Oilers Bury Souray

Well, the Oilers have tried their best to move Sheldon Souray in a trade to get him off their books completely, but apparently no one wanted to bite down on a pretty big contract and help the Oilers out in this dire situation.

Instead, the Oilers were able to find an AHL assignment for Souray in Hershey, the Washington Capitals farm team.  The Oilers did not want to have Souray in their system at all, if he wasn't going to play for the Oilers main club, so the last resort was to find another team, which takes Souray's cap hit off the books.

Forwards	Defense	Goalies
Dustin Penner	Kurtis Foster	Jeff Deslauriers
Sam Gagner	Ryan Whitney	Nikolai Khabibulin
Gilbert Brule	Tom Gilbert	Devan Dubnyk
Shawn Horcoff	Jim Vandermeer
Andrew Cogliano	Ladislav Smid
Ales Hemsky	Theo Peckham
Colin Fraser	Jason Strudwick
Zach Stortini
Ryan Jones
J-F Jacques
Jordan Eberle
Taylor Hall
Steve McIntyre
Magnus Paajarvi

With Souray off of the team table above, I do believe we can call this the Oilers line-up for the start of the regular season, with J-F Jacques starting the year on the injured reserve.  The team will carry all three goalies into the regular season, with fears that neither Deslauriers or Dubnyk will pass through waivers without getting claimed.

This now gives the Oilers a complete 23-man roster, 13 forwards, seven defense and three goalies, plus a buyout and a cap overage penalty, bringing their current cap projection to a total of $48.5 million.  With some young entry-level deals on the books, they have helped the team get over the salary cap floor $43.4 million, thanks to some big bonuses for some of the league's top prospects.  Getting rid of Souray's big lump didn't really help them in that department.

The countdown to Thursday night is now on, where we'll finally be able to look at the brand new Edmonton Oilers with all their young guns geared up and ready to go.  They will kick off the season against the Calgary Flames on the back end of a Thursday night Hockey Night in Canada doubleheader.

I have a feeling that we'll see plenty of goals from this Oilers team, but I'm not terribly certain that all that new offense will necessarily turn into wins.  Nevertheless, they should be a fun team to watch.