After a season on the sidelines, multiple reports indicate that former Detroit Red Wings general manager Ken Holland is set to step back into an executive’s chair, taking over the Los Angeles Kings as the team’s next general manager.
A potpourri of NHL insiders—including Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli—have reported that Holland will officially be confirmed to the new post within the week. After a five-season run as president and general manager of the Edmonton Oilers ended last summer when the two parties elected to part ways following the team’s Stanley Cup Final defeat, Holland did not work for a team for the 2024-25 season. Now he’s poised to return.
Now that he’s no longer with those organizations, Oilers and Red Wings fans perhaps have a similar ambivalence toward Holland. In both cases, Holland delivered unquestionably positive results, but there were also a number of transactions that left both fan bases somewhere between mystified and maddened.
From a Detroit perspective, of course, frustration doesn’t stem from the overall success of Holland’s tenure so much as the condition in which he left the Red Wings—a largely inept roster hamstrung by long-term deals to players who could never live up to them and a prospect pool left barren by the team’s short-term decision-making. The selection of Filip Zadina over Quinn Hughes with his final first round draft choice (in 2018) became the primary symbol of the futility of his latter years, despite presiding over three Stanley Cups during his reign as GM.
The LA team Holland is set to inherit finds itself stuck somewhere in the middle of rebuilding and contention. Franchise icons Anze Kopitar and Drew Doughty are clearly approaching the end of their careers, but at least for the time being, they remain cast in important roles. The roster elsewhere isn’t devoid of useful pieces (Adrian Kempe, Phillip Danault, and Mikey Anderson to name a few), but the ‘on-the-fly’ rebuild hasn’t exactly propelled the Kings into a new window of contention. Instead, LA has suffered four straight first round losses at the hands of the Oilers.
At 69 years old, Holland could very well have called it a career after departing Edmonton, but instead he’s (reportedly) taken on a new challenge. With that in mind, let us know in the comments what you think is next for Holland and the Kings. Will he be able to help open up a new era of contention in Los Angeles or are the Kings destined to sink into mediocrity?
