Hope springs eternal for Oilers at the draft

EDMONTON – With a good strong crew of young players already in place for the Edmonton Oilers, they can let their prospects develop in the minor pros, college, juniors and in Europe. The Oilers hope they can improve from within offensively and defensively with the additions of Pat Quinn as Head Coach and Tom Renney as his associate. The reason for internal improvement lies within the fact they have several players tied up with large contracts and their top end talent is a year or two away from being impact players in the NHL. They simply may not be able to import too many contracts due to their commitments. Up front the team has several players who have to score in order to earn their money in Ales Hemsky, Dustin Penner, Shawn Horcroff, Patrick O’Sullivan and Fernando Pisani. Frankly some of those players are not giving the club a full return on its investment. For the amount of money they are earning the club needs more from Penner and Pisani. The next level of support on the team comes from the young legs of Sam Gagner, Robert Nilsson and Andrew Cogliano. Edmonton needs those players to start putting some points on the board. The team also has former first round picks Jordan Eberle (2008), Riley Nash (2007) and Rob Schremp (2004) in the organization. Schremp’s time with the club might be now or never. Defensively the club hopes to get some contributions from young defenders like Taylor Chorney, Theo Peckham and eventually Jeff Petry. If one or two of those guys can step into the lineup it would surely help because the Oilers have invested heavily in veteran defenders. Sheldon Souray, Lubomir Visnovsky and Tom Gilbert combined eat up roughly $15 million in cap space. Denis Grebeshkov played well with the team, but he might be priced out of the market because he has arbitration rights. The team also has to make a call on restricted free agent Ladislav Smid who came over to the club in the Chris Pronger trade with Anaheim. Edmonton has some cap space and they may use it to bring in a new starting goaltender, an experienced backup, or they may re-sign unrestricted free agent Dwayne Roloson. The club could go economy class and allow the tandem of Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers (31^st overall in 2002) and Devan Dubnyk (14^th overall, 2004) to take over the reins in net.

The biggest items the Oilers need to improve upon are their goaltending and compete level. There isn’t a goaltender worth taking this early in the draft so that cancels out the position unless the club can trade down. There are many good players still out there at this slot in the draft, but with a need for jam the club could go with Zack Kassian. Kassian has been compared to a higher-scoring Milan Lucic who has had a great start to his career with the Boston Bruins. At 6’3″, Kassian already has NHL size but he does need to work on his skating before he can be considered a sure-fire can’t miss pro. That being said, instead of going for another player such as Eberle early in the draft the Oilers are not going to pass on a player who might be able to score some goals and impose his will physically. “With the 10^th pick in the 2009 NHL Entry Draft, the Edmonton Oilers select, from the Peterborough Petes of the Ontario Hockey League, Zack Kassian. Contact the author at Tom-Schettino@prohockeynews.com