Oilers Need to Clean House Before Another Season is Lost

We look back on the Peter Chiarelli Oilers era with disdain. He was so clearly incapable of doing his job in Boston, how did he ever get hired in Edmonton, why did he last so long, and how was he able to continue making errors until literally two days before he was fired? When you have organizational incompetence at the highest levels, the mistakes made, be they poor signings, ill-considered trades, or Entry Draft gaffs, these errors can’t be fixed overnight.

That is the reason current Oilers’ GM Ken Holland has been given so much rope over the past few seasons. We had to out-wait the Chiarelli mistakes before Holland could really put his own fingerprints on the roster, and the past summer was the moment for him to do just that. Today’s team is the one Holland built, and that’s a big problem.

The Good Moves

Let’s be fair here, Holland hasn’t sunk to the disastrous level of his predecessor just yet. The Lucic trade was an obvious win, both immediately, and for the following season. And the fact that Neal’s bout with Covid19 and lengthy recovery process necessitated a buyout can’t be blamed on Holland. Recovering Jesse Puljujärvi as an asset and contributing player has to be a feather in his cap as well.

Beyond that, Zack Hyman coming to Edmonton as a free agent was a good thing. His term and price point perhaps less so, but his addition improved a forward group that lacked top six depth and skill. And while we might regret the dollar figure associated with the deal in the years to come, Edmonton is in “win now” mode.

Everything Else Was Worse

We know Holland has final say on every move he makes. It was a condition of his coming to Edmonton and was even written in his bio on the Oilers’ team page for a time. So while the rest of the Oilers brass have plenty of problems, with many due for replacement as well, personnel decisions fall on Holland’s shoulders. And there have been a lot of mistakes.

Zack Kassian scored 15 goals playing alongside the greatest player in the game. Everyone not named Ken Holland knew the “McDavid bump” was responsible for the production, and if Kassian was going to cash in, it should have been another team’s GM that overpaid him. But Holland, in a move that has become something of a pattern, signed him for too much money and for too long. Kassian celebrated the deal by immediately getting suspended, and hasn’t come close to providing value for money in the time since.

The 2019-20 trade deadline was awful for a number of reasons. Holland decided to “go for it” but apparently only felt comfortable bringing in former Detroit Redwings (and Tyler Ennis, who I have nothing but good things to say about). Mike Green isn’t even worth mentioning here but the other deadline acquisition most certainly is.

Holland paid the absolute highest acceptable price for Andreas Athanasiou, only to let him walk away, essentially giving away two second-round picks, and the diminished, but still productive Sam Gagner.

Here is Holland’s specific quote upon completing the Athanasiou trade:

“Athanasiou is a player I know very well from [being GM in Detroit], had 30 goals a year ago,” Holland said. “It’s more than a rental. He’s a restricted free agent for a couple of years. Certainly, we paid a price for Athanasiou, but no risk, no gain.”

The player was -45 that season. He scored 1 goal as an Oiler (while Gagner equaled that production in Detroit). Nobody should have known the player better than the Oilers GM, who drafted him as a Redwing back in 2012. At the time, the Covid-shortened season couldn’t have been reasonably predicted, nor the ensuing cap crunch. But if six years of watching Athanasiou develop gave Holland the confidence to go out and get him, how did 13 games in an Oilers uniform change his mind? We can argue whether Holland made the mistake when he traded for Athanasiou, or in letting him walk, either way, the Oilers were left with nothing to show for it.

The Other Worse

How do we even begin to describe the past offseason, other than to say it was a horrendous failure? We’ve mentioned Hyman above, but giving maximum term and money to a player that wants to come to your team and city gives you limited credit at best. The Duncan Keith trade was atrocious. The Ethan Bear trade ill-conceived and its return underwhelming. The depth signings all seem to have been wrong as well.

Never mind the fact that the Chicago Blackhawks, who’ve built and dismantled a dynasty while the Oilers have been perennial doormats, should have paid Edmonton for taking an aging and expensive player off their hands. The fact that Holland allowed the Hawks to get out from under Keith’s salary (no retention, no sweetener), meant they were able to overpay Seth Jones. That signing boosted the asking price of every defenseman in the league, and Holland ended up giving Darnell Nurse more than nine million dollars a year as a result.

Nurse has outplayed every contract he has signed in Edmonton, but that trend is unlikely to continue, and Holland has only himself to blame for the price tag. Adding to that shame is the fact that he could have waited a year to re-sign the player. If Nurse continued to light the lamp, eat up huge minutes and lock things down defensively, then something close to the number he signed for might be reasonable. But if he instead regressed, coming slightly down to earth in the intervening 82 games, so too would the price tag have lowered. Another unforced error from Holland.

Ethan Bear is playing top four minutes in Carolina every night, just as surely as Duncan Keith is getting regularly turnstiled by opposing forwards. Bear has more goals, a higher plus/minus and none of the baggage the ex-Blackhawk carries. Bear was also beloved in the community, an idol for many indigenous youth, and significantly less expensive than Keith.

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Mike Smith earned another contract in Edmonton after the year he had in 2020-21. He earned a shot, at 38 years old, at retaining the starting job. But he didn’t deserve two seasons, when the risk of injury was so obviously high, and he should have had more competition than Mikko Koskinen, even if moving the overpaid and average Finnish netminder cost Edmonton a pick or a prospect. Returning the same goaltending tandem was a dereliction of duty, and it has played out exactly as anyone outside of Oilers management would have predicted.

The bad moves aren’t limited to the list above, but if Holland keeps his position, you can expect that list to grow.

Let’s not forget the coaching

Dave Tippett is to Ken Holland as Todd McClellan was to Peter Chiarelli. An aging coach, with flawed tactics for today’s game and a clear preference for running his veterans ragged rather than using his entire roster properly. Tippett is so unforgiving of mistakes that a young Dmitri Samorukov rode the bench for the majority of his first NHL game after rookie jitters led to a couple of goals against. Edmonton lost the game anyways. The aforementioned Keith hasn’t seen similar treatment after missed assignments, nor has Tyson Barrie.

The coach’s strategy seems lacking. Simple things like using time-outs at key moments are often missed. The stubbornness with his lineup decisions arguably contributed to the team’s past two early playoff exits. He doesn’t seem to be able to develop talent, and leaning so heavily on his superstars doesn’t look like a recipe for success either.

Tippett squeezed water from a stone down in Arizona, turning a bad team into a middling one, but the same results in Edmonton are not good enough. Edmonton should be a Cup contender year in and year out, and while he is limited to the roster he’s given, Tippett has to be held responsible for the on-ice results.

Bob Nicholson, Forensic Auditor

Nicholson sits so high above the day-to-day fray that he’s easy to forget in these moments. His job seems simple, put the right people in place to build and run an elite NHL club. Not only has he failed to do so, he’s failed to even go through the entire process properly. Chiarelli was let go in Boston on April 15th and his hiring in Edmonton announced just 10 days later. It’s inconceivable that he was properly vetted in that time.

When Chiarelli was walked out the door, it sounded like Nicholson might have learned from his mistake. And even though as recently as the summer of 2018 Nicholson believed in Chiarelli’s plan while the rest of us saw the disaster for what it clearly was, there was hope that Edmonton might finally, for the first time since Glen Sather, go through the proper process of identifying the right person for the job.

Unfortunately for Edmontonians, Nicholson’s version of a proper executive search consisted of phoning his old friend in Detroit. And rather than ride off into the sunset after a successful Detroit Redwings tenure, Holland recommended himself as the best, albeit most expensive, option. We can debate the true details of the call, but ultimately Edmonton ended up with a second straight GM whose most recent Cup victory was well in the rearview, and whose cap management skills are questionable at best. Nicholson can’t be involved in the next hire, or the past will only repeat itself.

So here we sit. Barring a spectacular recovery the Oilers sit on the verge of another draft lottery, potentially out of the playoffs, or looking at a first round matchup against the best the Western Conference has to offer. Other teams have taken a look in the mirror at times like this and made the right decision, changing things before they spiralled completely out of control.

The Oilers’ next GM deserves a chance at building a contender while McDavid and Draisaitl are still in their primes. That window grows shorter by the day, as does the likelihood that one, or both, decide to test the waters of free agency when their current deals expire. Does Oilers’ owner Daryl Katz have the guts and wisdom to make the call and hand out pink slips across the board? History says otherwise, but maybe he’s finally seen enough.