Building and growing roster value is one of the key elements of constructing a competitive team in the NHL that can consistently contend for championships.

By leveraging existing assets, acquiring players through the draft and the open market, signing them to reasonable contracts within a cap-system and having proper mitigation strategies in place, managers can find a competitive edge over other teams and increase their team’s odds of consistently winning games. And this can only happen if team owners build front offices that are strategic, that understand asset and risk management, and can make decisions based on modern business practices.

For a long time now under Daryl Katz’s ownership, the Edmonton Oilers have consistently brought in general managers who have a history of flawed decision-making processes and who struggle with roster construction and cap management. Through numerous trades, over-priced signings, inadequate scouting and poor drafting, the Oilers have consistently lost roster value. There are constantly inefficiencies across the roster in the form of overpaid and underperforming players, and a shallow prospect pool. And the end-result under Katz’s ownership is a single banner for the team – a western conference championship in 2024.

The dual offer sheets tendered by the St. Louis Blues this week is yet another blow to the Oilers roster value. Due to their poor mismanagement, the Oilers are at risk of losing two good young players that the team had spent significant resources on. Both Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg add an element of speed and skill to the team, with potential to grow into larger roles and could have been important depth pieces for the Oilers. And whether the Oilers match the offer sheets or not, they’ve already lost the cost-control they had over two assets – and for the bulk of their prime years. In a perfect world, both players would have been identified as long-term options for the team early on in their careers and signed to reasonable, team-friendly deals where the Oilers maximized their production and until they hit free agency. Instead, they slow-played both and ran out of cap space to do anything if they wanted to. The Oilers are now in a position of weakness and must spend more time and resources to find other comparable, cost-controlled talent.

The reason the Oilers are in this position is because ownership chose to have a general manager like Ken Holland that has a history of overpaying players, favoring experienced players for youth, and who takes a very conservative approach to building his rosters. This whole situation with Holloway and Broberg could have been avoided had Holland been smarter with cost-allocation and evaluating prospects. And if someone in the organization was overseeing and evaluating Holland’s work. The Oilers knew what they were getting when they signed Holland for five years.

Ownership really is to blame for this situation as they often bring in long-term hockey executives and fail to take a more modern approach to building out their hockey operations. And it’s going to continue with the hiring of Stan Bowman, whose track record is similar to Holland in that he continued to lose roster value through a significant number of transactions and blunders in Chicago. On top of that, he created a team culture that allowed a player to be sexually assaulted and then played a role in covering things up. Through some reputation laundering, he’s back in the NHL. But I don’t see how he’ll be of any help to the Oilers to build up the roster’s value.