The Edmonton Oilers lost in the first round to the Anaheim Ducks, finished with their worst points percentage since 2018-19, all while Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl both publicly stated that they were worried about the direction this franchise is headed.
It's fair to ask whether Stan Bowman should be the one to fix it.
To his credit, not everything he's touched has gone sideways. Trading a fourth-round pick for Vasily Podkolzin was a steal, and the three-year extension he signed him to looks like a bargain.
Acquiring Jake Walman at the deadline a year ago was a reasonable move. Walman was one of Edmonton's best defencemen in the 2025 playoffs, and at the time, it looked like a good deal.
But the execution kept letting him down.
Walman's seven-year, $49 million extension was a bit much given Edmonton's cap situation, and he averaged less than 19 minutes per game through the regular season. Trent Frederic's eight-year deal was just horrible. He averaged four goals and seven points in 74 games. He was healthy scratched on more occasions than one.
Then came December. Bowman sent Stuart Skinner, Brett Kulak, and a 2029 second-round pick to Pittsburgh for Tristan Jarry and AHL forward Samuel Poulin. And you know what? The logic was understandable. Jarry was a known commodity with term on his deal, and the goaltending needed addressing.
But Jarry had an .858 save percentage, lost the starting job to Connor Ingram, and carries a $5.375 million cap hit through 2027-28. Skinner and Calvin Pickard are both UFAs come July 1. The Oilers could have walked away clean by now. No dollars wasted.
What was supposed to solve the problem became a new one.
By the end of the season, Bowman's relationship with Kris Knoblauch had frayed publicly, adding another layer of uncertainty to an organization that needed the opposite.
The case for keeping him is that continuity matters, and the problems he inherited were troublesome. The cap constraints were baked in before he arrived, and aided significantly in losing Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway to offer sheets a couple of months after he got the job.
But the Oilers are not a team with the luxury of a learning curve. McDavid's window is measured in months, not years. The moves that were supposed to push this team over the top made it harder to get there, and heading into what might be the most consequential offseason in franchise history, that's a hard thing to look past.
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