Ducks Look Ready

The Ducks made a few roster moves today, sending Justin Pogge and Ryan Donally down to the AHL and releasing both Kyle Calder and Jassen Cullimore from their professional tryouts. This now leaves the Ducks with a roster of 26 players. With Erik Christensen still on the shelf with a shoulder problem, they should be going into the year with this line-up, minus only a couple of players.

Forwards	Defense	Goaltenders
Ryan Getzlaf	Scott Niedermayer	Jonas Hiller
Corey Perry	Steve Eminger	J-S Giguere
Bobby Ryan	James Wisniewski
Teemu Selanne	Ryan Whitney
Joffrey Lupul	Nick Boynton
Saku Koivu	Luca Sbisa
Andrew Ebbett	Sheldon Brookbank
Erik Christensen	Brendan Mikkelson
Todd Marchant
Evgeni Artyukhin
George Parros
Petteri Nokelainen
Ryan Carter
Mike Brown
Troy Bodie
Logan MacMillan

The Ducks have taken their core players in Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry, Teemu Selanne, Scott Niedermayer and their goaltending tandem and did a good job of building around them for a long season run. New faces like Saku Koivu (pictured), Evgeni Artyukhin, Luca Sbisa and Steve Eminger should provide some depth to an already strong core. This team is my favourite for the Pacific Division title.

The salary cap number has been carefully worked around in Anaheim, as their 26 players on the roster only have a cap hit of $55.5 million. This still leaves three cuts, which should leave a lot of cap space for a deal around the trade deadline, if they are buyers, which I believe that they will be. I think this team is pretty well built for a reasonable cost, which should leave for management of the year considerations. Especially when you can bring Koivu to the team where his fellow countryman, Selanne, is playing already.

I have a feeling that the Ducks are going to be one strong team this season. They're built well. They can add on. All that really stands in the way of them and real success may be their goaltending situation, since it really isn't resolved and they'll have to pick a number one going forward. Getzlaf and Perry are a pair of scoring machines on the pond and now they have some more depth with Koivu and Selanne. This team will have some legs, so they should be on your pool list.