Ken Holland’s Best & Worst Signings With the Oilers

3 Worst Contracts:

Kyle Turris – 2 years x $1.6m

Kyle Turris has never been a strong defender, and his offense had been in consistent decline over the previous few seasons when Ken Holland decided to sign him to a multi-year deal at $1.6m. It’s one thing to bank on a player bouncing back, but when the player has had poor underlying numbers that have only gotten worse every year, and you extend that risk an extra year, that is another thing entirely.

While the $1.6m isn’t a ton of money, you can find decent depth players for cheap, and instead, the Oilers got a player that was in the AHL by the end of the deal. Turris was no doubt a major flop in Edmonton, as he produced some of the worst possession numbers I’ve seen in quite some time, and predictably, failed to recapture any offense.

Zack Kassian – 4 years x $3.2m

Did Zack Kassian produce well during the 2019-20 season when this contract was signed? Yes. Were there also numerous warning signs that a four-year deal at over $3m was a bad idea? Also yes. Kassian’s offensive numbers were not only inflated by playing almost a full season next to Connor McDavid, but also a red-hot shooting percentage of 16.67%.

This shooting percentage was a major outlier to his usual shooting of closer to 10%, and for a guy that has been in the bottom six for most of his career, this should have set off warning signals that Kassian’s success just wasn’t sustainable. I understand that the team was extremely thin on scoring wingers at the time of this contract, but Holland signed it in the middle of the season with absolutely no pressure to get the deal done.

He probably should have waited to extend Kassian to see if there were any better replacements on the market. While Zack Kassian will be remembered fondly by many for his physical brand of hockey, the term and money were both far too much on this deal, and the Oilers had to spend assets just 2 years later to get rid of that cap.

Darnell Nurse – 8 years x $9.25m

The Darnell Nurse contract is another cautionary tale of extending a player after a career year where they had an unsustainably high shooting percentage that inflated their production. I understand that the Seth Jones deal completely broke the market for number one defenseman, and all of the big names were being signed to monster contracts that summer, but the Oilers could have easily waited until the next season to sign Nurse.

There is just no way that his value could have gone up again to the point where he wouldn’t accept a $9.25m deal. There was nowhere for Nurse’s value to go but down, and the Oilers instead elected to lock him up when his value was at an all-time high. I will say that Darnell Nurse is still an elite offensive defenseman, whose defensive woes are overblown by many in the fanbase that don’t like his contract.

He is the Oilers’ best defenseman, but let’s be honest, the fact that he makes more money than Cale Makar is insane. His true value is probably somewhere closer to the $7m range that Morgan Reilly signed for just one year after Nurse, and that extra cash could have come in handy for the Oilers this summer.