Stan Bowman has already had a busy stretch as Oilers general manager, but not every move has aged well. With the 2026 NHL Draft in the books and the offseason now in full swing, Edmonton still has major business ahead.
Free agency is coming. More roster decisions are coming.
And so is the scrutiny.
A few of Bowman’s early calls are already looking like the kind a GM would love to get back.
The biggest one may be the Trent Frederic extension. Bowman brought Frederic in at the 2025 trade deadline, and at the time it wasn’t hard to see the logic.
Frederic had a rough year offensively with just 15 points, but he had put up 40 points the season before and 31 the year before that. Then came one regular-season game in an Oilers sweater, followed by a middling Stanley Cup run in which he managed four points in 22 games.
After that, Bowman handed him an eight-year deal worth $3.85 million per season.
The problem is the production has never followed. Through 75 combined regular-season games, Frederic has just seven points.
He’s still only 28, so there’s a path where this works if Edmonton can get him back on track as a middle-six power forward who adds some secondary scoring. If that doesn’t happen, the contract is going to sit there like a weight for the next seven seasons.
Then there’s the Tristan Jarry trade, which was supposed to stabilize a position that had clearly gone sideways. Edmonton opened the 2025-26 season with Stuart Skinner and Calvin Pickard, and that setup didn’t hold. Just two months in, with the Oilers unable to keep their grip on a playoff spot, Bowman went searching for a fix and landed Jarry from Pittsburgh in exchange for Skinner, Brett Kulak and a 2029 second-round pick.
It looked shaky almost immediately. Jarry got hurt three games into his Edmonton run, and that should have been a warning sign.
When he returned, he ended up sharing the crease with Connor Ingram, but he didn’t hold onto the starter’s job. In 19 games with the Oilers, Jarry has posted a .858 save percentage and a 3.86 goals-against average to go with a 9-6-2 record.
He still has two years left on a five-year deal that carries a $5.375 million cap hit, which makes this one look especially ugly heading into 2026-27.
The Andrew Mangiapane signing belongs in the same conversation. Edmonton entered the 2025 offseason needing to slash payroll after locking up its core and facing more expensive business ahead, including Evan Bouchard’s next deal and Leon Draisaitl’s contract situation. That pushed Bowman into bargain shopping for scoring help, and Mangiapane got the two-year contract at an annual average value of $3.6 million.
On paper, there was a case for it. Mangiapane had done his best work just three hours south in Calgary, where he set a career high with 55 points, including 35 goals and 20 assists, in 82 games. He had also had multiple other 40-point seasons, and even in the shortened 2020-21 campaign he scored 18 goals and 14 assists for 32 points in 56 games.
But the fit never really came together in Edmonton. Mangiapane struggled to produce, drifted into a bottom-six role and was even scratched at times under now fired head coach Kris Knoblauch.
In 52 games with the Oilers, he scored seven goals and seven assists for 14 points while averaging 12:36 per night. He was then moved to the Chicago Blackhawks at the trade deadline as part of the package for newly signed shutdown centre Jason Dickinson.
Bowman has already made some significant changes behind the scenes, including the firing of Knoblauch and several front office promotions. Even so, the early returns on a few of his biggest roster decisions have not been kind. The work is far from finished, and the Oilers still need the next round of moves to look a lot better than these ones did.
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