It’s news that surprises no one, but the Edmonton Oilers have missed the playoffs again. This now gives them the honour of holding the longest active playoff drought in the league.

The Oilers have missed the postseason for the seventh consecutive year. The news came after they lost to the Anaheim Ducks on Sunday night.

“To have another season where we’re out of the playoffs, another season where we’re playing meaningless games at the end of the year, is very frustrating,” said Taylor Hall. “It’s something we’re not proud of.”

“It’s tough, it’s been extremely tough on me,” Shawn Horcoff said. “We made some steps and at least this year we got some meaningful games in, gave ourselves a chance to get in, but it fell off as of late. I think we’re moving in the right direction. It’s just a little slower than we’d like.”

Horcoff, for the record, has been with the Oilers for the entire seven year drought.

The Oilers will now have to once again look to the future and will hope their young stars eventually turn the tide. Part of the equation is Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, who is set to fly to Cleveland to have his shoulder examined. “Surgery is likely,” the club said on its Twitter feed, “will miss remainder of season.”

Nugent-Hopkins reportedly has a torn labrum, the same injury Hall had at the end of last year, and is looking at about six months on the injured list.

Nugent-Hopkins has apparently been bothered by the injury since his junior days, which brings up a number of questions about why Edmonton didn’t have him take care of it sooner. He presumably could’ve had the surgery last season. Given the lockout, it almost seems strange for him not to have had the procedure.

Of course, the Oilers followed a similar pattern with Hall. He apparently hurt his shoulder “four years ago” at least and it had been “wearing away” prior to his surgery.

Is the flaw with management? If so, what’s the conceivable reason for not taking care of their best players and the hope for the franchise? With so much going wrong in Edmonton these days, it’s hard to imagine that the team would compound the issue by waiting on important procedures for its key players.

If this keeps up, we could be looking at another seven years without a playoff berth.

The Edmonton Oilers have fired general manager Steve Tambellini and have replaced him with Craig MacTavish. The club made the announcement Monday at Rexall Place.

“We are not where we want to be right now, or where we should be. We feel strongly we make changes right now,” said president of hockey operations Kevin Lowe.  ”We need to get better immediately. That starts today with this announcement.”

The Oilers currently sit at 16-18-7 and are eight points out of a playoff spot.

Getting better immediately clearly means clearing out Tambellini, whose tenure with the team seems to have been spotted with missed opportunities and, at times, total chaos.

Over his four-plus years with the franchise, the Oilers failed to make the playoffs each season. They’ve been booed off the ice and they’ve been “selfish,” to have Nick Schultz tell it, so there’s a lot of work for MacTavish to do.

“I’m an impatient guy. We have to do some bold things to move this team forward in a rapid fashion,” said MacTavish. “We have to a better job arming our coaches and our core players with a group to get us to a highly-competitive level.”

As coach, MacTavish holds a 301-252-56 with the Oilers and took them to the post-season three times. He also has a stellar working relationship with Kevin Lowe, Edmonton’s president of hockey operations.

Some might suggest that Lowe also needs to go if there really is to be a sea change for the Oilers, but that doesn’t appear to be in the cards just yet. Instead, there is tremendous faith in the club.

“We’re poised for greatness and our fans understand that,” said Lowe.

Edmonton Oilers forward Taylor Hall has been suspended two games for after kneeing Minnesota’s Cal Clutterbuck. The incident took place during Thursday’s game between the Oilers and the Wild.

Clutterbuck suffered a thigh contusion and is using crutches.

“People don’t like getting hit,” said Clutterbuck. “I don’t like getting hit, and that tends to frustrate people. I think when you get frustrated, you tend to do things that maybe out of your character and you see red a little bit…I understand that being as physical as I am, that can cause frustration in other people. It’s part of the reason I’m effective.”

League disciplinarian Brendan Shanahan handed down the suspension after a long-distance phone conversation with Hall on Friday.

Hall was sent off the ice with a five minute major penalty for kneeing and a game misconduct on Thursday. He said after the game that he had no intention of hurting Clutterbuck.

“To be honest, I would rather not even talk about it anymore,” said Wild coach Mike Yeo after the game. “I will say I didn’t like it. I didn’t think the puck was there. That to me was the biggest issue about it. Aside from that, we don’t like it. We’re not happy when one of our players gets hurt, especially on something like that. But we have to move on…The league’s going to take care of it.”

It’s pretty clear that Hall’s hit is a kneeing penalty by the definition of Rule 50.1: “Kneeing is the act of a player leading with his knee and in some cases extending his leg outwards to make contact with his opponent.”

Hall may never have intended to take out Clutterbuck or injure him (and really, what player has ever admitted intent to injure?), but the Oiler forward sure did lead with the left knee coming into the hit. Principle contact on the hit came with the left leg and thigh, not the upper body.

“Although this play happens quickly, Hall is in full control of himself and in control of this hit,” Shanahan said. “He makes the decision to step up and deliver a low check on a player who is not engaged with him whatsoever.”

Hall did not speak to the media following practice on Friday.

As the NHL’s lockout looms, various teams are getting their contingency plans in order.

The Edmonton Oilers have their own plans and will give the Oklahoma City Barons a major boost, sending a total of 26 players to the AHL club. Among them are Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jordan Eberle, Magnus Paajarvi, and Justin Schultz. First overall pick Nail Yakupov will suit up for the OHL’s Sarnia Sting, while David Musil will head to the WHL’s Vancouver Giants.

Many of the players moved to the AHL are still on entry level deals, so it doesn’t cost much for the Oilers to make the moves.

“I talked to Ryan Whitney who played in the AHL during the lockout and he said it was one of the best years of his career,” said Eberle. ”It’s going to be good to go down there with the guys, hang out and get a winning attitude because we’re going to have a good team.”

This will mean a pay cut of some sort to the players moving to the AHL. Eberle, for one, will earn a salary of about $65,000 annually in the AHL. He’s in the final year of his entry level contract with the NHL club, but his new deal with the franchise was for six years to the tune of $36 million.

Other players, like Taylor Hall, were not eligible to join the Barons due to being on the IR.

Other clubs have been following suit, with the Carolina Hurricanes sending 28 players – including Jeff Skinner – to the Charlotte Checkers. The New Jersey Devils moved players like Adam Henrique to the Albany Devils, while the Winnipeg Jets sent a baker’s dozen to the St. John’s IceCaps.

There are some other players with their own back-up plans and some may even suit up for the KHL, especially if looks like the lockout will drag out.

Stick with us here at HockeyDraft.ca and on our Facebook page for more news and discussion as the dark hours of yet another NHL lockout drag on.

Forward Jordan Eberle has signed a six year extension with the Edmonton Oilers, cashing in to the tune of $36 million over that period.

The 22-year-old is entering the final year of his three year entry level deal and the new contract will go into effect in the 2013-2014 season. He’ll stay with the club through the 2018-2019 season.

“Obviously I’m pretty excited,” Eberle said. “With Taylor [Hall] getting his done last week, I was pretty anxious. I’m happy to be an Oiler…and I think with the direction the team’s going it’s pretty obvious that there’s a lot of excitement level around Edmonton and throughout our locker room…We’re stating that we want to be here, we want to be the core guys of this team that help us win.”

Eberle is a great points-producer for the Oilers, leading the team last season in goals, assists and points in just his second year in the NHL. The year prior, he also led the Oilers in scoring – finishing 15th overall.

“I’m happy for the organization and I’m proud of Jordan because he deserves it,” Oilers general manager Steve Tambellini said. “He’s a young man that is totally committed to what we’re trying to accomplish here.”

Eberle finished last season as a finalist for the Lady Byng Trophy, notching only 10 penalty minutes.

But the 22nd pick of the 2008 NHL Entry Draft knows that he has his work cut out for him on a team that desperately has to find ways to win. The Oilers have finished in the basement of the league for the last three seasons and need to start turning things around. The Eberle and Hall signings should help in that regard, as should the arrivals of Nail Yakupov and Justin Schultz.

“I think this year is definitely going to be a big year for us, as far as developing our name as a team,” Eberle said. “Our success in the past couple of years hasn’t been nearly where we want it to be, and next year’s going to be a huge stepping stone for us.”

The youth movement is long underway in Edmonton. Now it’s time for it to start paying off.

The Edmonton Oilers have locked up 20-year-old Taylor Hall to a seven year contract extension that makes him the highest-paid player on the club to the tune of roughly $6 million per year. He has a year left on his entry-level deal, but the new deal will keep him in Edmonton until the 2019-2020 season.

“I’m only 20 years old. I think [the contract] just shows the commitment that I have here. When they said seven years I didn’t blink,” Hall said on the Oilers’ website Wednesday. “I’m comfortable being here for that long, and I think by that time, hopefully we’re a perennial threat. That’s my main goal, and that’s my mindset when I signed the deal, is that that’s going to happen.”

Hall was the Oilers’ first pick in the 2010 NHL Entry Draft. In 126 regular season games, he has 95 points. Last season, he missed 21 games after shoulder surgery but still managed 13 power play goals – good enough for fifth in the NHL.

Currently, Hall finds himself four and a half months into a six month rehab process. He returned to the ice a month ago and is now skating about twice a week.

“I’m really positive about it,” Hall said. “I’m not going to say I’m going to be perfect on day one, but it feels really good and I’m excited about the process of being healthy. It was a hard summer, but the way it feels now I think it’s all worth it.”

The Oilers are also looking to lock up Jordan Eberle to a long-term deal, which will solidify Edmonton’s young core.

“We’ve had some good dialogue throughout this whole thing,” Hall said of current talks with Eberle. “I think his [contract] should be pretty soon, I can’t say for sure, but he’s along the same path, he wants to be here, so do I. It’s only a matter of time before all this kind of settles and we can go and play hockey…With everything that’s gone on lately, I think it’s not a stretch to imagine that we can keep all the young guys together, and I think this proves that today.”

The Edmonton Oilers have introduced Ralph Krueger as their new head coach. He replaces Tom Renney and has signed a three-year deal.

Krueger was the team’s associate coach and impressed GM Steve Tambellini with his work on the power play, transforming it from 27th overall to third in the league by season’s end. Krueger’s work with the Swiss hockey club was also noteworthy.

“We are not going to be focusing on winning, winning, winning to the point that it suffocates us and we squeeze our sticks,” Krueger said. ”We have skill in our room that’s so exciting and I need to find ways that their instincts can play freely. We want to be known as a hard-working team on and off the ice, a very disciplined team. And then, naturally, the winning will come as a byproduct of that.”

From 1997 to 2010, Krueger served behind the bench of the Swiss national team and took it from 15th to seventh in international rankings. He was in the thick of it in 2006 when the Swiss defeated the favoured Canadian team 2-0 at the Olympics. Needless to say, Tambellini was impressed.

“For hockey that was an incredible moment, but I know why that happened,” said Tambellini. “When you speak to the people that work with Ralph, when you speak to the players who have played with him, they talk about leadership, they talk about clarity, they talk about motivation.”

Interestingly, Krueger is also a motivational speaker. He has written a book, Teamlife: Over Setbacks to Success, and seems to be a very prepared, very controlled individual.

The Oilers will need his help, that’s for sure, and he’ll be responsible for transforming the culture of the hockey club. The Oilers have finished last, last and second last in the last three seasons. Krueger is the fourth head coach since 2009, entering a revolving door situation that he hopes to put a stop to. The Oilers have missed the playoffs consistently as of late, despite having a slew of young talent, and they’ll need to figure out what to do with their latest acquisition: Nail Yakupov.

Going forward, the Oilers hope Krueger’s communication strengths will pay off well. He has sound technical knowledge of the game and comes with Renney’s outgoing endorsement.

Firmly locked in a rebuild process, the Edmonton Oilers will go the next few steps up the road without head coach Tom Renney.

The Oilers went 57-85-22 under Renney, finishing last in the Northwest Division twice. In Renney’s first season, the team was a league-worst 25-45-12. This season, the club went 32-40-10 in the regular season. That marked an improvement, but it wasn’t enough in the end.

“Tom’s done some great things for our hockey club,” said GM Steve Tambellini, “but we felt it was the right decision to make a change…We’re entering a new phase of our hockey club. We’ve got some great challenges, but ones that we’re looking forward to. I want to thank Tom for his work that he’s done with us.”

Renney was largely selected initially for his ability as a teacher of young players. Indeed, with players like Taylor Hall, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, Jordan Eberle, and even Sam Gagner in the fold, it looked like the 57-year-old coach was going to be a nice fit for the long haul.

But the Oilers don’t seem to show any signs of slowing down their revolving door of coaches. The next coach to be hired by Tambellini will be the fourth coach of the club since 2008.

“We need to get to a different level of compete…a different level of competing for playoff spots,” Tambellini said. “We’ve had some young people now who have been here through a couple of years. We’ve had some veterans who have underachieved for whatever reason and expectations will increase, as they should.”

As to who that next coach will be, speculation has been running rampant that former Calgary Flames head coach Brent Sutter will be up for the position. Todd Nelson, the coach of the Oilers’ American Hockey League farm team in Oklahoma City, is also expected to be considered.

“There are a few people we have interest in,” Tambellini said. “I would hope to have something in place prior to the draft.”

The Edmonton Oilers have done it again. The team won the NHL Draft Lottery for the third year in a row and will have the first overall selection at the upcoming NHL Entry Draft.

The Oilers entered the lottery with the second worst record in the National Hockey League and had an 18.8 percent chance of winning the top spot.

Over the last couple of years, the Oilers have done relatively well in the draft. They picked Ryan Nugent-Hopkins last year and Taylor Hall the year before that. With the upcoming pick, word around the campfire is that Nail Yakupov of the OHL’s Sarnia Sting will be selected first. Mikhail Grigorenko of the QMJHL’s Quebec Remparts is also expected to go high in the draft.

The league’s worst team, the Columbus Blue Jackets, have the pick following the Oilers. The Montreal Canadiens, New York Islanders and Toronto Maple Leafs round out the top five.

As usual, the five teams who had the lowest records in the regular season had a crack at the top pick in the draft through the lottery. The Blue Jackets had the odds in their favour, with 25 percent of the combinations in the lottery hopper.

The draft takes place on June 22-23 in Pittsburgh.

Edmonton Oilers forward Taylor Hall is now officially out for the remainder of the NHL season.

The 20-year-old will have surgery on his left shoulder and hasn’t played since March 17 after suffering a concussion in a game against the Calgary Flames.

The official timeline for Hall’s recovery is five to six months, says Oilers GM Steve Tambellini. The hope is that Hall will be ready to go at the start of the next season.

The injury to Hall’s shoulder developed after he hurt it in when playing for Canada at the U-18 tournament four year ago. It has gotten worse over time and the forward has played through it, but it looks like the time has finally come to get something done. ”I’ve been playing with a pretty bad shoulder for most of this year and I’m excited to see what I can do after it’s fixed,” Hall said on Twitter. “It’s not the way I envisioned my career starting, but I hope to stay healthy after this and be a good Oiler for a long time.”

“He’s going to have an incredible career, so this is the right time to take care of business and get this (surgery) done,” said Tambellini, also via Twitter.

Hall has gone through some injury difficulties over his NHL career thus far. A hit from Colorado Avalanche defenceman Ryan Wilson in November put him on the shelf for seven games and aggravated the shoulder, while Mark Fistric of the Dallas Stars cross-checked him a few weeks ago and possibly caused Hall to re-injure it. Then two weeks ago, a Cory Sarich hit gave Hall a concussion and wound up being the last time the Oiler would appear in the season. That leaves aside the scary incident involving Corey Potter’s skate in a pre-game warm-up in Columbus that, in all honesty, could have been tragic.

In 61 games with the Oilers this season, Hall had 27 goals and 26 assists.