Edmonton Oilers Must Navigate a Tricky Path to Improve This Off-Season
Many thought the Edmonton Oilers could win the Cup this year, but they fell out in Round 2. With tight cap space and players to re-sign, will they improve enough in the trade market to take the next step?
No matter the time of the year, there’s never any shortage of drama surrounding the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers.
That’s a credit to the devotion Edmonton fans have for the sport and for their team. Very little matters more to them than the state of the Oilers franchise. And as late spring shifts into summer, Edmonton supporters have legitimate questions about where the Oilers are heading in the 2023-24 season.
Although much of the worry concerning the Oilers concerns their goaltending, we don’t see Edmonton GM Ken Holland doing much of anything in regard to veteran Jack Campbell and youngster Stuart Skinner. For better and worse, the Oilers are stuck with those two for now.
That said, Edmonton’s defense corps could see an addition made before the 2023-24 campaign kicks off. The same goes for the Oilers’ bottom six forwards.
After signing forward Derek Ryan to a two-year deal worth $900,000 per year on Tuesday, Holland has only $5.07 million in salary cap space with 18 players under contract for next season, per CapFriendly. That $5.07 million is going to be swiftly eaten up by new contracts for RFAs Evan Bouchard, Ryan McLeod and Klim Kostin, leaving Holland with very little money to add assets to his roster.
That leads some to expect Holland to use one of Edmonton’s first-round draft picks in a trade to add experience, but he’s already used this summer’s first-rounder on the deal that made former Nashville cornerstone defenseman Mattias Ekholm an Oiler. Ekholm’s performance after coming over from the Predators made that trade worthwhile, but it did deplete Edmonton’s depth of young assets.
The Oilers are in win-now mode, so we could see Holland dealing Edmonton’s first-rounder in 2024 or 2025 to add an elite veteran to the lineup. But the Oilers have to find a trade partner to either provide more cap space or bring in a proven performer who can make them tougher to play against in their own zone. In the flat-cap environment, that’s easier said than done.
Holland must identify a target another team will part with and then make the financial component of the trade make sense under the cap.
Otherwise, most of the bedrock pieces of the Oilers will stay intact. Connor McDavid is still going to be the best player on the planet, and Leon Draisaitl is not that far behind him. Ryan Nugent-Hopkins had a career-best year, and while Edmonton management doesn’t expect Nugent-Hopkins to improve on his 2022-23 offensive totals, they still need him to provide excellent secondary scoring.
The same goes for wingers Zach Hyman and Evander Kane. Both of those two aren’t going anywhere. And the defense corps will likely remain very similar to the one that finished this past season. Many things went right for many Oilers players in 2022-23, but even then, there was still clear room for improvement.
It’s difficult to envision a scenario where Holland trades away one of the aforementioned Oilers veterans. The team performed well enough in the regular season to finish second in the Pacific Division and win a playoff round. However, the manner in which Edmonton was eliminated by the Vegas Golden Knights in Round 2 underscored how far the Oilers still have to go to be a Stanley Cup champion.
The onus now is on Holland to improve the group without taking away competent veterans in any trade. The status quo isn't an option for him. The free-agent market is weak this year, leaving Holland with trades as his sole option to make the Oilers deeper and stronger. He must engage with his fellow GMs and come up with at least one trade of consequence this off-season.
If he can’t do that, Oilers fans will let him have it. That’s just par for the course in Edmonton. Previous Cup dynasties have forever raised the bar for the Oilers, and the pressure is always on the team to once again win it all at hockey’s top level.
Getting there next season will be extremely challenging, but if Holland can tweak the roster and position the Oilers to go on a much deeper Cup run than they had this season, he’ll go down in history as another Edmonton legend, and schools in Alberta will be named after him.
That’s the potential reward that’s there for him, but he’s got to line up all the Oilers’ ducks in a perfect row.