The Year Ahead…
Since relocating to the depths of the deep american south it is going to be a heck of a lot harder to watch all the games this year, but hey living in Florida does beat living in Calgary!!! From an Oiler Fans prospective anyway!
I have had some time to read over a few articles on this site and had many arguements with some flames fans back home, all of which are saying that the Oilers will miss the playoffs, how they will miss pronger, peca, samsonov and spacek… the one funny thing about all those players is that they were only here for 1 year. The loss of pronger will hurt, but the rest were just rental type players. The core guys that ARE the oilers are still around. Smyth, Smith, Moreau, Hemsky, Staios. Not to mention the BEST GM in the NHL. The only mistake he made was not pulling the trigger on the teams goaltending issue earlier on in the year. Also they have drafted extremely well over the last couple of years without high end draft picks. The Oilers have built an extremely gifted group of forwards and D men with smart trades and without a top 10 draft choice in the last 10 years. So let’s look at the team…
Smyth-Horcoff-Hemsky
Torres-Stoll-Lupul
Moreau-Reasoner-Pisani
Sykora-Pulliot-Shremp/Winchester/J.F. Jaques
Smith-Tjarnqvist
Staios-Bergeron
Greene-Hejda/Smid/Syvret/Roy
Roloson
Markannen
A lot of people are saying that the oilers defense will be weak, there defense was not the problem last year…shaky goaltending for the fist 60 games of the year was. Don’t get me wrong the loss of pronger will hurt a bit, but having a confident #1 goalie in the pipes for 60 games this year will lighten the load on a young defense corp. Plus if things are not going as planned Lowe will make a move…he proved he was good at it last year with Spacek and Tarnstrom! Also there were a lot of good signs from players like Greene and Bergeron who will be able to shoulder more minutes than last year.
As for up front they are set with 2 or 3 scoring Lines (depending on how MacTavish sets up his team) and the old combo of Reasoner Pisani and Moreau who did a lot of checking a couple of years ago
This team isn’t blessed with a “superstar” player like an Ovechkin, Neidermyer or Luongo, but there is a whole heap of great players which can beat a superstar on an good team anyday.
Not to mention guys like