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The Edmonton Oilers were practically begging rival franchises to extend offer sheets to defenseman Philip Broberg and forward Dylan Holloway.

The Oilers made lowball offers to both, about $1.1 million for Broberg according to reports and a similar annual average for Holloway over three years.

Broberg’s camp became frustrated with the Oilers while he spent most of his third pro season in North America in the AHL. Agent Darren Ferris was looking to get Broberg a fresh start for some time, so he was a natural target for an offer sheet.

Blues general manager Doug Armstrong found the sweet spot with his offer, an average of $4.58 million for two years. That was big enough to dissuade the Oilers from matching, but just small enough to require only a second-round pick as compensation.

That said, this was a hugely speculative offer by Armstrong. Broberg has a rangy frame (6-foot-4) and the skating ability to grow into the Top 4 role the Blues would like to see him eventually fill.

He has physical ability, which is why the Oilers rook him with the 8^th overall pick in the 2019 NHL Draft. While Broberg’s NHL track record is thin, this scouting report from EP Rinkside’s David St-Louis last season spoke to his promise:

Broberg has the tools to play in the NHL. He can match the footwork of some of the league's shiftiest attackers and he has the range to deny their playmaking space. His offensive reads have also improved over the past two seasons. If he were getting more regular minutes in the league, you would likely see him activate and orchestrate plays much more often in the NHL.

Playing in the AHL won't hurt him, but his career, status as a player, and overall development would probably benefit more from a move to a new organization. The same qualities that made Broberg so appealing in his draft year are still there. With the right guidance, he could leverage them into a top-four role at the NHL level.

While Broberg graduated into a postseason role with the Oilers this season, his underlying numbers weren’t great. So ultimately Armstrong is betting two contract years and some non-prime future assets that Broberg can finally untap his potential.

Holloway was the easier bet, given the reasonable AAV on his offer sheet.

The Oilers are “win now� mode, so CEO of Hockey Operations Jeff Jackso aggressively spent to land free-agent wingers Jeff Skinner and Viktor Arvidsson and retain forwards Adam Henrique and Connor Brown.

That made perfect sense for a team wanting to win with superstars Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl in their prime and defenseman Evan Bouchard emerging as a star in his own right.

But those moves left little upward mobility for Holloway. That, plus his understandable unwillingness to sign a multi-year deal for minimal money put him in play.

Tipsheet is surprised the Oilers let him go. Yes, the team has immediate salary cap concerns, even with Evander Kane potentially spending the year on long-term injured reserve after undergoing sports hernia repairs.

Yes, the team also has long-term salary cap concerns with Draisaitl and Bouchard needing massive raises on their next contracts. But the Oilers had invested three years in him and the franchise is not exactly swimming in good young forwards.

New GM Stan Bowman, who replaced Ken Holland this summer, engineered a trade to land Vasily Podkolzin from Vancouver to essentially replace Holloway.

Bowman also got defensive prospect Paul Fischer and a 2028 third-round pick from the Blues as his reward for not matching the offer sheets.

When all was said and done, the Oilers remained a team in “win now� mode and the Blues got two more pieces to retool with. Broberg adds much-needed youth and upside to the defensive corps while Holloway joins the army of young forwards trying to find their place in the Robert Thomas/Jordan Kyrou nucleus.

In the near term, Armstrong spent money that could have allocated to a middling NHL free agent or European free agents but didn’t. And he retained salary cap flexibility in the longer term.

Here is what folks have writing about this move:

Ryan S. Clark, : “Maneuvering their financial situation became an instant priority for the Oilers after they lose Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final. Less than two weeks after their season ended, the Oilers added forwards Viktor Arvidsson and Jeff Skinner while signing defenseman Josh Brown. They also brought back forwards Connor Brown, Adam Henrique, Mattias Janmark and Corey Perry, in addition to defenseman Troy Stecher. But with the Blues' offer sheets, it left the Oilers trying to figure out how they would be able to afford at least one, if not, both players whereas the Blues have more than $7 million in cap space by comparison.”

David Staples, Edmonton Journal: “Since July 1 the Oilers have now said good-bye to three of their top 7 d-men from the 2024 playoffs: Vincent Desharnais, Cody Ceci and now Broberg. They have lost four fast, young and skilled players in Ryan McLeod, Dylan Holloway, Warren Foegele and Broberg. The ºüÀêÊÓƵ Blues put the Oilers between a proverbial rock and hard place on this one. Offer sheets are rare in the NHL but as former NHL GM Brian Lawton said this week on Oilers Now, ‘You can’t be surprised if it happens. As management of a team, you’re asked to look behind every tree for danger and to consider it.’ Oilers GM Ken Holland was reportedly advised to sign up Holloway and Broberg to new deals last winter but did not get either done. It could be there was no digging out of that hole for the Oilers, especially when combined with Edmonton’s slow promotion of both players. But hockey boss Jeff Jackson also spent well over the cap this summer, leaving Edmonton with little wiggle room to match the ºüÀêÊÓƵ offer. The episode represents a major blow to the franchise and a fail by Oilers management past and present. This past week Jackson and new GM Stan Bowman evidently scrambled to create cap space but have come up short, possibly due to Evander Kane’s murky situation. Is Kane going on Long Term Injured Reserve or not?â€�

Tyler Kuel, Daily Faceoff: “Bowman admitted that the Oilers’ brass pondered matching either Broberg or Holloway, individually, along with seeing they could afford to re-sign both players . . . Even though the Oilers had seven full days to match the contracts, Bowman and company realized they didn’t have the space to do so. He also pointed out that the decision not to match ºüÀêÊÓƵ’ offers had nothing to do with the quality of Broberg and Holloway.â€�

Mark Spector, Sportsnet: “Edmonton Oilers general manager Stan Bowman is sitting across the table from the agent for Leon Draisaitl, or Evan Bouchard, or Connor McDavid, making his pitch. ‘I know your comparables are higher than our offer,’ Bowman is saying. ‘But if you take a little bit less, I can keep this core together and win some Stanley Cups.’ There is no guarantee, of course, that anyone on the Oilers roster will be willing to take a small haircut to keep the band together. However, this IS a guarantee: If Bowman blinked and overpaid a couple of youngsters in Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway who have a grand total 170 NHL games played between them — giving them a far bigger piece of the salary-cap pie than they have earned — the entire model of ‘taking less to win’ blows up. Never mind how that would play out in a room full of veterans such as Adam Henrique, Connor Brown, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins and Mattias Janmark who have taken less money and term to play in Edmonton.�

Allan Mitchell, The Athletic: “Fans got an early indication the organization was heading that way when the club made the weekend deals for defenseman Ty Emberson and forward Vasily Podkolzin. The reasoning behind the moves is obvious. Once the Blues delivered the offer sheets to Broberg and Holloway, the primary value of those players — quality value for low cost against the cap — dissolved in an instant. After that, the next logical step was to evaluate the cost of matching and to decide if that cost was worth it . . . The template for Edmonton’s roster in 2024-25 had Broberg and Holloway coming in at a little more than $1 million each against the salary cap. When Broberg ($4.58 million AAV on a two-year deal) and Holloway ($2.29 million AAV, also two years) signed with ºüÀêÊÓƵ, Jackson and Bowman were forced to make tough decisions. The result was a trade of veteran defender Cody Ceci to the San Jose Sharks in order to lower cap, and the acquisition of two men who can be replacements for the players heading to ºüÀêÊÓƵ. The Oilers’ savings in making these moves is significant. For the first time in the Connor McDavid era, management will have room to wheel at the 2025 trade deadline (should they choose to stop making news by acquiring players until then) unencumbered by salary-cap worries.â€�

Jim Matheson,ÌýEdmonton Sun: “Before the Blues’ offer sheets to Broberg and Holloway, the Oilers were $341,000 over the $85 million cap. It looked like they were trading Ceci to maybe keep Broberg, whose agent Darren Ferris said there were three teams investigating an offer sheet. But no. Broberg is now a Blue — and probably not blue. He had asked for a trade over the winter . . . Not matching on Broberg and Holloway gives the Oilers more cap space to work with, never a bad thing with the trade additions of Emberson and Podkolzin. Both are young, but Edmonton is still the oldest team in the league with an average age of 30.27. The Oilers defense is in flux. Bouchard and Mattias Ekholm are the top pair, but they have to find a right-handed partner for Darnell Nurse (it could have been Broberg). It could be 494-game veteran Troy Stecher, last season’s trade-deadline pickup who needed surgery for a cyst on his ankle in the playoffs.â€�

Ryan Lambert, EP Rinkside: “Even with the controversial hiring of Stan Bowman, the sailing has been pretty smooth and there's a lot to be happy with, so dropping a grenade in the middle of their cottage time is, frankly, what teams in the Blues' position should be pursuing aggressively. Every team that feels like it's kinda spinning its tires and not really in a playoff position should be willing to burn a little too much cap space (or a lot, in Broberg's case) and a second- or third-round pick to pry a youngish NHLer out of a capped-out team's system. That's a great way to get better on a shorter timeline than a full rebuild. However, with these particular players, it's hard to really see what the Blues' plan was. It's not that Holloway and, to a lesser extent, Broberg aren't NHL players or anything, but neither have really proven themselves as full-time NHLers, either. The needlessly heavy pursuit of Broberg, in particular, seems to be entirely driven by the fact that when he was on the ice at 5-on-5 in the postseason, the Oilers outscored their competition 6-2 in 135 minutes. That's a great number, but also every other underlying he posted in the playoffs, if we're being kind, needed improvement; his on-ice share of attempts, unblocked attempts, shots on goal, scoring chances, high-danger scoring chances, and expected goals, in the 35-42 percent range. But when he was on the ice, the Oilers shot 13.3 percent and got a .968 save percentage, and you can't teach that. (Please don't think too long about how badly everything else had to go to only score 75 percent of the goals when you have a 110 PDO.) Broberg just turned 23 around the end of the Cup Final, and has a grand total of 101 career NHL games between the regular season and playoffs. Every number he's ever posted in his career apart from that PDO-driven GF% has been subpar.�

MEGAPHONE

“Not matching made the most sense for where we are today. This isn’t reflective of the players, at all, I want to be clear on that. I had no concerns. It came down to our short- and long-term viability with the salary cap.�

Oilers general manager Stan Bowman.