Pre-season has come and gone in the EHEC and the Pittsburgh Penguins are a little over a week from opening night (EHEC play kicks off October 4th, while the Penguins will play host to the Nashville Predators in their season opener on October 6th).

After three straight years out of the playoff race, the Penguins are hoping for a different fate this season, GM Trevor Cook's second at the helm.

The Penguins revamped their defense this summer and made some up-front additions that they hope will also make them more difficult to play against. "Getting more physical was definitely a goal this summer, as well as improving our depth on the back end and building a group that's really solid defensively," the GM says.

New guy Erik Gudbranson will be key to that effort - 6'3, 215 pound physical force roaming the back end. He's eclipsed the 300-hit mark twice in his EHEC career and in the years he doesn't, he still usually threatens it. Offense may not be his thing, but he is feared when he's on the ice. He will be counted on to mentor Moritz Seider, last year's #10 overall pick who plays the game quite similarly. "Moritz isn't quite as mean, but he's still very physical. Probably has a little more offensive upside. Erik is a great guy for him to learn from, for sure."

Nicklas Jensen, Alexander Avtsyn, Mika Zibanejad, and Vitaly Anikeyenko also serve to attest to the GM's claim that the Penguins will be tougher to play against this year.

The Penguins went 3-4-1 in the pre-season, usually icing a lineup of mostly prospects. They won their last two games, in which they played in a configuration much closer to what we'll see in the regular season. Zibanejad and Jack Hughes tied for the team lead with 7 points each.

Final cuts were announced last night, and there were a few surprises. Highly-touted prospect and off-season pickup Vasili Podkolzin was sent to the AHL, and so were Guillaume Latendresse and Ryan Stone, two players who were expected to feature on the fourth line. "There was some maneuvering required to fit under the salary cap and this is how we decided to do it. Vasili, in particular, is a player we'd love to have in the bigs. But he's a 19 year old kid, he's got a lot of time to grow and develop and become a great player in this league. And we knew from the time we acquired Mika this off-season that there would be some cap implications to that. But we're very excited with how this lineup looks."

The Penguins' farm club in Wilkes-Barre/Scranton figures to be an exciting place to watch this season, with Podkolzin joined by #5 overall pick Cole Perfetti, another top prospect in Filip Hallander, and some new veterans with proven AHL track records including Mario Lucia and Marko Dano up front and Eric Roy and Jack Glover on the back end. They join the returning Juuso Ikonen (61 goals, 110 points), Nic Petan (42 goals, 79 points), and Vyacheslav Osnovin (24 points in 21 games) to form what should be a more successful minor league club than last year's mediocre group.

A look at the finalized opening night roster for the Penguins:
#3 Seth Jones - A
#4 Marc-Edouard Vlasic
#5 Braydon Coburn
#8 Jack Hughes
#9 Patrick Sharp - C
#10 Brayden Schenn
#11 Brendan Perlini
#12 Zach Sanford
#13 Mark Pysyk
#17 Nicolas Kerdiles
#19 Calle Jarnkrok
#22 Kevin Fiala
#23 Sean Monahan
#30 Ben Bishop
#37 Andrei Svechnikov
#44 Erik Gudbranson - A
#46 Nicklas Jensen
#53 Moritz Seider
#57 Vitaly Anikeyenko
#71 Alexander Avtsyn
#77 Anthony DeAngelo
#90 Robin Lehner
#93 Mika Zibanejad