Curb your enthusiasm about Connor Ingram

As fans clamoured for a goaltending change in Edmonton over the summer, one player many looked to as a potential option was Connor Ingram.

That hope turned out to have some legs as at the beginning of the month the Oilers acquired Ingram from the Utah Mammoth for “future considerations,” NHL legalese speak for nothing, and $800,000 of his contract retained by Utah, leaving Ingram with a $1.15 million cap hit — not so coincidentally the maximum amount of a contract that can be stashed in the minors.

However, anyone expecting Ingram to step right in and unseat Stuart Skinner or Calvin Pickard was naively proven to be expecting too much. Ingram went into the NHL’s Player Assistance Program in March of this year due to the untimely death of his mother, which understandably affected his mental health, and he was cleared from the program in August. This is the second time Ingram has been in the program, as he was also in it in 2021 to help deal with a diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

While it may come off as callous, his play has certainly been impacted in recent years. Ingram’s numbers suffered last season with Utah, as in 22 games, he put up a 3.27 GAA and a .882 sv%. He also spent one game with Utah’s farm team, the Tucson Roadrunners, but one game doesn’t tell you anything, so it’s not really important to dissect.

Those who have put their hopes in Connor Ingram also need to remember one other important element – he’s only 102 games into his NHL career, so regardless of which uniform he was putting on, no one truly knows what you have with him. Some say he has potential, and he very well might, but we don’t really know what we have with him until he’s played at least 200 games in the NHL. He’s a long way off from that, especially now — more on that later. All we really know about him right now is early on in his career, he’s been an average to below-average goalie at best. That could change, of course, but right now there’s really no evidence one way or the other that he’s going to be good enough to supplant the incumbents.

The plan all along was to get Ingram to the Bakersfield Condors, after he missed all of training camp and the pre-season in Utah, which is where he’ll start the season.

This essentially means the Condors will be running a three-headed goalie monster, at least in the short term. Matt Tomkins will be the organization’s #3 and starter for the Condors as Ingram and prospect Nathaniel Day will be left to fight Tomkins for playing time. Day actually earns a promotion to Bakersfield after he played three games for the Oilers ECHL affiliate Fort Wayne Komets at the end of last season, and absolutely killed it in short sample size. Day was originally a sixth round pick of the Oilers back in 2023.

Tomkins is obviously just keeping the spot warm as he’s already reached his peak at the age of 31, so I’m sure the Oilers player development staff is hoping that one of Ingram or Day supplants him. The organization’s goalie depth chart after Skinner and Pickard is now completely wide open after last season’s depth pieces all left the organization for jobs elsewhere, so this means whoever supplants Tomkins will definitely have a shot at an NHL spot if they properly develop over the next couple of seasons after that. That then leaves Connor Ungar and Samuel Jonsson to fight it out for playing time in Fort Wayne.