Oilers fans are high on Stan Bowman's work but top NHL expert disagrees

Edmonton Oilers fans are generally well pleased with the work that NHL GM Stan Bowman did this off-season to improve the team, but not everyone shares that opinion, including The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn. When it comes to which team did the most to improve since the end of the season, Edmonton ranks 25th out of [...]

Edmonton Oilers fans are generally well pleased with the work that NHL GM Stan Bowman did this off-season to improve the team, but not everyone shares that opinion, including The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn. When it comes to which team did the most to improve since the end of the season, Edmonton ranks 25th out of 32 NHL teams, Luszczyszyn says. Compare that with a Cult of Hockey poll that saw an avalanche of support for Bowman’s moves, with 55% giving him a grade of “A” and 33% a “B.” Luszczyszyn has ranked how each NHL did when it comes to off-season acquisitions since the summer of 2018.

He is one of the most reasonable and respected writers from the school that focuses on statistical analysis. I put some weight in his careful assessments, even as I think it’s overly ambitious to use public analytics (as opposed to more granular private NHL stats) to rate and rank the defensive play of NHLers. In this year’s ranking, Luszczyszyn does not include Bowman’s work in signing up trade deadline acquisitions Connor Murphy and Jason Dickinson to what look to be value contracts in his assessment.

He’s only looking at each team’s current roster comapred to the one they ended 2025-26 season with (including players acquired at the deadline): “This is not an exact science, nor is it a list of how good each team is expected to be next season — just how much they’ve changed. A great team with a poor offseason can still be a great team next season. But it is worth noting some of last year’s most and least improved teams did end up trending in that exact direction.”

In: Ryan Shea, Frederik Andersen Out: Jack Roslovic, Darnell Nurse, Connor Ingram “Edmonton is hoping that the biggest addition it made this summer was behind the bench. I am deeply skeptical of the way Mike Babcock operates, but from a pure results perspective, he projects to provide a major impact given how the Leafs improved under the hood in his first season there. Whether what happened a decade ago applies now remains to be seen.

On the roster, Ryan Shea makes a lot of sense replacing Darnell Nurse, given the price difference. Frederik Andersen, when healthy, is an upgrade in net too. But the Oilers could still use a middle-six forward to replace Jack Roslovic, even if he was incredibly inconsistent.”

In an added note from social media, Luszczyszyn said, “I don’t agree that Shea is an upgrade (over Nurse). Dickinson and Murphy were already on the roster so I didn’t count them.

Andersen was a good add. Roslovic is the definition of mid and they have internal options to replace him, but for the purposes here losing him is a factor.” My take 1.

I was curious to see how teams that succeed in the Stanley Cup playoffs do in Luszczyszyn’s off-season ranking. This is of particular importance in Edmonton, given the high annual playoff expectations for the team in the McDavid/Draisaitl era. Of course, Luszczyszyn’s system isn’t meant to predict playoff success.

An awful team can improve a lot in the off-season and still be a bad team. And a great team can lose a lot of players in the summer — often due to salary cap considerations — and still win the Stanley Cup, as the Florida Panthers have demonstrated. Luszczyszyn’s off-season rating system is openly and admittedly just that, just one piece of the puzzle, not any kind of power ranking or prediction for which teams will win in the playoffs.

But I was curious to see if the teams that made the Final Four in the playoffs trended up or down each year in their off-season moves, at least as Luszczyszyn had them ranked. Overall for the past eight seasons, Luszczyszyn had 14 teams that would go on to make the Final Four trending up in the preceeding off-season, while 18 trended down in his off-season rankings, then went on to make the Final Four. When it comes to Stanley Cup winners, a few of them trended up, such as Carolina doing so significantly in 2026 and Tampa and St. Louis a bit in 2020 and 2019 respectively.

In five out of the eight seasons, the eventual Cup winner trended down in the previous off-season, with a few of them crashing in Luszczyszyn’s system, such as Florida in both the summers of 2023 and 2024, Vegas in 2023, and Colorado in the summer of 2022. 2. Luszczyszyn also had the Presidents’ Trophy-winning 2021-22 Florida Panthers trending down hard in the summer of 2022, ranking them the least improved of all 32 NHL teams. The three straight years Luszczyszyn had Florida trending down from 2022 to 2024 makes some sense, as they lost players like Jonathan Huberdeau, MacKenzie Weegar, Mason Marchment, Claude Giroux and Ben Chiarot in the July 2022, Anthony Duclair and Radko Gudas in July 2023, and Vladimir Tarasenko, Kevin Stenlund, Nick Cousins, Ryan Lomberg, Brandon Montour, Oliver Ekman-Larsson, and Anthony Stolarz in July 2024.

That is a major exodus of talent. At the same time, when we look at the 2022-23 Panthers, I’ll suggest that Luszczyszyn’s model for rating and ranking players didn’t always prove to be predictive. He wrote: “Matthew Tkachuk is a fantastic player, but he alone cannot make up the value of both Jonathan Huberdeau and MacKenzie Weegar.

It’s an upgrade at forward that will create one of the most terrifying duos in the league — Tkachuk and Aleksander Barkov — but the team now has a giant hole on defense. Weegar is one of the league’s best defenders and his impact will be truly missed. The Panthers are two wins worse because of the deal.

Florida still has an elite team, but reaching last year’s heights now gets significantly more challenging.” 3. When it comes to the Oilers, in 2022-23 Luszczyszyn predicted slight improvement for the Oilers based on their summer of 2022, when they signed Jack Campbell and Mattias Janmark and lost Zack Kassian.

“Edmonton’s biggest question mark was in net. Did the Oilers answer it? It’s tough to really say because of how fickle goalies can be — and Jack Campbell fits that billing more than most.

His extreme highs and lows make him a somewhat chaotic choice to steer the ship for Edmonton. What the Oilers are getting likely isn’t that much different from what they already have in Mike Smith. Still, it’s an upgrade over Mikko Koskinen and gives Edmonton a relatively strong tandem between the pipes.

Campbell, as the team’s starter, adds 1.7 wins to Edmonton’s bottom line which puts the team into a pretty high league-wide standing.” That Oilers team ended up making it the Final Four in 2023, though not on the strength of Jack Campbell’s erratic play. To be fair, there was little agreement on Campbell’s prospect for success in Edmonton and predicting the future performance of any one player is fraught.

4. In 2023-24, when the Oilers made it to the Stanley Cup Finals, Luszczyszyn saw significant off-season improvement from the signing of Connor Brown and the departures of Nick Bjugstad and Klim Kostin, whom his model didn’t rate highly. “The Oilers only made one addition this offseason and it’s a good one,” he wrote.

“Connor Brown comes in cheap and should fit perfectly anywhere in the team’s top nine. He’s a hardworking winger who can score and grind while being an asset at both ends of the ice. That’s a sizeable improvement from Kailer Yamamoto who just wasn’t working out in a top-six role anymore.

The rest of the team’s improvement here is from Nick Bjugstad and Klim Kostin no longer being on the roster. Both are viewed as below-average players though Edmonton’s actual improvement will depend on who the Oilers get to replace those players.” 5.

In 2024-25, another Stanley Cup Final year for Edmonton, Luszczyszyn said the Oilers were the only one of the NHL’s top teams that got better during the July 2024 free agency period, but just as most everyone else did, he notably made his assessment before the Oilers lost Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg as free agents, a franchise-crippling event in August of that year. With the retention of Adam Henrique and the addition of Viktor Arvidsson and Jeff Skinner, Luszczyszyn said in July, “That gives Edmonton a seriously deep top nine that may be the best forward group we’ve seen in the cap era.”

6. Last summer in July 2025, Luszczyszyn said the Edmonton Oilers had the fourth worst off-season of any National Hockey League team. Only teams that lost major free agents, the Los Angeles Kings with Vladislav Gavrikov, the Winnipeg Jets with Nikolaj Ehlers and the Toronto Maple Leafs with Mitch Marner, declined more than the Oilers, Luszczyszyn said.

Said Luszczyszyn: “For the Oilers, everything hinges on their two rookies. They need one or both of Ike Howard and Matthew Savoie to be good from the jump.

That’s because a lot of their forward depth has been turned over this summer. Gone are Evander Kane, Viktor Arvidsson, Connor Brown and Corey Perry — all of whom looked like serviceable middle-six talents. In their place is only Andrew Mangiapane, who could have some upside in a bigger role, but is coming off a down year with the Capitals.

The Oilers have lost a lot on paper. They’re still an elite team, but how Edmonton responds internally — with the rookies as focal points — will dictate how far the Oilers can go next season.” This turned out be a solid assessment of the team, which added Jack Roslovic, but looked like a spent and disorganized team for much of the year.

5. As for this summer, I agree that when it comes to regular season play that Ryan Shea is no upgrade over Darnell Nurse. But the major problem with Nurse, of course, isn’t his regular season play.

It’s how his game consistently fell apart five playoff seasons in a row. When the going got faster and more intense, Nurse’s reads of the game greatly deteriorated. In this way, if Shea withstands playoff pressure, he will represent a massive upgrade over Nurse this playoff season, the team jettisoning a poor playoff player for a good one.

That could well be huge. I’m uncertain that new goalie Andersen will prove to be a major upgrade over Connor Ingram, and also not sure whether Ike Howard can provide the 21 goals provided by Jack Roslovic. But Roslovic is another proven playoff non-performer, so no surprise the Oilers move him out.

Edmonton’s main acquisition in net might not be Andersen but rookie Devon Levi. In the ened, fans loved Bowman’s work because he had signed Murphy and Dickinson leading up to July 1 on value deals, and he was able to move out Nurse without eating any salary, which many folks had expected would have to happen. If you’re expecting to swallow a poison pill and don’t have to swallow it after all, that will put a smile on your face, no?

Essentially, Oilers fans were almost unanimous in wanting Nurse moved, they loved how Bowman executed the deal, and are glad Shea is taking his place whatever Luszczyszyn’s model says about the value of the two players.