May 11, 2026 by Ryan Lotsberg

Nobody in the Edmonton Oilers front office should feel truly safe right now. That includes Stan Bowman, who just completed his second season as the general manager of the Edmonton Oilers with a first round playoff exit.

In case you missed my piece on the counterpoints to the arguments for firing Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch, I pointed to player execution and roster construction as being the largest factors in the Oiler’s results this season rather than coaching. That isn’t to totally exonerate Knoblauch because he isn’t perfect, but the roster issues are notable.

Related: Counterpoints to criticisms of Knoblauch

Before I dive into this, I’ll acknowledge two things about this team and this season. First, the Oilers dealt with a long list of injuries throughout the season. It was a constant parade to the injured reserve in the first half of the season. The volume slowed, but the significance climbed dramatically when Leon Draisaitl, Zach Hyman, and trade deadline acquisition Jason Dickinson missed time down the stretch. None of them were 100% healthy for the playoffs. Adam Henrique and Connor McDavid got hurt in Game 1 of the playoffs. Henrique couldn’t return to the series. McDavid played on a broken foot or ankle, just like Dickinson did.

The second thing is the reality of the cap situation last summer. Draisaitl and Evan Bouchard signed contracts with raises adding up to $12.1 million that both started in 2025-26. The league salary cap only went up by $7.5 million. That math meant that salary had to be cut and the Oilers roster for 2025-26 got younger and cheaper. The results matched my pre-season expectations with that understanding.

Related: 29 + 2 = $12.1 million

Having said that, Bowman’s roster decisions still merit evaluation.

The single most impactful signing that Bowman made last summer was the McDavid extension. I don’t give Bowman credit for McDavid deciding to take another two-year deal at $12.5 million per year. That was what McDavid wanted, and he was always going to get what he wanted. Bowman didn’t scare McDavid away, but he doesn’t get credit for the value deal that McDavid signed.

Bowman traded Evander Kane to the Vancouver Canucks for the fourth round pick that was given to the Canucks for Vasily Podkolzin, which was a necessary and tidy piece of business. He traded Viktor Arvidsson to the Boston Bruins for a 2027 fifth rounder, which was another necessary piece of business. The pain came on July 1. Corey Perry and Connor Brown were allowed to walk away in free agency. I would MUCH rather have retained Brown (four years, $3 million AAV) than have signed Andrew Mangiapane for $3.6 million for two years, but I digress.

Those were the most significant losses from the 2024-25 team. All in all, five of the top ten producers in five-on-five points/60 from 2024-25 were lost. That doesn’t include Kane, who didn’t play in that regular season. Hyman missed the first two months of the season due to injury, which made six such players gone from the 2024-25 roster to start the season. They were not adequately replaced at any point in the season. 

Jack Roslovic was a decent addition. He scored 21 goals and got 38 points in 69 games. He’s known as a streaky scorer that isn’t great defensively and that disappears in the playoffs. Roslovic came as advertised. Matt Savoie finished with eighteen goals in his rookie season. That number is slightly inflated due to a hat-trick in the final game of the season against a depleted Vancouver Canucks team, but he still scored the goals. Roslovic and Savoie are the only two new faces that played meaningful minutes that produced five-on-five points per 60 rates high enough to replace any of the five players that left last season’s team. Savoie wasn’t even a Bowman acquisition.

The Good

Vasily Podkolzin

Podkolzin was acquired for a fourth round pick while Bowman was deliberating the futures of Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg in 2024. The soon to be 25-year old has become a fan favourite in Edmonton. He has become Draisaitl’s favourite winger because he does the hard work that isn’t Draisaitl’s strong suit. He routinely leads the team in hits, and his offensive game is on the rise. Most importantly, he works his tail off in practice, and it has been paying off for him. He’s under contract for three more years at a reasonable $2.95 million AAV. This was a win for Bowman.

Kasperi Kapanen

Kapanen was claimed off waivers from the St. Louis Blues early in the 2024-25 season, which took a little bit of the sting out of losing two key young players to them via offer sheets a few months prior. He brings a lot of speed and physicality to the table, and he can play up and down the lineup. Kapanen has also performed well in the playoffs. He scored the series winning goal in the second round last season, and he was one of the best Oilers in this year’s playoffs. Claiming Kapanen was a clear win for Bowman.

Connor Ingram

Bowman traded for Connor Ingram during training camp. Ingram missed a large chunk of the 2024-25 season tending to mental health problems, and the Utah Mammoth went another direction in goal. Ingram wanted to be closer to his family, so the Oilers were a preferred destination. Ingram ended up being a great insurance policy. He ended up being the team’s playoff starter. Going from castaway to Game 1 starter and passing three goalies on the depth chart along the way was impressive.

Connor Murphy

Murphy was acquired for a 2028 second rounder at the 2026 trade deadline. He’s a true shutdown defender, which is something the team needed and has lacked since Adam Larsson left the Oilers. The team’s defensive play improved after Murphy was added. It was a smart addition by Bowman. It will have been worth the second round pick if they can re-sign the 33-year old, but they should be wary of signing another aging veteran UFA. The price had better be right.

Isaac Howard

Bowman made a bit of a splash when he acquired Hobey Baker Award winner Ike Howard from the Tampa Bay Lightning for Sam O’Reilly. Howard didn’t want to sign with the Lightning because he wasn’t going to get an opportunity to play in the NHL in 2025-26 if he was in their organization. The Oilers gave him an NHL opportunity to start the season, but it was evident that he needed more AHL time. I think he improved over the course of the season, but I’m still not sold on him being the impact top six scoring winger he’s being touted as. It’s a bit too early to tell how good this trade was, but Howard is much closer to being NHL-ready than O’Reilly is, and his ceiling is higher.

NCAA/EURO Free Agents

Bowman has turned to undrafted NCAA and European free agents as avenues for acquiring prospects because the Oilers have made a habit of trading draft picks for immediate help during this era of championship contention. The advantage of this strategy is that the prospects enter the organization at an older age, and they’re further along in their development. The disadvantage is that these kids were undrafted for a reason. These are late bloomers, but the reality is that undrafted prospects rarely turn into success stories.

Quinn Hutson and Josh Samanski highlight the list of these types of signings made by Bowman last year. Hutson led AHL rookies with 30 goals, and finished second among rookies with 63 points. He showed off his high hockey IQ and his goal scoring touch, but size (5’11”, 176 lbs) and footspeed are issues with Hutson. 

Samanski came to the organization with four years of professional experience in Germany. The 24-year old earned his way onto the playoff roster for the Oilers and showed that he can hold his own in the NHL. He excels defensively, but the offensive side of his game needs to develop further. He showed glimpses at the end of the season, but those glimpses might turn into fourth line production. Some Oilers fans think Samanski is ready to be a 3C. I disagree. I see him as a reliable 4C.

David Tomasek led the SHL in scoring last season and came to the Oilers with a long resume of production in Europe. It just didn’t work out here, but it was an interesting experiment. Attro Leppanen led the Finnish Liiga in scoring by a defenceman last season and set an all-time record while doing so. He joined the Bakersfield Condors this season and put up 38 points in 56 games. The 27-year old is talented, but I’m not sold on his NHL viability. Damien Carfagna (NCAA) showed promise with the Condors this season and could get NHL games at some point.

The Oilers also signed 23 year old centre Owen Michaels (NCAA) and 22 year old defenceman Tomas Cibulka out of Czechia recently. It’s too early to tell how these players will fare and project, but they seem like astute signings.

For now, it’s fair to say that this has been an effective means for acquiring prospects while the team has been short on draft picks.

The Bad

Brett Kulak

The writing was on the wall for Kulak’s time as an Oiler when Bowman extended Walman and Mattias Ekholm in September. Kulak is an impending UFA, and those signings meant there wasn’t going to be room for him on the left side in the future. I don’t know if that’s why Kulak got off to such a poor start to his season, but it may have played a role. Kulak’s $2.75 million cap hit was expendable, and it needed to be used to address other areas of weakness. 

As it turns out, it was used to help address the goaltending. Kulak was traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins to make the money work as part of the Stuart Skinner/Tristan Jarry trade. Pittsburgh later flipped Kulak to the Colorado Avalanche for Samuel Girard and a 2028 second round pick. Kulak clearly had some value, and the Oilers could’ve used that additional value. Instead, he was included in the Jarry trade (more on that in a moment). I don’t know how the price for Jarry would’ve changed if Kulak had been moved in a separate deal, but I would imagine that the assets the Oilers could’ve gotten for Kulak in a separate trade would’ve outweighed the potential further cost of the Jarry deal. That was mismanaged by Bowman in my opinion.

Evander Kane LTIR strategy

Kane entered the 2024-25 season recovering from surgery to address multiple core issues. That surgery took place on September 19, 2024. The delay in scheduling the surgery led to some uncertainty for Bowman that summer. That uncertainty impacted his decision making on matching the offer sheets that were signed by Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg.

Bowman planned to construct the roster so that they didn’t need to place Kane on LTIR so they could accrue cap space before the 2025 trade deadline. He claimed they couldn’t afford to keep Holloway or Broberg, so he let them both walk.

Bowman placed Kane on LTIR on the opening day of the season, which wouldn’t have stopped the Oilers from being able to accrue cap space since they weren’t using any of that LTIR relief. However, Bowman unnecessarily called up multiple players throughout the season (including both Noah Philp and Drake Caggiula to replace one injured player), which prevented the Oilers from accruing cap space.

Kane ended up missing the whole season on LTIR, which is a prediction that I made that summer when Bowman was mulling the offer sheet decision over. Bowman traded for Trent Frederic and Jake Walman at that trade deadline. Bowman could’ve kept Holloway with no issues had he committed to using Kane’s LTIR space earlier in the season. Broberg could’ve been kept as well, but further salary cap shedding would’ve been needed. Those decisions would’ve prevented the Oilers from adding at the 2025 trade deadline, but I would’ve taken that tradeoff for keeping those two young pieces. I’d MUCH rather have Holloway and Broberg over Frederic and Walman right now.

The right play was to keep the kids, use the LTIR relief, and figure the rest out later.

Letting Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg Walk

Bowman’s first test as Oilers GM was the offer sheets signed by Holloway and Broberg. Holloway and Broberg are the only two of former Oilers GM Ken Holland’s draft picks that are playing in the NHL right now. Reid Schafer got some games for the Nashville Predators this season, but he’s not a full time player for them. Regardless, they were two important pieces to the future of the Oilers, even within the window of the McDavid era.

He didn’t match either offer sheet.

There were certainly some mitigating factors at hand. Oilers president and CEO Jeff Jackson’s free agent signings put the Oilers in a cap bind, and then St. Louis Blues GM Doug Armstrong knew it. Bowman would have had to have been creative to find space for both Holloway and Broberg, but it was absolutely 100% possible to do so with some tinkering.

As Tom Gazzola said on Friday’s episode of the Oil Stream, Holland offered contracts to Holloway and Broberg while they were in the minors in January of 2024. Those were obviously lowball offers considering they were in the minors at the time. That was likely the straw that broke the camel’s back for Broberg. I believe that his development was bungled and his road to the NHL was unnecessarily blocked by Holland at every turn, especially prior to the 2022-23 season. I sense that Holloway might’ve been willing to stay in Edmonton, but the offer from St. Louis was too alluring to decline.

Holloway and Broberg have both signed new contracts with the Blues that I believe will age quite well. The Oilers are still without a Stanley Cup and are struggling to get younger and faster without sacrificing immediate competitiveness. Losing Holloway and Broberg set the Oilers back.

Everything that happened with those two players and with the cap situation at that time happened before Bowman arrived. That’s why I’ve put these moves in the “bad” section rather than the “ugly” section. Bowman could’ve used Kane’s LTIR relief differently to keep these players though.

Jason Dickinson

I’ll likely get raked over the coals in the comments for this take, but I stand firmly by it. The role that Bowman had in mind for Dickinson was my biggest issue with the acquisition. Dickinson excels as a defensive centre that can kill penalties. The idea was for Dickinson to play 3C and take some of the hard minutes against elite competition away from McDavid and Draisaitl. Plainly put, this is a losing strategy. Dickinson can’t produce offence at the requisite level needed to saw off the five-on-five goal share battle against elite competition. He should stay far, far, far away from elite competition. I view him as a reliable shut down 4C.

My second biggest issue with it was the fact that Bowman gave up the 2027 first round pick to make that trade. Being able to get rid of Mangiapane, a massive mistake of a signing from last summer, and address their need for a centre in one trade made it desirable for Bowman. He explained that it would’ve taken more picks to move Mangiapane in a separate deal, so including a late first rounder in the Dickinson deal made more sense. I clearly place a higher value on that first round pick than Bowman and most Oilers fans did. I feel that a more impactful piece could’ve been acquired with that pick this summer.

The Ugly

Trent Frederic

The first thing that Bowman did this summer before making cap space for the free agency period was signing Frederic to an eight-year contract with an average annual value of $3.85 million. Frederic played just north of seven minutes for the Oilers in one game after being acquired at the trade deadline in 2025 because of a high ankle sprain. Frederic essentially did cardio during the playoffs. That was what the Oilers got for two prospects, their 2025 second round pick, and their 2026 fourth round pick. That was a total disaster.

Frederic scored seventeen and eighteen goals in 2022-23 and 2023-24 respectively, but his point scoring fell off a cliff in 2024-25. That was prior to his ankle injury. Looking at production from two years ago and spending quality assets in hopes of a player replicating past success isn’t sound management.

I will never, ever in a million years understand what Bowman saw in Frederic that not only made him acquire him at that price in the first place, but that made him sign him to an EIGHT-YEAR CONTRACT after what he watched Frederic do in the playoffs. Predictably, Frederic struggled this year. Seven points in 74 games isn’t close to good enough for $3.85 million. I could’ve wrapped my head around a one or a two-year deal, but EIGHT? That’s a massive strike against Bowman in my opinion.

Tristan Jarry

The prevailing story through the Oilers’ struggles in the first two months of the 2025-26 season was the goaltending. Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard were given some runway to find their games under new goalie coach Peter Aubry. 

The goalie situation became too much of an issue for Bowman to not address. Skinner needed a change of scenery for many reasons. The trade sent Skinner, Kulak, and a 2029 second round pick to the Pittsburgh Penguins for Jarry and Samuel Poulin. Kulak had a terrible start to the season, and his $2.75 million cap hit needed to be moved to accommodate Jarry’s cap hit. 

The Oilers didn’t get better goaltending with Jarry than they did with Skinner. Jarry played fairly well before getting injured in his third start for the Oilers. He never found his game again after he returned from that injury. Ingram ended up stealing the net from Jarry, and Ingram was the playoff starter.

Jarry was on Bowman’s radar last summer, but he wanted to see how Jarry’s season started. Jarry was waived and sent to the AHL during the 2024-25 season. Bowman needed to know if Jarry could rebound from that setback. Jarry had a strong start to the season with the Penguins, Skinner struggled in Edmonton, and the trade was made.

I don’t think Jarry should ever have been the target for Bowman. He moves better laterally than Skinner, but he also has a reputation for giving up goals in bunches when it isn’t going well for him. That’s what we saw play out with Jarry as an Oiler this season. Skinner is an unrestricted free agent, and the Oilers are stuck with Jarry for two more years at approximately twice the cap hit barring another trade. 

When you consider all of that and the fact that Kulak was later flipped for a roster player and a second round pick, the trade looks like a big fat “L” for Bowman. The Oilers need tradable assets. Kulak was a player that could clearly yield a high draft pick. Kulak should’ve been moved in a separate deal. Everything about that trade was wrong.

Andrew Mangiapane

The pain sustained on July 1 got worse when Bowman signed Andrew Mangiapane. The hope was that Mangiapane could regain the form that saw him score 35 goals for the Calgary Flames in 2021-22 after a down year with the Washington Capitals in 2024-25. Mangiapane wanted an opportunity to prove that he could play in the top six. I thought that he was dreaming if he felt he was a top six forward. As it turned out, Mangiapane found himself in the bottom six or the pressbox on most nights by January. The Oilers gave Mangiapane permission to seek a trade in January, and he was dealt at the deadline. This deal didn’t work out, and Bowman acknowledged as much.

Wrap

I didn’t include Jake Walman in any of the good, bad, or ugly sections. I think Walman is a solid defenceman and I thought that adding a player under 30 years old that would be a part of the plan for a long time was smart use of the LTIR relief the Oilers got for Kane. That thought is offset by the fact that the Oilers wouldn’t have needed to spend their 2026 first rounder, which has turned out to be somewhere between 17 and 24 after losing in the first round of the playoffs year, if Bowman had simply opted to use that LTIR space to keep Broberg in the summer of 2024. So, Walman could be added to both the good and the bad sections.

Anyway, Bowman has done some good things, but they don’t outweigh the bad and the ugly decisions that he has made. I acknowledge the salary cap realities that Bowman was presented with this season, but the moves he made to handle that reality weren’t good enough. There have been too many foolish and costly decisions made under Bowman to give me faith that he will make the right decisions in the next two offseasons to get the Oilers their Stanley Cup. He won three Stanley Cups with the Chicago Blackhawks, but those were all won before Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane signed their megadeals. Bowman hasn’t proven he can build a winner with a salary cap distribution similar to what the Oilers have now.

I thought Bowman was the wrong choice when he was hired, and I still feel that he’s the wrong person to lead the Oilers where they want to go. I would strongly be in favour of firing Bowman right now.