"What are they doing?": Edmonton Oilers a loser of NHL free agency, NHL commentators say – Edmonton Journal

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The reviews are in from pundits and commentators outside of Edmonton on the first day of NHL free agency.

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And the reviews are not positive. Zach Hyman was considered a winner of the free agency period, but not the Edmonton Oilers, which had one of the most active and consequential days in team history.

Edmonton’s move included:

OUT:

Adam Larsson left as free agent, Ethan Bear traded, Jujhar Khaira left as free agent, James Neal bought out, Caleb Jones and third round pick traded.

IN:

Zach Hyman signed to a seven-year, $5.5 million per year deal, Tyson Barrie signed to a three-year, $4.5 million per year deal, Cody Ceci signed to a four year, $3.25 million per year deal, Derek Ryan signed to a two year, $1.25 million per day, RFA Warren Foegele acquired in a trade, Mike Smith signed two years. $2.2 million per.

Here is some of what the commentators had to say:

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Mike Brehm of USA TODAY had Hyman as a winner: “He played with skilled forwards Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner in Toronto. Now he’ll get a chance to play alongside Connor McDavid in Edmonton. Plus, the winger gets a seven-year, $38.5 million contract after averaging $2.25 million in his last contract.”

But Matt Larkin, The Hockey News on youtube had Edmonton as a loser: “I just don’t understand. What are they doing? … I’ll put the Zach Hyman deal aside. I’m willing to defend it. I think he’s going to actually be very helpful in the
short term.  You have to give him that term and money because it’s competitive to sign him. I think he’ll be a really nice fit
playing with McDavid… I think that move is totally fine but bringing in guys like Cody Cedi and with term, I just don’t understand what this team is doing. You’re bringing Duncan Keith. You lose Adam Larsson.  You trade away Caleb
Jones. You trade Ethan Bear… You’ve also resigned Mike Smith into his 40s now for multiple seasons.

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“I just can’t condone the decisions over all of this team… I  don’t know if this team is better. I don’t believe that they are but I could be wrong.”

Larkin added: “I do think that the Oilers could save their offseason. They could steal Tomas Tatar on a cheaper deal kind of like what they gave to Dominik Kahun last summer.”

Scott Burnside of The Athletic gave the Oilers a 4.5 out of 10 grade. “That’s some weird stuff going on for an Oilers team that was embarrassingly swept by Winnipeg in the first round of the playoffs. Young defensive depth went out the door in the form of Caleb Jones (Chicago) and Ethan Bear (Carolina) replaced by 38-year-old Duncan Keith and Cody Ceci, who was pretty good in Pittsburgh and is now an Oiler at $3.25 million for the next four years. Ceci is the kind of player, and that is the kind of contract, that fans in Edmonton will turn on in an instant… This is at best a blue line in transition and at worst in regression. Love Zach Hyman up front and the Oilers will love him too but not likely for the entirety of his seven-year deal at $5.5 million).”

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Commentator Josh Wegman of The Score, also had the Oilers as a loser:  “The Oilers general manager’s reputation has taken a turn for the worse over the past couple of weeks. The Oilers made a handful of questionable moves Wednesday, leaving them with one of the most suspect blue lines in the league… The Bear-for-Foegele trade isn’t entirely bad in itself, but the fact that the Oilers shipped out a promising, homegrown blue-liner to make room for Barrie and Ceci is bad optics. Outside of Nurse, this back end is littered with question marks… Holland did do well to improve Edmonton’s forward depth, bringing in Foegele, Derek Ryan, and Zach Hyman, but the latter’s seven-year deal worth $5.5 million per season is a massive overpay. The Oilers also didn’t address their issues between the pipes, missing out on all the top free-agent options and failing to pull the trigger on a deal for Kuemper.”

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Lyle Fizsimmons of Bleacher Report also had the Oilers as losers, says that Holland “made a series of moves Wednesday that could be labeled anywhere from optimistic to misguided… iI’s the defensive moves—particularly the Bear trade—that reminded fans of past moves that saw young assets bloom elsewhere. The Oilers traded Matt Greene, then 25, to Los Angeles in 2008 and saw him win two Cups with the Kings; dealt Jeff Petry, then 27, to Montreal in 2015 and saw him emerge into one of the league’s best blueliners and later help the Canadiens to the Cup Final this season; and dispatched Justin Schultz, then 25, to Pittsburgh in 2016 where he, too, went on to win a pair of Stanley Cups.”

My take

1. These commentators have varying degrees of knowledge and expertise about the Oilers and about the true talent of the players Edmonton move out and moved in. Nonetheless, I find it interesting what outsiders have to think. Quite often they get it right in evaluating Edmonton’s moves, but they also get it wrong. For example, last year the re-signing of Mike Smith was widely criticized but it worked out well.

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2. The comment I most agreed with came from Larkin when he said: “I  don’t know if this team is better. I don’t believe that they are but I could be wrong.” It’s excellent when any commentator recognizes the limitation of their her or his own knowledge, and the limitation of anyone’s predictive power in general, and owns up that they could very well be wrong. That’s a sign of wisdom.

3. I’m fascinated by those fans and commentators who aren’t expert in these players, who haven’t seen many of them play much this past season and certainly haven’t studied them closely enough to give an expert take on their value, yet come out with complete certainty on the merit of a trade.

For example, we can tell certain things about Foegele from his statistics and from what others say of him, but that’s not the kind of deep analysis needed to get a fair and accurate sense of his true talent. It’s the best we can do, and it’s fun to engage in this kind of judgement as fans and commentators, but how could we possibly be certain of our predictive powers regarding the outcome of a trade when our knowledge base is so incomplete?

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Even if we have a deep understanding of the value of a player, as many Oilers fans do with players like Larsson and Bear, it’s hard to know just how they’re going to perform next year. For one thing, so much depends on the player’s health and his usage. Will Larsson’s back hold up? Will Bear get thrown into the deep end, over his head, against the toughest competition?

But it’s also difficult to guess if a player like Bear will do what it takes and get the right coaching and opportunity to take a step up. And it’s also difficult to know how much more one more year of grinding will impact Larsson’s game.

4. The best we can do with players we know well is offer a probability, such as me guessing Larsson has an 80 per cent chance of playing as well as he did this past season and suggesting it’s a coin flip as to whether Bear will progress or regress this coming year. As for players I haven’t seen and studied thoroughly, such as Foegele, Keith, Ceci and Ryan, my guesses about how they’ll play are utterly crude, not anything I would state with certainty.

5. As for Larkin wondering what the Oilers are up to, that’s a fair question, but I think the answer is obvious: Edmonton was scrambling to fix its defence after Larsson unexpectedly left, and this is what made most sense to the organization. When you’re scrambling, it’s not easy. Ask any quarterback. Sometimes you get sacked, even concussed. Sometimes you’re able to improvise a touchdown pass.