It doesn’t seem like things can get much worse for fans of the Edmonton Oilers. The club has already lost 145 man-games due to injuries and recently broke the news that Ales Hemsky will be out for the remainder of the season thanks to shoulder surgery.

Robert Nilsson (concussion), Taylor Chorney (ankle), Mike Comrie (mono), Denis Grebeshkov (knee), Nikolai Khabibulin (back), Fernando Pisani (colitis), Ryan Stone (knee), and Marc Pouliot (sports hernia) are also out of the Oilers’ line-up.

The team is near the bottom of the Western Conference, as you might expect, and is struggling to put together a full 60-minute game. Even with such adversity, Oilers GM Steve Tambellini wants to stick with the group he has for the time being. He’s in no hurry to make a trade, he told the Edmonton Sun.

“A lot of teams deal with injuries at different times of the year,” Tambellini said. “This has been a hard month for us, dealing with the flu virus, concussions and now this with Ales. But that’s what you’re dealt with and we’ll find ways to get through.”

Word around the campfire has been that Edmonton is looking for a top-six forward to transition into the line-up. Now would be a great time to make a deal, of course, and there are a few possibilities for the Oilers that could work snugly with their current roster. Still, Tambellini says he’d prefer to see how the Oilers react to this adversity.

“We’ll see how our guys react. There are some people that we know we can get more out of offensively. So we’ll see how this group reacts and we want to see how the team looks with some people coming back in a couple of weeks. But these situations can present opportunity also, so we’ll see what happens,” he said.

For the time being, it looks like Edmonton fans will have to be satisfied with the team they have on the ice. With a little more hustle and some grit, that may not turn out to be such a bad thing after all.

Posted by Jordan Richardson.

Tags: edmonton, Edmonton Oilers, Edmonton Oilers, Injuries, steve tambellini

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 at 3:04 am and is filed under Edmonton Oilers, Injuries, NHL, NHL Notes, Players. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.