The New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers are pretty much polar opposites.
One is a young, talented team on the rise, taking the NHL world by storm this season with a wide open and incredibly promising future ahead of them.
The other, is a flawed, poorly constructed group of aging veterans and too few star caliber talents whiling away the weeks until the season ends and they can select one of the top players in next year's NHL Entry Draft.
Could there be common ground found somewhere between these two franchises, headed in seemingly opposite directions, possibly in the form of a trade?
That's the latest rumor thrown out earlier today by Eklund of Hockeybuzz.com.
...there's a growing possibility of an Oilers-Islanders trade centered around Jordan Eberle going to New York with Griffin Reinhart as the key piece going to Edmonton. Still far from a done deal right now but there is push on both sides from what I've heard.
Eberle, whose name continues to pop up in trade rumors, seems destined to find himself in a new hockey city before the trade deadline. He's a former first-round draft pick of Edmonton who, at 24, has four-plus seasons of NHL experience under his belt.
He's never managed less than 37 points in a season and that, his career low, only came during a year in which he played in just 48 games, according to Hockey-Reference.com. He's got 16 points already this season while playing on an entirely dysfunctional Oilers team.
Reinhart, on the other hand, is a 20-year-old former number four overall draft pick who saw his first real NHL action this season. He's played in four games with the big club, and has a minus-1 rating in that time. He's also played in 15 games with the club's AHL affiliate, the Bridgeport Sound Tigers.
Reinhart is talented, but he's mostly potential at this point. If the Islanders are getting Eberle, there is much, much more to the deal.
