So the best moves you can come up with for him so far are:
"Getting rid of Lucic" by trading for a player who is nearly as bad while retaining salary and thus making our cap situation worse.
And signing Darnell Nurse to an inflated 2 year deal that takes him right to Unrestricted Free Agency.
...
The Lucic trade is meh at best and terrible at worst for the reasons you mention and this board still treats it as this walk on water moment for Holland. I'll never get that.
It's also widely believed Holland will be able to sign Nurse after walking him to UFA status...
I get that people want to be optimistic for their team/GM and it's perhaps too negative to assume the worst BUT!
Most/many of Holland's moves in a perfectly unbias vacuum are bad or at least very questionable.
By his own mouth he failed to get the players he has been targeting. The ones he does get are deeply flawed and he ends up paying too much for them to boot.
Edit: Holland, surprisingly from his reputation, seems far more concerned with the appearance of making the hockey club better than actually making the club better. His strategy is very much a quantity over quality.