EDMONTON — Edmonton Oilers general manager Stan Bowman is sitting across the table from the agent for Leon Draisaitl, or Evan Bouchard, or Connor McDavid, making his pitch.
“I know your comparables are higher than our offer,” Bowman is saying. “But if you take a little bit less, I can keep this core together and win some Stanley Cups.”
There is no guarantee, of course, that anyone on the Oilers roster will be willing to take a small haircut to keep the band together.
However, this IS a guarantee: If Bowman blinked and overpaid a couple of youngsters in Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway who have a grand total 170 NHL games played between them — giving them a far bigger piece of the salary-cap pie than they have earned — the entire model of “taking less to win” blows up.
Never mind how that would play out in a room full of veterans such as Adam Henrique, Connor Brown, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Mattias Janmark who have taken less money and term to play in Edmonton.
“It was nice to see that the Oilers are a destination for players that are focused more so on trying to win a championship. It was obvious that the players that chose to come to Edmonton likely (left) money on the table,” Bowman said in a Zoom call Tuesday. “This came down to a business decision relative to our short term as well as long-term viability for our roster with the salary cap.
“When you put this whole situation together, we feel like we’ve been able to … give us a lot of flexibility and options moving forward.”
After trading $3.25-million defenceman Cody Ceci to free up the cap space that seemed necessary to match the St. Louis Blues offer sheets on Broberg and Holloway, the Oilers pivoted on Monday. Instead, Bowman opted to take the cap space created by the loss of the three players and declined to match the offer sheets, settling for compensation totalling the Blues’ second- and third-round draft picks in 2025.
In the past week, Bowman also picked up 23-year-old Vasili Podkolzin for a fourth-round pick, grabbed right-shot defenceman Ty Emberson, 24, in the Ceci trade, and has enough cap space now that Evander Kane won’t have to go on long-term injury reserve unless Bowman and Co. choose to go that route. But they won’t be forced to be an LTIR team, another preferred outcome from this sticky situation.
In short, Bowman chose $10 million in cap space over the three players — Ceci, Holloway and Broberg — and grabbed a couple of draft picks that will leave the Oilers with maximum flexibility at this season’s trade deadline.
Bowman made it clear that an Oilers’ cap management plan that will be a bit of a high-wire act in the next 12 months could not be adversely altered by a pair of young players you would like to have retained, but who are not core players.
Instead of the two drafted and developed first-rounders — who became unexpectedly overpriced with the Blues’ offer sheets — the Oilers will settle for the extra cap space, be able to avoid being in LTIR over Kane, and have more financial freedom to sign three far more important players in Draisaitl, Bouchard and McDavid.
“When you put this whole situation together, we feel like we’ve been able to (accrue) a lot of options and flexibility going forward,” Bowman said. “We were faced with a challenging situation, but I think we move forward with the best series of transactions.”
There is some risk here: The right side of the Oilers blueline is weak as of today, lacking a genuine No. 2-pairing player to line up alongside Darnell Nurse. But Bowman’s team is likely good enough to remain a contender until he can use the cap space and assets accrued this week to find the right D-man — and he may sign a cheap UFA in the nearer term.
That’s a problem that can be solved.
There was also the possibility that matching these offer sheets could have left Edmonton vulnerable to offer sheets on Bouchard or Draisaitl, a factor that goes away with this added roster flexibility.
Look, the best-case scenario would have been to simply keep Broberg at $1.5 million, and Holloway at somewhere around $1.25 million. But St. Louis eliminated that scenario.
Bowman made the best of a tough situation here, and maintained the most important factors for a team trying to win a Stanley Cup: the ability to sign their most important players and a chance to add at the deadline, when it will be much clearer what this Oilers team needs to win one more game in the spring of 2025 than it did the year before.