The National Hockey League draft used to be the highlight of the entire season in Edmonton.
All of the losses, the suspect trades, the fired coaches and overall disarray led Edmonton fans to those glorious Friday nights when the lottery balls lined up to cast a spotlight on the Oilers.
It’s where all the hard work finally paid off.
Taylor Hall. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins. Darnell Nurse. Leon Draisaitl and Connor McDavid. That’s about as good a haul in a six-year span as you’re ever going to find.
Those days are gone, of course, reducing what used to be a landmark day in franchise history to a process that barely garners a passing glance in this town.
And so it was with this weekend’s NHL Draft in Buffalo, an event that didn’t provide any big moves or surprises for a market longing for both.
For the third time in the last four seasons, the Oilers didn’t have a pick in the first round. And you have to go back to Evan Bouchard (10th overall in 2018) to find a first-round pick since McDavid who is still in the organization.
The draft is a bit of a dried-up vine these days, and with general manager Stan Bowman inactive other than making his selections in the second, third, fifth, sixth and seventh rounds, it was a rather anticlimactic weekend for Edmonton.
Related
On a Friday night with 12 trades and 32 picks, the Oilers were pure spectators. That’s understandable: if you don’t have a first-round pick, or an expendable player somebody would be interested in trading a first-round pick to get, nobody is interested in talking to you on Day One.
Day Two was an agonizingly long and tedious exercise (more than five hours of a panel waxing on about the size, speed and hockey IQ of almost all 191 picks), but it yielded the desired outcome — a few prospects for down the road some time.
“In the absence of a first-round pick it was a long first day on Friday night,” said Oilers director of amateur scouting Rick Pracey, adding they achieved their goal of stocking the shelves with potential.
After trading the 52nd overall pick to Tampa Bay for 58 and 133, the Oilers used 58 to take Rudolfs Berzkalns, a six-foot-four, 205-pound Latvian-born centre. He had 13 goals and 12 assists in the USHL last year.
Why trade down six spots?
“That was pure strategy,” said Pracey. “We had a long stretch between 84 in the third and 180 in the sixth, so we gained an early fifth-round pick. We felt we were looking at the same type of player (52 or 58) and we could gain something that was useful.”
And they’re happy with what they got at 58.
“It’s important to add some size in the middle of the ice,” said Pracey. “His game is raw and it has tremendous upside. The plan is one more year of junior hockey before the NCAA. We think that will do him a world of good in terms of exploring the offensive side, because we think it’s in there.”
In the third round (84th overall), they took Malcom Gastrin, a six-foot, 174-pound left winger from Sweden who is touted as a high-energy forward with a physical edge. He had nine goals and 16 assists in 24 games in the Swedish Jr. league.
They spent the 133rd from Tampa on left-shot defenceman Andrew Robinson of the Windsor Spitfires and the 180th on his teammate Cayden Harvey, who had 34 points in 68 games. USHL goalie Ryan Cameron at 212 rounded out Edmonton’s day.
Andrew Robinson of Canada looks on after being drafted by the Edmonton Oilers with the one hundred thirty-third pick during day two of the 2026 NHL Draft on June 27, 2026 in Buffalo, New York.
“I joked with the guys that I might have some explaining to do to my wife,” said Pracey, who lives 45 minutes from Windsor’s rink. “I travel around the world and I take two players from my backyard.”
Saturday’s haul is for well down the road while the Oilers are very much focused on a Stanley Cup window in the here and now.
This still leaves some important business to be taken care of with July 1 fast approaching.
The Oilers still need to get themselves a goaltender to run tandem with Tristan Jarry. They need to take care of the Darnell Nurse trade situation. They need to fill the void left by Nurse if they don’t get a top-four defenceman back in a trade. And they might want some upgrades at forward if the plan under new head coach Mike Babcock is to bring four lines of balance into next season.
With the Red Wings set in goal, former Edmonton Oil Kings netminder Sebastian Cossa (who went 15th overall to Detroit in 2021) was on the market. He went to Utah for the 23rd pick overall, currency the Oilers didn’t have.
There remains little progress on a Nurse trade. He isn’t generating a lot of suitors with four years left on a $9.25-million salary and it certainly isn’t helping matters that he has a list of only three teams he’d be willing to lift his no-trade clause for.
E-mail: rtychkowski@postmedia.com
Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know — add EdmontonJournal.com and EdmontonSun.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.
You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Edmonton Journal | The Edmonton Sun.