The Canucks Are In Town.

The Oilers are back in action tonight following a tough loss to the Florida Panthers on Thursday night. A game where the Oilers out-shot and generally out-played the opposition, and Anderson, the current leader in SV%, shut us down big time.

That was then and tonight is now and we’re going up against a Vancouver team that no one expected to be good this year. It didn’t look like they were making big moves this past off-season, and they’re still waiting to hear about the whole Sundin debacle, (yes I am calling it debacle, after 6-7 months of waiting it has become a debacle and I’m sure everyone can hardly wait for the decision to be made so we can stop talking about it. I kind of wish he would just go back to TO, but that’s just my opinion). And yet here they are, leading the NW division with 35 points. The Calgary Flames also have 35 points but the Canucks have a game in hand. Personally I don’t think their success will continue, but if they’re playing this well without Luongo who knows what will happen when he returns.

Back to the game at hand: I’m scanning my memory for games that we’ve played well in against Vancouver and I’m not coming up with many. We lost the only other match-up of the season thus far to Vancouver and we split the season series with them last season, although three of our wins came in the SO, make of that what you will.

Nilsson draws back into our line-up for the game; he will be reunited with Gagner and Cogliano as the ‘Kid-Line’ gets another shot, and for their sake I hope it goes well because it seems most of Oil country want Gagner sent down and have Schremp or Brule take his place. I am not a member of this philosophy.

Roloson gets the start tonight in hopes that he can perform like he did against San Jose again, if he doesn’t this could just complicate the goaltending issue, and to be honest I’m at the point where I think they just need to make a decision. If we don’t choose soon this will come back to haunt us, I’ll guarantee that.