to turn contender status into something more lasting. [Read more 🡒]
Oilers May Have An Overlooked Prospect Built For A Real Role
Josh Samanski has quietly put together a case that looks different from the usual prospect hype cycle in Edmonton. His AHL work and brief NHL look suggest a player whose value shows up in the details, with a positive influence on his line and enough defensive reliability to stand out in an organization still sorting through names like Ike Howard and Roby Jarventie.
The intrigue is not whether Samanski is going to score at a flashy rate. It is whether his game translates into something more practical for the Oilers, the kind of forward who can handle trusted minutes, help on the penalty kill and hold his own at five-on-five when the margins tighten. For a team always searching for cost-effective depth that can be trusted in real NHL roles, that is a development worth watching closely. [Read more 🡒]