A familiar name is back on an AHL bench, and this time it’s in San Diego. Jay Woodcroft’s former Oilers assistant Paul Buchberger is taking over the forwards with the Gulls, stepping into a Ducks organization that doesn’t have much room for farmhands at the moment.
That’s partly because the pipeline is crowded at the top. Defencemen Tristan Luneau and Norwegian Stian Solberg are the closest to the NHL, while six-foot-five centre Roger McQueen, 19, may be the club’s top prospect.
“Anaheim’s got a really young team. I don’t know those players well but I do know they’ve got some stars ,” said Buchberger of players like Leo Carlson, Cutter Gauthier, Beckett Sennecke and Jackson LaCombe. Former Blue Jackets assistant Steve McCarthy will handle the blueliners in San Diego.
Buchberger also had a blunt read on the American League grind.
“One thing about the American League, the young players come out of junior and think they’re going to light it up but when you get to this league you realize pretty quickly it’s tough from the travel to the playing,” said Buchberger, well aware that young minor-league pros have to be really good at something to get to the NHL, and that’s often not the star-driven stuff they lived off as a junior.
Elsewhere in the Oilers orbit, Bakersfield winger Matvei Petrov is headed back home after three seasons in the organization, signing with Spartak Moscow in the KHL. Petrov, 23, had two strong years in the OHL in North Bay but never found traction with the AHL Condors.
“I liked the kid. He had lots of injuries and couldn’t get going the last two seasons,” said Keith Gretzky, the GM in Bakersfield. Spartak is coached by former NHLer Alexei Zhamnov.
There’s also a fresh note on Oilers 2025 draft winger Tommy Lafreniere. After a 41-goal season with Kamloops, the 2025 draft pick is headed to Western Michigan in the fall and has landed on the Canadian team world junior showcase squad, an early sign he’s on the radar for the U20 worlds here over Christmas.
Free-agent addition Ryan Shea brings his own interesting backstory. He and one-time Oilers draft pick Mike Kesselring were teammates on Northeastern’s blue line, and Shea wore the captain’s C there.
Two NHL organizations have already passed on him in different ways: Dallas, after three years on their AHL farm team, only offered a two-way deal in his UFA season in 2023, and now the Penguins declined to meet a $4-million AAV over five years for the 29-year-old defenceman. Shea’s puck transition ranked in the 91st percentile last season, with an 83 per cent success rate, but Pittsburgh opted for younger and cheaper.
In today’s cap climate, $4 million for a steady defender looks modest.
There was also a sobering financial wrinkle involving former Oilers goalie Jack Campbell and Frederick Andersen. Campbell could make more, with $2.6 million on his buyout, than Andersen this season. Andersen’s deal includes a $1 million base salary, another $1 million for getting to 20 games played, and $200,000 bonuses for every playoff round the team is in, provided he appears in 50 per cent of the games.
Former 2022 Oilers trade-deadline pickup Derrick Brassard has also moved into a new role, joining the Rangers in player development. Brassard, 38, had ankle surgery in 2023 while with Ottawa, retired in 2024, then returned to play last December in Geneva before getting hurt again after one game.
On the junior side, Oil Kings forward Kayden Stroeder is among the 27 players at Canada’s U18 Hlinka-Gretzky Cup training camp roster. The camp begins July 27 at NAIT, with pre-tournament games against Sweden on July 30 and Czechia on Aug. 1 before the event opens here Aug.
- The tournament will feature a number of players expected to go in the top two rounds of the 2027 NHL draft.
Canada’s camp roster also includes the sons of two former NHLers: Adrian Aucoin’s son Kayden Aucoin, a defenceman in Sarnia, and Nikolay Kulemin’s son Aleks Kulemin, a centre in Kingston.
There’s a strong Edmonton thread running through Sparta Praha as well. Ladislav Smid is beginning his first season as an assistant coach there, and the connections stretch to defencemen Mark Pysyk and Aaron Irving, ex-Oilers centre Devin Shore, and one-time Oilers draft pick Matej Blumel.
Smid also had a role in the Oil Kings’ decision to take two Czechia players in the CHL import draft: defenceman Lukas Kachlir and forward Jonas Vanicek. Both are set to play in the Hlinka-Gretzky tournament.
“Lukas is small (five-foot-eight and 150 pounds) but extremely smart. He’s already played some games in the Czech pro league.
The forward is one of our best centres in the 2009 birth year. Both very competitive,” said Smid.
The Oil Kings made one more move of note, sending overager and alternate captain Rhys Pederson to the Vancouver Giants for a sixth-round 2027 draft pick. Pederson, 20, played 183 games for Edmonton’s WHL club and averaged more than three minutes a night on the penalty kill last season, when the Oil Kings ranked fifth in the WHL.
“Rhys was a great leader for us,” said Oil Kings GM Michael Chan.
To replace him, the Oil Kings brought in Brandon Wheat Kings forward Dylan Ronald, a 19-year-old from Ponoka, in exchange for fifth-round 2029 compensation.
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