The news came down Tuesday morning that the Edmonton Oilers would not be matching the offer sheets of defenceman Philip Broberg and winger Dylan Holloway. Both will now be members of the St. Louis Blues. As compensation, the Blues will send the Oilers a third-round pick for Holloway and a second-round pick for Broberg.

For the St. Louis side, it gives them a much-needed jolt to their youth. Dalibor Dvorsky and Jimmy Snuggerud look like good, young players, but the Blues need some help now. Broberg could immediately slide onto the second pair with Holloway immediately onto the second line. We'll wait until training camp for that, but it'll be interesting to see what this means for Jake Neighbours. Holloway is kind of a threat for his power play role, but Neighbours really helped elevate the team's PP in 2023-24 so he should still have the inside track.

Holloway moving on should leave Edmonton with a top-6 forward mix looking something like this (assuming Evander Kane on LTIR):

Jeff Skinner – Connor McDavid – Zach Hyman

Ryan Nugent-Hopkins – Leon Drasisaitl – Viktor Arvidsson

That seems pretty set until Kane returns, and assuming everyone else stays healthy. It should also leave room for Ty Emberson to be a lineup regular on defence, even if he's a right shot. They will probably be rotating him, Josh Brown, and Troy Stecher to some extent, but Edmonton's newest defenceman has a chance to stay in the lineup if he can play as well as he showed in his limited time with San Jose.

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On Monday, the Montreal Canadiens made their first real move of the offseason by trading for Columbus Blue Jackets winger Patrik Laine. They also received a second-round pick for taking on the full contract and sent defenceman Jordan Harris back to the Jackets.

Brennan wrote about the deal at the time and his take can be read here.

I want to start with the real-life impact.

The issue with Laine's on-ice play has been his defensive ability. HockeyViz shows that he has been a below-average defensive player his entire career until very recently:

When he is on the ice, his team generally gives up a lot of shots from somewhere in the circles, indicating that he has trouble marking his man in the defensive zone no matter the scheme his team is playing.

Montreal was a team that had a lot of issues preventing the opposition from clean zone entries and allowed a lot of shots off the rush. The Habs play a fast, transition-heavy style that gets their players up the ice quickly so when passes aren't crisp or the opposition has a good read, the play can go back against Montreal in the blink of an eye. It isn't just conjecture, either, as tracking data from AllThreeZones shows the Canadiens giving up a lot of carries against, shots off those carries, and shots off the rush:

Part of that is on the defencemen, absolutely, but it's also on the forwards. If they cheat too much or aren't in a position to provide backside pressure on the puck-carrying opposition, it puts immense pressure on their rearguards. If Laine cheats too much, and can't apply that back pressure, he could make an existing problem for Montreal worse. That is a genuine concern.

The other concern is that he's a player that wants the puck. Not that it's a bad thing, but as highlighted by David St-Louis at Elite Prospects, it's one of the reasons things didn't work so well with Johnny Gaudreau in Columbus. Gaudreau is also a player that wants the puck on his stick as much as possible, and that fight for the puck led to very marginal results. In fact, Columbus did much better by goal differential when Laine was with anyone but Gaudreau in Columbus.

Going to Montreal, it makes the fit a bit curious. Anyone that watched the top line last year knows one thing that worked well was that Nick Suzuki did a lot of the neutral zone work and then Cole Caufield and Juraj Slafkovsky played off of that. Back in 2022-23, Laine did a lot of the neutral zone work for Columbus:

That is what makes fit important. He may not be the best option to slide next to Suzuki, and could actually work better on the second line with Kirby Dach. Dach can do good work in the neutral zone, but he thrives at turning pucks over in the defensive zone to facilitate puck-moving from his defencemen and get his line mates moving up the ice. That seems like a better fit for Laine, but we'll see what the coaches decide.

There is also a question of how the power play will work. As mentioned by Brennan in his breakdown of the trade, this all but assuredly moves Dach to the second power play unit and leaves a top unit of Suzuki, Caufield, Slafkovský, and Laine. That makes three right-hand shots, including Caufield, who often plays his off wing on the power play. That would also be the spot Laine would occupy, so someone needs to move. It will be interesting to see how they make this work.

Guessing right now, I think the team leaves their usual top line together and sees if they can make a Newhook-Dach-Laine line work in a secondary scoring role. Dach and Newhook can do some neutral zone work, but they don't need the puck like Suzuki does. Newhook can push the defenders back with his speed, and Dach can get Laine moving up the ice with his defensive-zone work. It seems worth at least trying.

The other part of the acquisition is the contract. Laine has a hefty AAV at $8.7M per season, but the upside is that it's only for two more years. All of Suzuki, Caufield, Slafkovský, Newhook, Kaiden Guhle, and Sam Montembeault are all signed through that time. The team will still have over $20M in cap space for next season. It is a short-term bet they can make to try and help elevate the roster while they wait for Ivan Demidov to show up, Joshua Roy to mature, and their young defencemen to get up to scratch. It is a hefty bet, but it's a short-term one, and that means the team is not limited in what they can do once they (should) become perennial playoff contenders in 2026 and beyond.

I will say that, as a Habs fan, I do like Jordan Harris as a defenceman. He was solid defensively and looked to have some more growth coming. My hope was that he could turn into a Carson Soucy/Olli Maatta-type in that he'd be a good defensive third-pair guy who could move into a second-pair role. However, with all the left-shot defencemen Montreal has, someone had to go, and this gives Columbus an immediate third-pair upgrade over Jack Johnson. He won't bring much in fantasy, though.

To get to the fantasy aspect of this, the aforementioned top-6 setup would push Joshua Roy, Brendan Gallagher, Joel Armia, and everyone else to the bottom-6. It also means those same names are on the second PP unit, at best. Not that things will stay that way all season, but it does hurt the value of guys like Dach, Newhook, Gallagher, and so on.

It is easy to forget just how productive Laine can be across the board. Out of 336 forwards with at least 2000 minutes played across the last three seasons, there are 30 – or less than 10% – that have both first-line rates of goals per 60 minutes (at least 1.3) and assists per 60 minutes (at least 1.5). When looking at players in his range of goals, assist, and shot rates, there is one name that comes up:

Production-wise, the big difference between Laine and Dylan Larkin is ice time, but Laine has a chance to land in the 18- to 19-minute range in Montreal. When Newhook returned from injury last season, he skated 17:11 per game, and that included top PP minutes. It is not hard to see Laine at 18:11 per game, and that level of ice time means a 30-40 season with 240 shots is feasible. That also presumes an 82-game season, and the injuries have been a problem in recent years, so that's the complicating problem here. All the same, Laine is going to a team that should be able to cobble together an average power play and if they can make the pieces work, he looks to be a very good fantasy value, even in multi-cat formats where he doesn't bring much for blocks and hits.

I hate to be That Guy, but I like this trade both from a real-life perspective as a Habs fan and from a fantasy perspective. Laine is an underrated playmaker who can help his teammates score, is one of the top finishers of this generation, and gives Montreal some desperately needed secondary scoring. It also provides a buffer while they wait for Demidov et al. Both Montreal fans and fantasy hockey managers should be excited about this.