Ken Holland is getting the last laugh
Well, not exactly, but the much-maligned Oilers GM has answered his critics by pushing a lot of the right buttons and making some deft moves
Ken Holland has been through enough long playoff runs in his almost four-decade managerial career to know that his Edmonton Oilers really haven’t actually accomplished a whole lot. As a genuinely bewildered Alexander Mogilny said in 2002 amid the bedlam after the Toronto Maple Leafs advanced to the Eastern Conference final, “Why is everybody so excited? We’ve only made it halfway through the playoffs.”
But there has to be a small part of him who wants to tell all those people who just months ago thought he was the NHL’s version of the village idiot where they can dispose of their opinions of him. Or at the very least to go forth and multiply. “I’ve got no message,” Holland told Hockey Unfiltered. “We certainly feel good about where we’re at, but our goal is to go on a playoff run and be the last team standing. You can sit and evaluate whether you think I did a good job or a bad job, but I’m not thinking about that. I’ve had a lot of critics for a number of years.”
Yes, he has. Just take a look on social media occasionally. There are a lot of people out there who believe that Holland had lost his fastball and was collecting $5 million a year to keep the Oilers mired in mediocrity. A good number of his moves and non-moves were panned, particularly at mid-season, when the Oilers woke up the morning of Jan. 21 to discover they were in seventh place in the Pacific Division and 13th in the Western Conference. The Oilers were the best team in the league after the first quarter of the season when they went 16-5-0, then went on a 2-11-2 run during which they were one of the worst. Exacerbating matters was that so many games were being postponed by COVID that the stretch ran over seven weeks, which made it slow and very painful.
It turns out the Oilers were far closer to being the team that was at the top of the league than the one that languished through December and January. In their final 46 games of the season, the Oilers went 31-11-4 and the 66 points they picked up in that time tied them for third in the each team’s final 46 games, behind the Florida Panthers (34-11-1) and the Calgary Flames (32-9-5). Want to hear something crazy? The team with which they were tied is the Colorado Avalanche, who had the identical record in their final 46 games. That means that of the four teams that are left in the post-season, the Avs and Oilers were the two hottest ones in the second half of the season.
Holland is not about to take any bows, but it turns out that on the ice at least, the signing of Evander Kane turned out to be a stroke of genius. And the decision to go with a goaltending tandem of Mike Smith and Mikko Koskinen, as messy as it can look at times, just might be good enough for a team that creates the amount of offense the Oilers do. The Zach Hyman signing was exactly what the Oilers needed. The acquisitions of Duncan Keith and Cody Ceci most certainly did not give Edmonton two perfect defensemen, but they’ve had their moments. The decision to fire Dave Tippett was an agonizing one, marking the first time in Holland’s career that he made a mid-season coaching change. But it was clear that a change behind the bench needed to be made. “You’ve got to make more good decisions that impact your team than bad decisions,” Holland said. “I’ve been around for a long time, so I’ve made a lot of decisions that haven’t worked out, but I’ve made lots of decisions that have worked out. Then you move on to the next decision.”
One of the reasons Holland has lasted so long is that he plays the long game. One of his most enduring memories was in the 2005-06 playoffs when, after a 124-point, Presidents’ Trophy season, the Red Wings lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Oilers and everyone said they were too small and too European. Holland stuck to his convictions and the next season lost to the Anaheim Ducks in the Western Conference final, then won the Stanley Cup, then lost the Stanley Cup final in Game 7. “I’ve been up high and down low,” Holland said, “and everywhere in between. I’ve been called everything.”