EDMONTON — If the Edmonton Oilers were a cake, or some fantastic dessert that the recipe book promises will wow your guests, then Ken Holland is the chef, pacing the kitchen floor and glancing through the oven window.
Holland’s ingredients have long since been purchased, measured and folded into the bowl — give or take a one-year deal for Connor Brown, or the icing sugar that is a Brandon Sutter Professional Try Out.
Now he waits, confident in his ability to think on his feet with the right PTO, or a deadline deal come late February that can bring in the defenceman (or goalie?) he’ll need at that point on the season.
"We're going to start with the seven defencemen who finished last year. The goalies are set," Holland said over the phone on Friday afternoon. "Up front, we signed Brandon Sutter this summer. We’ll go to camp, see what they can do, watch the waiver wire …"
Look, if his team resembled a mud pie, you could criticize Holland for a summer that featured only the one major move in Brown — who will see $3.225 million of his $4 million earnings come off the 2024-25 cap in the form of bonus overages. It’s not perfect — especially if Jack Campbell doesn’t find his game this season — but it’s a pretty good roster Holland has built here in Edmonton.
And honestly, just keeping the younger players that a team has to keep has exhausted much of Holland’s ability to make material change in Edmonton, even if he wanted to.
“This is my fifth year here in Edmonton. The cap has gone up $2 million in five years,” he said. “We brought in (Zach) Hyman. We brought in (Evander) Kane. We brought in (Mattias) Ekholm — players who have had a high impact on the team. But it starts to add up.”
As he waits for the timer to chime, does Holland feel like he’ll pull a Stanley Cup winner out of the oven one day soon?
“I feel good about the team,” he allowed, slightly nervous about the 21-man roster that the cap dictates he’ll start the season with. “Obviously the depth is a question. But when the cap goes up $2 million over five years, and the pieces that we've added … (Stuart) Skinner was due a raise, (Ryan) McLeod was due a raise, (Evan) Bouchard was due a raise. … Some (young players) moved on to other teams. …
“That’s the CBA. That’s the salary cap world we live in.”
Holland made time for us on one of his final Friday afternoons of the summer, before things start to get real. But still, as his captain, Connor McDavid told us a couple days before, there are months — not days — before the bullets begin to fly for real.
“It's a long year,” said McDavid, who expects an entire roster to return early to Edmonton for his Captain’s skates, which begin on Sept. 5. “We haven’t even reported back to Edmonton yet, haven't gone through Captain’s skates yet, no training camp yet. No nothing.
“We're a long, long, long ways away. But, the belief is there. Understanding what it feels like to be (deep in the playoffs) is there. So they're all those are all good, good signs.”
On the heels of signing Bouchard to a two-year, $7.8 million contract, Holland would have loved to have more to do with his roster. But like all the good teams that are happy with their core players, Holland doesn’t have the wherewithal to wheel and deal.
The guys he has, he likes. The guys he wouldn’t mind moving — and there aren’t a lot of them in Edmonton — would only return some other team’s problems, and likely cost some cap space to trade.
Holland can, however, check that all-important box: he has a team that truly believes. We’ve seen a lot of teams over a lot of years and heard them all say the right things at this time of year.
This Oilers roster, to our eye, believes that they are Stanley Cup material. As a maturing captain, McDavid will sniff out anyone who isn’t on target with that goal, and he trusts his GM to make the commensurate moves to shore up the positions or personnel that need shoring up.
The price Edmonton will pay with a 21-man roster is that a couple of injuries will leave the Oilers icing a 19- or 18-man roster at some point this season. But, as Holland points out, “When the playoffs start, there’s no cap.”
Watching teams like Vegas and Tampa exploit the cap by bringing back injured players for the post-season, you know that Holland will do the same if the opportunity presents itself. He’d also like to follow the paths those clubs (we’ll add the Colorado Avalanche) beat to the Stanley Cup, following each disappointing playoff ending with another promising regular season until, finally, the breaks fell their way.
“What I’ve learned through my experiences, through the years, is that you’ve just got to keep with it,” Holland said, a refrain we’ve heard before from the Oilers GM. “You’ve got to be good year, after year, after year, after year, after year. The teams that you're talking about, that's what they do.”
Looming over it all is the fact that Leon Draisaitl will be entering the final year of his contract a year from now. With Auston Matthews now signed in Toronto, the spotlight will shift westward to a team whose best two players are nearing the end of their deals.
“I can't worry about the ‘24-25 team right now. I’ve got to worry about to ’23-24 team,” Holland said. “Do we have to be aware of the future? Absolutely. Certainly things are going to change. Now, it appears that the cap is going to finally be on the move.”
It will be the ability to win Stanley Cups in Edmonton, more than the money, that will drive Draisaitl — and after him, McDavid — to re-up with the Oilers.
The question will be, “Where else can I go to have a better chance to win a Stanley Cup.”
If the answer is, “Nowhere,” then that, Oilers fans, will take the cake for Holland.
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