All of Ken Holland's Oilers first-round draft picks play for other teams now
The Edmonton Oilers are set to ice a roster that has no players drafted by the team during the entirety of Ken Holland’s five-year reign as GM.
After the team lost Philip Broberg and Dylan Holloway to St. Louis on a pair of offer sheets, the cupboard from what Holland was able to draft during his time as Oilers GM is just about empty.
Though he was able to build a team that got within a single win of getting the Stanley Cup, Holland did not do much to restock Edmonton’s prospect cupboards through the draft. His drafting has been especially horrid,with the team now losing all four first-round selections either through offer sheets or by trading them away.
Broberg and Holloway were the closest to making a meaningful impact on the team, but the others have faded away into obscurity.
#Oilers have now traded or lost every single first round pick made by Ken Holland… Broberg, Holloway, Bourgault, Schafer are all with other organizations now.
Pretty remarkable that none of his first-rounders made any significant impact on the team… and not in a good way.
— Preston Hodgkinson (@NHLHodgkinson) August 20, 2024
An argument could be made that Reid Schafer, the Oilers’ 2022 first-round pick, was impactful as he was a key piece in the trade that acquired Mattias Ekholm. Yet, he had not played in a single NHL game in Edmonton.
Xavier Bourgault, Edmonton’s 2021 first-rounder, was traded to the Ottawa Senators earlier this summer, having not yet made his NHL debut. This alone would be a bad look on Holland’s draft record, but it gets even worse. In fact, not a single one of Holland’s draft picks from 2021 onward has played in an NHL game.
There is also a chance that the Oilers will start the season with exactly zero Holland-era draft picks on the roster.
The only hope for this not to be true is Raphael Lavoie, who was selected in the second round of the 2019 NHL Draft. The Quebecois sniper has been tearing up the AHL over the past couple of seasons but has yet to get a good look in the NHL. He isn’t expected to make the opening lineup but if he has a good training camp and preseason, it’s a possibility.
Beau Akey, drafted in the second round in 2023, is another hopeful, but he seems a lot less likely. Edmonton has holes on their backend, but Akey is just 19 and is coming off an injury-riddled season in the OHL. Never say never, but he would have to have a generational camp to sniff NHL action next season.
As the team gets older and older, it will be more important than ever to ensure that the Oilers are drafting competent NHL players who can help supplement the top-end talent on the roster.
Holland is gone, and it will now be up to Stan Bowman and Jeff Jackson to right the ship when it comes to amateur drafting and development.