How can the Edmonton Oilers fix the glaring hole on their second defensive pairing?
In the past few days, the Edmonton Oilers have made two decisions that significantly impact the outlook of their defensive core.
Firstly, on August 13, the St. Louis Blues tenured offer sheets to Edmonton’s restricted free agents Dylan Holloway and Philip Broberg. Yesterday morning, the Oilers finally decided not to match Broberg and Holloway’s offer sheets.
Additionally, a few days following the Blues’ offer sheet, the Oilers dealt Cody Ceci and a 2025 third-round pick to the San Jose Sharks for defenceman Ty Emberson.
The second-pairing, right-defence spot next to Darnell Nurse in Edmonton’s top four has been a glaring hole for quite some time. For the past two seasons, Cody Ceci has most commonly played in the 2RD spot, but he heavily struggled.
After the conclusion of the 2024 playoffs, most expected Broberg to begin the 2024-25 season at 2RD next to Nurse, signing a cheap deal in the low ~$1M range. This was where he played for nearly the entirety of the 2024 Stanley Cup Finals.
While Broberg is a left-shot defenceman, he was not projected to play much on his natural side in Edmonton considering that Mattias Ekholm, Darnell Nurse and Brett Kulak were all ahead of him on the LHD depth chart. Furthermore, he did have significant experience on his off-side when he played for the Skellefteå AIK of the Swedish Hockey League in 2019-20 and 2020-21. I wrote all about Broberg’s potential viability at 2RD back in July.
At the start of the summer, Edmonton’s most significant additions were two top-six forwards; Jeff Skinner and Viktor Arvidsson. Meanwhile, the NHL defence mainly remained intact aside from Vincent Desharnais leaving in free agency. My guess is that the Oilers did not want to spend assets on a top-four defenceman until they saw how well Broberg could perform at the 2RD spot over a significant sample.
