According to the @Edmonton Oilers, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins will not be available for the upcoming home-and-home weekend against the @Vancouver Canucks as he continues to recover from a “procedure” on his hand.

Last weekend, news broke that @Ryan Nugent-Hopkins would miss a couple of games with an undisclosed hand injury, but that time on the shelf will be extended into early next week as he continues to recover from some kind of procedure. What kind of procedure, you ask? I have no idea — the Oilers aren’t volunteering many details. Either way, I’m no scientist but I can’t help but feel like the Oilers are keeping secrets from us since I don’t know of many “procedures” that are no big deal. Not to mention, is a week and change enough time to recover from whatever surgery he had to get to fix the issue?

At this point, this news offers up more questions than it does answers and it’ll be very interesting to see how this RNH situation plays out in the coming days. So far, we’ve seen the team say that Nuge would only miss a couple of games to now having him miss at least four and possibly more. According to Dave Tippett, RNH is expected to be ready to return sometime next week, so we’ll have to hope that this latest timeline is indeed correct. In the meantime, I’d expect that @Sam Gagner will continue to fill in on the Oilers’ second line until Nugent-Hopkins is given the green light.

In 25 games played so far, Nugent-Hopkins has put up five goals and 11 assists for 16 points while averaging 19:16 worth of ice time in all situations.