Grading the offer sheets: Oilers make right call on Broberg but lose Holloway for too little

Mike Gould
Mike Gould
Grading the offer sheets: Oilers make right call on Broberg but lose Holloway for too little
Credit: Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

The St. Louis Blues offer sheet saga that captivated the hockey world for seven days has finally drawn to a close, with both Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg officially leaving the Edmonton Oilers for St. Louis on Tuesday.

Offer sheets are rarely used in the NHL, with managers generally considering them taboo and often viewing them as grounds for retaliation, even if deployed unsuccessfully. But in this case, the Blues didn’t just succeed in taking one young player away from the Oilers — they nabbed two at the same time.

Here at Daily Faceoff, we’ve long published our initial reactions to major transactions between NHL teams in a series we simply call Trade Grades. This, of course, is a little more complicated. The Blues did acquire two players on Tuesday and, by the rules of the offer sheet mechanism, had to give the Oilers two of their own draft picks as compensation.

And then, on top of that, the Blues and Oilers ended up making an honest-to-goodness trade on Tuesday, with St. Louis sending defense prospect Paul Fischer and a 2028 third-round pick to Edmonton in exchange for future considerations (AKA, nothing at all).

The Oilers had until 9:30 a.m. MT on Tuesday to make their decisions on Holloway and Broberg. The trade (which was announced at 7:30 a.m. MT) was brought upon by the Oilers threatening to match both offer sheets, leaving the Blues with nothing, if St. Louis didn’t sweeten the pot for them a little.

Put all this together and it really starts to look more like a big … trade … that we can … grade. So, that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Did the Oilers make the right call not matching on either player? Did the Blues get good value for their money and draft picks? Let’s dig into it.

ST. LOUIS BLUES

Receive:

D Philip Broberg, 23 – $4.58 million cap hit through 2026
LW Dylan Holloway, 22 – $2.29 million cap hit through 2026

It’s only been five years since the Blues won their first Stanley Cup, but it’s been a long time since they’ve felt further away from winning a championship. Their forward group is good, but not great; their defensive group is anchored by three declining veterans with matching $6.5 million cap hits; and although Jordan Binnington bounced back last year, he’s still a particularly unpredictable player at an already volatile position.

Broberg and Holloway might not be the quick fixes the Blues need to turn back into a Cup contender, but they’re two good players with plenty of talent and the potential to become pieces of a burgeoning young core in St. Louis. Both of them also played significant supporting roles with the Oilers this past spring as they made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final against the Florida Panthers. They’re two excellent additions for a Blues team that needs a spark in a big way.

For the Blues to get two of the Oilers’ recent first-round picks without giving up one of their own is extremely impressive. Nevertheless, it all still came at a relatively significant cost. Although Holloway’s two-year, $2.29 million AAV contract isn’t that much more than what most pundits expected he’d get from the Oilers, absolutely nobody saw Broberg getting more than $9 million over two years on his next deal.

Broberg has long been a highly touted defense prospect with a ton of positive attributes. He’s a smooth-skating Swede who can play both sides and contribute at both ends. But that doesn’t change that the 23-year-old Broberg has yet to become an NHL regular. The 6’4″ lefty played in only 22 out of a possible 107 games with the Oilers over the 2023-24 regular season and playoffs, collecting two goals and five points.

The Oilers probably could’ve matched the Holloway contract (more on that later) but the Broberg deal never really made any sense for them. It’s a reasonable gamble for a St. Louis team that still has more than $2 million in cap space before Torey Krug goes on long-term injured reserve. But that doesn’t mean it’s a perfect deal, and there are plenty of potential downsides to the current situation in St. Louis — for instance, the Blues now have just three picks in next year’s draft.

It doesn’t look like the Blues plan to bottom out for a top draft pick any time soon, meaning GM Doug Armstrong has to find value wherever he can get it. We’ll have to wait and see whether they can parlay their current strategy into long-term success, but the prospect of Holloway and Broberg joining the core of Robert Thomas, Jordan Kyrou, Pavel Buchnevich, Jake Neighbours, Jimmy Snuggerud, Dalibor Dvorsky, and Adam Jiricek is an undeniably attractive one.

Grade: B+

EDMONTON OILERS

Receive:

D Paul Fischer, 19 – Unsigned draft pick
2025 second-round pick
2025 third-round pick
2028 third-round pick

The Oilers painted themselves into a bit of a corner with their signing spree on the opening day of this year’s unrestricted free agency period. They made perfectly reasonable bets on Jeff Skinner and Viktor Arvidsson and allocated even more of their cap and roster space to re-signing Adam Henrique, Connor Brown, Corey Perry, and Mattias Janmark, leaving precious little room for their two key RFAs.

Of course, restricted free agents are, in their nature, restricted, so the Oilers may have taken for granted that the NHL’s other 31 teams would opt not to exploit their glaring vulnerability to an offer sheet (or two). In the end, that turned out not to be the case, and the Oilers have now parted ways with six of their last eight first-round draft picks.

The Oilers have always been weaker on defense than at forward during the Connor McDavid era, but even so, it never made much sense for them to match the Broberg deal. It’s just too much money for an unproven player, especially when what the Oilers really need is another right-handed defender to replace Cody Ceci. They made the right call taking the second-round pick, which they can now use to acquire a different player at some point in the future.

Holloway is a different story. He was drafted a year after Broberg and had much more to do with the Oilers finding success in the 2023-24 regular season and playoffs, racking up 11 goals and 16 points over 63 games (including all 25 playoff contests). Holloway is a big guy who skates well and is still on the right track toward eventually becoming a top-six forward. But the Oilers blocked his path when they went all-in on veterans during Jeff Jackson’s tenure as interim GM.

If the Oilers had known back in July that signing all those 30-plus forwards would result in them losing Holloway for a third-round pick, would it have given them pause? They technically cleared enough space with the Ceci trade to take on Holloway’s $2.29 million AAV, but doing so still would’ve required them to begin the season with Evander Kane on LTIR — thereby preventing them from accruing any cap space. It remains to be seen whether, say, the Oilers’ two-year, $4 million AAV deal for Viktor Arvidsson ends up being worth them allowing a younger, bigger, and more promising player in Holloway to leave for a relative pittance.

The Oilers deserve credit for strong-arming the Blues into giving up another third-round pick and a solid defensive prospect the same day they had to make their decision, but it only improves their grade by a little bit. No matter how you slice it, it’s a bad look to lose two highly touted young players at the same time. Now, it’s up to the Oilers to pivot. If they can flip these assets for players who can help them win, they could still come out ahead.

Grade: C-

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