Oilers acquire Hallander from Penguins for Stastney
On Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2026, the Edmonton Oilers traded defenceman Spencer Stastney to the Pittsburgh Penguins for forward Filip Hallander. Both clubs announced the swap that morning. It was Edmonton’s first trade of the 2026-27 season.
The conversion was fiscal before it was anything else. Hallander’s contract carried an average annual value of $850,000. An average annual value is the yearly charge a player’s deal places against a team’s salary cap. Stastney’s average annual value was $1.5 million, listed by the Penguins and others at $1.525 million. Hallander’s figure sat at just under half of Stastney’s. After the names and the dollars moved, the Oilers held $1.436 million in cap space. The deal pulled an idle eighth defenceman off the depth chart and put a cheaper forward body onto the roster in the same motion.
Stastney had been listed eighth on the Oilers depth chart and stayed a healthy scratch. He had not played a minute in the first three games. Mike Babcock had the third pair sorted after the early games. Ty Emberson would skate with Jake Walman. Shakir Mukhamadullin would sit as the extra defenceman. Emberson had waited through the opening pair of starts, then taken the Saturday shift against Seattle. Babcock liked the way the night went.
“I liked Ty’s first game (Kraken). He wasn’t in trouble, played simple. Sat out the first two games for his chance and probably wasn’t as relaxed as he could have been but I thought he was good,” Babcock said.
Mukhamadullin and Emberson had the ice. Stastney had the bench. The seat that once looked like a steady fill-in had gone cold, and the reasons reached back to how he arrived and what the Oilers needed him to be.
He had come over from Nashville in December for a 2027 third-round pick. The deal closed the same day the Oilers sent Brett Kulak to Pittsburgh. Stastney was brought in to take the seat Kulak left.
“I think he plays a very similar game to Kulak and that was important for us… we’re very encouraged by what Spencer brings to the table,” general manager Stan Bowman said that day.
Stastney finished the season with a career-high 66 games, 36 of them in Edmonton. With the Oilers he scored one goal, posted a −10 rating, and averaged 16:02 of ice time a night. The Penguins later put his combined totals at two goals, eight assists, ten points and 63 blocked shots. After the March 19 game against Florida he did not play again. He sat all six playoff games in the loss to Anaheim. The fill-in role that had looked steady through the winter had already gone quiet by spring.
Filip Hallander stands 6-foot-2 and 207 pounds. Born in Sundsvall, Sweden, he is a left-shot centre who has primarily played wing at the NHL level. The Penguins selected him in the second round of the 2018 draft; their release listed the pick at 27th overall, while other accounts placed it at 58th.
The clearest stretch of production came later, back in Sweden. With Timrå IK he scored 40 goals and 89 points in 102 games and finished plus-24. That output was what drew him north again after earlier North American seasons had stayed brief. He missed much of last season. A blood clot on his left leg limited him to 13 games, one goal and four points.
The two appearances he had already made with Pittsburgh this fall were the first look at what the recovery produced. Hallander recorded a goal and three points in the Penguins’ 7-0 season-opening win over Philadelphia. The final was seven goals to none. His share was one goal and two assists. Through two games with Pittsburgh he finished with a goal and two assists for three points and a plus/minus of +4. Plus/minus is the difference between even-strength goals scored for and against while a player is on the ice; the +4 marked a four-goal edge in those minutes. All three points came in the opener. The second game added no scoring. The early line was already complete when the trade moved him. Those were the numbers the Oilers now carried forward.
PuckPedia listed the Oilers’ current cap space at $1,436,666. Its projected figure for 2026-27 stood at −$14,450. Projected cap space is the room a club is forecast to hold once the season’s full set of contracts and roster decisions are counted against the ceiling. The sheet now carried fourteen forwards. Max Jones was the winger most likely to drop into a depth role. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman remained injured and were due back within a week or so; their return would force the head count to give. One demotion would reverse the shortfall and start the accrual of usable room against the salary limit, even while those two stayed listed as injured. The ledger the Oilers carried into the days ahead read $1,436,666 available now and −$14,450 looking forward.
