Edmonton Oilers are no Longer Interested in Heatley

After several weeks of trying to entice two- time 50- goal scorer Dany Heatley to waive his no trade clause and join the Edmonton Oilers, their GM Steve Tambellini has officially announced that he has thrown in the towel.

Tambellini, who over the past month has engineered a trade for Heatley that fell through and even flew to B.C. in order to try and sell the 28 year-old on coming to Edmonton, said on Friday that it’s now time to go another direction. “We gave ourselves an allotted amount of time internally… to explore every opportunity to see if there was something that would work—it didn’t,” Tambellini said. “It’s time for us to move on. We’re very comfortable with that.”  Tambellini, who knows Heatley from past experiences with Team Canada, rightfully expressed lots of frustration and anger about the pending trade earlier this summer going public.

Edmonton, who missed the playoffs this past season by finishing 11^th in the Western Conference, were willing to send forwards Dustin Penner, Andrew Cogliano and defenceman Ladislav Smid to the Ottawa Senators for the disgruntled veteran.

“This is extremely disappointing to me,” Tambellini said about the trade proposal going public. “It’s very, very unprofessional. Eventually, I’m going to find out, we’ll find who did that.  I wasn’t very happy.”

Heading into the off-season Tambellini wanted to make a huge splash and despite receiving some criticism around the hockey circles for his continued pursuit of this star forward Tambellini has no regrets in trying to land the former Atlanta Thrashers 2000 first round pick. “We took a very aggressive approach on July 1,” the GM said. “There’s not too many people out there that are in the prime of their careers and have the potential of scoring 50 goals every year.”

Unfortunately for the Edmonton Oilers organization Heatley will definitely not be playing for them this coming season. “They’re just not ready to make a decision,” said Tambellini. That’s the only answer that I got. That’s all I can say. That’s fine—they can explore options elsewhere.”