This is delusional copium. Plenty of room for this guy for you going forward, and a huge loss for the Oilers. Imagine getting this production for $2.3m.
This is just mathematically NOT TRUE.
Oilers started the season with $750K in cap space, and that's with having their bottom-three rostered D-men (Emberson, Stecher and Dermot/Brown) making close to league minimum.
Matching on Holloway was simply not possible at that point. Not without blowing up any opportunity to upgrade their D. And that (I think we'd all agree) was more important than any winger, Holloway or otherwise.
Now if you want to go back to the WINGER decisions they made, then sure... signing Arvidsson and Skinner prior to the offer sheets were both horrible mistakes. (though I doubt an intellectually honest poll in September would have supported Holloway > Arvidsson > Skinner).
However by the time the offer sheets came around, Oilers had already placed their winger bets and the decision to let Broberg and Holloway walk was entirely driven out of concern for our D...
And that concern was addressed first by experimentation with Klingberg and then by deadline addition with Walman.
And that cap flexibility was ONLY enabled by letting the kids walk and saving/accruing the space. (for example we kicked the tires on Klingberg in the summer, but couldn't afford him given our available space... needed time for it to accrue)
And this is not revisionist logic... I argued it in Sept.