March 13, 2024 by Josh Boulton

How should we grade the Edmonton Oilers trade deadline? There’s no doubt other teams were more active and made bigger splashes, particularly the Western Conference counterpart Vegas Golden Knights, who the Oilers will surely have to get through at some point in the playoffs to win a Stanley Cup.

If you look at the trade deadline in isolation, it might appear Oilers general manager Ken Holland missed a few boats. But is it fair to judge a general manager fully on three to five days of work?

Firstly, it’s not like he didn’t do anything. The Oilers addressed multiple issues with two stones. Overall depth, secondary scoring, and penalty killing have all been question marks answered in acquiring Sam Carrick and Adam Henrique, while essentially giving up nothing to do it.

GM Ken Holland also picked up a stable defender in Troy Stecher from the Arizona Coyotes to add a little intrigue to the core at the back end. In short, Head Coach Kris Knoblauch now has some viable NHL experienced options to work with to stir up the depth a little bit and motivate players to want to keep their spot. Grit and compete. Intensity and toughness. That’s a playoff ingredient most teams want to go heavy on.

Of course you could argue he should have done more, but ask yourself, what is a trade deadline for? General managers across the league go for as much experience as they can get while trying not to do too much to disrupt the chemistry of the already established core. And who’s experienced more this season than the Edmonton Oilers core?

For example, since 2018 there’s only been two teams to be in the bottom five of the NHL in November and lived to make the playoffs: the St. Louis Blues and the Golden Knights, both in 2018-19. The 2023-24 Oilers are now the third.

Related: Oilers 2024 Trade Deadline Wrap

That’s partly because there’s only been three teams in the history of the entire NHL who’ve won 16 games in a row. The 2023-24 Edmonton Oilers are one of them. And this Oilers team is the only team in history to do them both in the same season.

That’s some pretty significant experience for these players that literally no one else has. I can’t think of too many things that would bond a team together and make them want to go through a wall for each other more than that.

When the puck first dropped on this season, the Oilers already boasted two Hart and Art Ross Trophy winners (Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl) and the 2023 Maurice “Rocket” Richard Trophy winner (McDavid). They also already had their stud defenceman Mattias Ekholm (acquired at last year’s deadline), seasoned power play specialists Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Zach Hyman, and Evan Bouchard, and a solid but uncertain goaltending tandem, which seems to have solidified itself.

Since then they also added Corey Perry, who alone has won a Richard Trophy, a Hart Trophy, and of course, the 2007 Stanley Cup. He’s a proven winner and one of the most desired playoff commodities of the last decade.

Slowly over the last two seasons up to now the Oilers already added the things other teams are crying for. Just because they didn’t do it over the course of the last one or two days when prices are high, doesn’t mean the Oilers lost the deadline.

There’s also one other championship characteristic this Oilers group has that other teams don’t, and it’s one you can’t possibly be acquired through a trade. It’s something even these same players on this same roster didn’t quite have in the same way last year that they do now: the bitterness of losing. The breaking point. The feeling of being so fed up with not winning that enough becomes enough and you just will winning into existence.

The most recent example of that is the sourness of Nathan MacKinnon’s exit interview after the Colorado Avalanche’s 2021 second-round loss to the Golden Knights. The utter frustration as he said “I’m going into my ninth year and I haven’t won (insert expletive here)” fueled the Avalanche’s run to a Stanley Cup victory the very next season. At least that was the most recent example, until the Oilers turned their season around with a 5-0 win over the Washington Capitals.

That victory triggered an eight game winning streak, and a run of 21 wins out of the next 24 games. That was the day the Oilers reached their breaking point. They day they said enough was enough. That day was Friday November 24, 2023. There’s nothing Holland could have done on Friday March 8 that would be better than that.