John Klingberg Is Signing with the Edmonton Oilers
Because leaving Dallas for the Anaheim Ducks and the Minnesota Wild wasn’t painful enough, word is now getting out that John Klingberg is signing with the Edmonton Oilers.
Now, this doesn’t guarantee that Klingberg will face the Stars in the playoffs for the second time in three years, but also, it pretty much guarantees that, right?
Anyway, the fit here makes a lot of sense. The Oilers’ have been using Mattias Ekholm and Darnell Nurse to run their second power play unit, and they’re both lefties. So already, you can see a pretty easy fit where (let’s say) Ekholm comes off to focus more on the penalty kill, and Klingberg runs it with Nurse, who would be there to cover for any lapses.
Additionally, the Oilers’ defensive depth in general could use a boost, and if Klingberg is able to hack it, he could look pretty good next to Darnell Nurse, who has played with a lot of different partners this season. Travis Dermott was probably the closest Klingberg analogue early in the year, when he played with Nurse briefly, but he was a disaster in Edmonton, so they waived him. Dermott was then claimed by Minnesota, who has needed every healthy body they can find.
(Incidentally, the Nurse-Dermott pairing bears some similarities to the Heiskanen-Dumba experiment earlier in the year that has been pretty clearly abandoned by Dallas at this point.)
Brett Kulak has looked like a top-four defenseman in Edmonton to complement Nurse, Ekholm, and Evan Bouchard, but as a left-shot, Kulak is not the most ideal partner for Nurse. That’s where the right-shot Klingberg could be a fit.
This is all predicated on the assumption that Klingberg will look like his old self rather than his recent self, of course. Take the HockeyViz metric of sG, for instance (Synthetic Goals), which reflects Klingberg’s career arc pretty accurately thus far. Can you guess where his hip started bothering him again? Go on, guess.
(Obligatory Peter Wallen mention, accompanied by a low whistle.)
It’s a pretty low-cost signing for Edmonton, no matter how it turns out. If the Oilers get Klingberg (who you’d expect to sign well under $2 million, if not the league minimum) at anything like his old self, then they bolster their blue line depth a great deal for cheap, and well before the deadline.
If Kilngberg doesn’t pan out, given how tough recovery from hip resurfacing surgery is, then the Oilers have a bit of time to make another decision. But for Klingberg’s part, joining a high-flying team like the Oilers seems very likely to give him a chance to pile up some nice-looking numbers before testing the market again in the summer. Creating offense with Connor McDavid, Zach Hyman, and Leon Draisaitl on your team seems like as desirable a proposition for Klingberg as he was ever going to find.
On the Dallas side, I’ll just reiterate what I said the other day: Klingberg’s status as the former number one defenseman in Dallas always made any reunion tricky from the Stars’ perspective. That’s a big name to bring back into the room under any circumstances. And from Klingberg’s perspective, Thomas Harley and Miro Heiskanen are pretty well cemented on the top two power plays (in whatever order you think they ought to be), so there would have been work to do to carve out a spot for him.
With the Stars already quite likely to be looking to make a move to improve their blue line, bringing back Klingberg simply has too many questions marks to go along with the upside. And the recent downside to Klingberg’s game has been pretty well documented. As much as I loved watching Klingberg, this feels like a good decision by Dallas.
That said, it would be a nice story if Klingberg can return to the NHL and resume a productive NHL career. And if the Stars end up missing out on that, then so be it. He was always a special player to watch, and to root for. And if it means the Stars have to knock him out of the playoffs again, that’s just the price you pay for catching up with old friends, sometimes.