The Edmonton Oilers have spent the better part of a decade being the most talented team in the building on any given night and still finding ways to lose series they should win. It's a problem that more talent alone is unlikely to fix, which is why the most interesting free-agent question surrounding this organization isn't which scorer they add, but whether they finally decide to make themselves harder to play against.
Because right now, they aren't.
The Oilers are fast, skilled, and easy to push around, a combination that works in the regular season and falls apart the moment a team decides to make the series physical and take them off their game, which is exactly what Anaheim did this spring and what Florida did the two years before that. The solution isn't complicated so much as it requires the organization to commit to a type of player they've historically undervalued.
Three names. That's the whole argument.
Start with Mason Marchment, the 31-year-old left winger who finished the season with Columbus after being traded there from Seattle in December, and who put together 45 points in 68 games across two organizations while playing with edge. 6-foot-4, heavy on his feet, not shy about the dirty areas, and capable of producing at a pace that would slot him comfortably in Edmonton's top nine. He just finished a four-year, $4.5 million deal, he's going to get interest from Toronto and Montreal and several other teams with money to spend, and if the Oilers are serious about changing the identity of this roster rather than just adding another skilled winger, Marchment is exactly the kind of player that changes how teams prepare to face you.
He's not a finisher in the traditional sense. He's a forward who makes the game harder, who wins puck battles at a rate that opens up space for McDavid's line, and who the other team's coach has to account for when drawing up line matchups. This is a description that fits almost nobody else available at this price point.
Then there's AJ Greer, who may be the least complicated addition on this list to justify and the easiest to overlook if you're only looking at a boxscore, because Greer doesn't put up points, he puts up 113 penalty minutes and 17 goals all on an $850,000 cap hit with Florida this past season, making him one of the better values in the entire free agent pool for a team that needs to add snarl without breaking the bank.
He's 29. He's big and he's mean in the right way, the way that makes skilled players on the other team think twice about running your stars, and on a roster built around Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, having someone like Greer in the lineup sends a message that the Oilers have been unable to send with any consistency for years now, which is that there will be a cost for taking liberties with their best players.
The third piece is Jeremy Lauzon, the 29-year-old Vegas defenceman who closed out his $2 million contract after 68 games this season and who brings the exact profile Edmonton's blue line lacks on its bottom pair: 6-foot-3, 225 pounds, 89 penalty minutes, and a penalty kill presence that doesn't ask you to do anything but be physical, responsible, and hard to move from the front of the net.
He's not going to quarterback a power play or produce much offensively, because he never has. He has 58 career points in 384 games, but that's not why you sign him, and confusing his value with a point total misses the point entirely. What Lauzon does is make the third pairing difficult to play against and give the penalty kill a body to effectively disrupt a power play.
All three of these players are available on July 1st. All three fit within the Oilers' cap constraints at varying price points. And all three address the same problem in different ways. The problem being that Edmonton, for all its skill, is a team that opposing players look forward to facing, which is the single worst thing that can be said about a Stanley Cup contender.
Mike Babcock was hired to change the culture. Adding Marchment, Greer, and Lauzon would change the personnel to match it, and in the NHL, roster construction and cultural expectations have to point in the same direction or neither one works particularly well on its own.
The Oilers have the skill. What they've been missing is the part that protects it.
That part is available Wednesday at noon.
