Getting to know new Oilers forward Filip Hallander

The Edmonton Oilers have made their first trade of the 2026-27 season.

On Wednesday morning, the team traded Spencer Stastney to the Pittsburgh Penguins in exchange for forward Filip Hallander. The name Hallander may be a bit out of left field, but it’s been well known for a while that the Oilers were looking to ship a depth defenceman for a depth forward.

Hallander is a 26-year-old Swedish forward who was selected 58th overall in the 2018 NHL Draft. He’s only had a cup of tea in the NHL, playing parts of four seasons where he has two goals and seven points in 18 games. That includes a goal and three points in two games this season, with all three of those points coming in the Penguins’ season opener.

Most of Hallander’s professional career has been spent with the Swedish Hockey League’s Timrå IK, though he spent the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons with Luleå HF. After a brief stint in North America in 2021-22 and 2022-23, mainly playing with the Penguins’ American Hockey League team, Hallander returned to Sweden, where he scored 40 goals and 89 points in 102 games.

Last season, Hallander played a career-high 13 games, scoring a goal and four points before missing the majority of the season due to blood clotting.

Hallander is everything a team wants in their bottom six. The 26-year-old stands at six-foot-two, 207 pounds, and is a solid skater with a strong two-way game. He kills penalties, and the Penguins outscored the opposition 3-0 during five-on-five play with the Swede on the ice. 

Even his underlying metrics are encouraging, as his 86.31 percent of the expected goal share during five-on-five is the best on the team. In fact, only two players who have touched the ice this season (Justin Danforth and Andre Lee) have more of the expected goal percentage, and neither comes close to Hallander’s 17 minutes of five-on-five action.

With this move, the Oilers also shed some salary cap. Stastney had a cap hit of $1.525 million and was set to become an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season. Hallander, who is also set to become an unrestricted free agent, carries a cap hit of just $850,000.

This move gets the Oilers pretty close to starting to accrue cap space ahead of the trade deadline, as PuckPedia has them just over $14,000 in projected cap space. That means that if they send one player down, they’ll start to accrue cap space, despite players like Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Zach Hyman being injured.

All in all, this is a pretty good move for the Oilers, especially as there’s still some room to improve for Hallander.