Oilers Look Ready to Contend

The feeling seems to be one of young confidence in Edmonton, as the Oilers prepare for the new season with some renewed optimism and some very skilled players in the line-up. Edmonton added Erik Cole to an already dynamic forward unit, added the puck moving of Lubomir Visnovsky to an already hard-nosed blueline and they have a three-way dogfight for time in the crease. It's going to be tough to say no to this team that finished the last 20 games of last season on quite the tear.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Ales Hemsky	Lubomir Visnovsky	Mathieu Garon
Erik Cole	Tom Gilbert	Dwayne Roloson
Shawn Horcoff	Steve Staios	Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers
Sam Gagner	Sheldon Souray
Dustin Penner	Ladislav Smid
Andrew Cogliano	Jason Strudwick
Robert Nilsson	Mathieu Roy
Kyle Brodziak	Steve MacIntyre
Fernando Pisani
Zach Stortini
Ethan Moreau
Marc Pouliot
Rob Schremp

Curiously, the Oilers are still listing 25 players on their active roster on their home page, with no players listed on the IR. This means they still have to drop two players from their roster, which should have been done yesterday. Nevertheless, there is likely a reason for this. The 25-man roster above does carry a salary cap hit of $55 million for the year, which will be discounted by the two players dropped before game time this weekend.

It's a pretty exciting looking team. If the goaltending can work hard enough to keep enough pucks out of the net, they will be a playoff bound team. For fantasy purposes, their blueline does carry a couple cannons, which you should be looking at for this season.