Report: McLellan confirms Oilers have lost several players to long-term injuries.

The Edmonton Oilers got off to an ugly start to kick off the 2018 - 2019 National Hockey League regular season although the Oilers have started to right the ship thanks in large part to the tremendous play of superstar forward Connor McDavid. 

The idea however that the Oilers can simply ride McDavid all the way to success without any additional pieces to help him out on the way is obviously unrealistic and unfortunately for the Oilers it looks like they are going to have to find a way to support McDavid with a patchwork roster in the next several days. That's due to the fact that the Oilers have now confirmed that several of their players are going to be out due to injury for a significant length of time.

On Saturday Edmonton Oilers head coach Todd McLellan delivered a series of negative updates regarding a number of his players and needless to say it was a depressing series of announcements for the Oilers fan base. The first update from McLellan was regarding 24 year old defenseman Matt Benning and like in every case the news was bad. According to McLellan the team has now placed Benning on injured reserve and the expectation is that he will be out for at least a week as he recovers. Benning was forced out of a Thursday night game against the Boston Bruins and presumably it is during that game that he suffered the injury that is currently hindering him.

The bad news continued with Todd McLellan commenting on the status of top line winger Ty Rattie. Although Rattie has officially been unsigned to injured reserve at this time the Oilers head coach did confirm that Rattie will be out " a couple of weeks" as the result of an injury he has suffered. McLellan did nto go into detail about the specific nature of his injury but he did provide some clues by stating that Rattie was suffering from a muscle injury in his midsection. Considering that Rattie plays alongside the aforementioned Connor McDavid on the team's top line this one is a big loss. Although not yet official it sounds like Kailer Yamamoto will be the man who will replace Rattie alongside McDavid, at least in the short term. 

Last but not least was 24 year old forward Drake Caggiula. This is not a new injury as Caggiula was already sitting on the sidelines dealing with some issues, McLellan's update on Saturday was just more bad news. According to McLellan the undrafted forward in not yet ready to return to action for the Oilers and the head coach did not provide any indication of when he may be available to the Oilers again.

The main issue here of course is that the Oilers simply do not have the depth to reasonably deal with these types of injuries to their roster, some would argue that the team does not have the depth to be a serious contender in the National Hockey League even when completely healthy. I don't expect the Oilers to make any kind of moves to address these injuries at this time so it looks like they will simply have to soldier through with what they've got, and that likely means more reliance on McDavid.

[pub]