There was a big development on the Andrej Sekera front on Monday. He was assigned to Bakersfield for a conditioning stint. As Ryan Rishaug (@TSNRyanRishaug) tweeted out a few days ago, a player coming off of LTIR can agree to a conditioning stint in the AHL for a maximum of either 3 games or 6 days to determine if that player is fit to play according to section 13.9 of the CBA. The Oilers can apply to have the stint lengthened by another 2 games if they need to, but that would be a rare and unlikely circumstance. The Oilers would not pull the trigger on Sekera’s conditioning stint if they did not believe that he is close to returning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5tsBNaQbY
Sekera will remain on the LTIR for the duration of his conditioning stint. Once he is deemed to be fit to play, the Oilers must activate him. February 10 will mark the end of his conditioning stint. The Bakersfield Condors will play two games between now and then (Feb 8 and Feb 9). Sekera will play in those two games. His 6 days will end before he will get the chance to play a third game. That would mean that his Oilers season debut could happen as early as February 13 against the Penguins.
CapFriendly (@CapFriendly) tweeted that the Oilers will need to shed $1,230,834 in salary cap hits in order to activate Sekera. That aligns with the “Today’s Cap Hit” number that is posted on the Oilers page on CapFriendly’s site, which is $80.7 million. However, as I noted in Part 1 of my All-Star Break Trade Preview, that number is merely a sum of every player’s Total Cap Hit for the entire season. Those numbers from CapFriendly are accurate, but that $80.7 million number is not the actual cap hit that the Oilers are working with at the moment.
Click Here to find out what the actual number they’re working with is.
