Former Oilers defenseman Oscar Klefbom, who hasn’t played a game since August 2020 due to a shoulder injury, has confirmed his retirement, via Rasmus Kagstrom of Hockey Sverige.
“It is as it is. I wasn’t quite done with hockey as a sport. But now it’s over,” Klefbom said (translated from Swedish). “I am very happy with my career. I’m just grateful that I got the chance to play as many games as I did — even though it was as an injury. I gained a lot of trust, got to take part in a fantastic journey. There are really two sides to the coin — because although I am grateful, I would have liked to be here today. On the ice. As a player.”
Klefbom also confirmed he played with his eventual career-ending shoulder injury throughout nearly all of his seven-year NHL career. Regarding the wait to officially announce his retirement, the 31-year-old said: “It was a choice I made. I talked to Edmonton that I wanted to lay very low with what was going to happen and what the situation is. They were perfectly ’fine’ with that. From my side, it was also because I thought it was so difficult to talk about it.”
For a brief time, Klefbom was one of the league’s premier two-way defenders. Selected 19th overall in 2011 out of Sweden’s Farjestad BK, Klefbom remained in his home country for two more seasons before making the jump to North America in 2013-14.
He was mostly an AHLer in his first season, suiting up in 48 contests for the Oklahoma City Barons. But he did get a taste of NHL action, posting three points in 17 appearances. It wasn’t much of an impact, but he’d make a large jump in his development in the 2014 offseason and became a staple of the Oilers’ top four in just his second season in the system.
Klefbom would go on to play 378 games in an Edmonton sweater, scoring 34 goals and 122 assists for 156 points (0.41 per game). He had a career -64 rating, understandable for a player routinely averaging north of 22 minutes per game on an Oilers club that only made the playoffs twice in his tenure. His even-strength possession numbers on the whole were positive, logging a 1.4 relative CF percentage and 50.1 xGF percentage at even strength, per Hockey Reference. He was a major part of Edmonton’s power play and penalty kill units, especially near the end of his abbreviated career.
The Karlstad native has been a UFA for over a year after his seven-year, $29.17M contract with the Oilers expired in 2023. He spent the final three seasons of the contract entirely on long-term injured reserve.
Klefbom made clear in his interview that he wants to return to hockey in some capacity, but whether that’s in the NHL or Sweden remains to be seen.