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Evander Kane will miss the start of this season for the Edmonton Oilers and have sports hernia surgery this week.

“He’s going to be out for a while,” Oilers general manager Stan Bowman said Wednesday. “I don’t want to speculate on that. I think our doctors will be able to give you a better handle on that, but he’s not going to be here for a while.

“It’s going to be soon. He is not going to be available for training camp and the beginning of the season. I don’t want to speak on the medical part. We’ll get our doctors to comment on that, but he is going to be having surgery.”

The 33-year-old forward had 44 points (24 goals, 20 assists) in 77 regular-season games and eight points (four goals, four assists) in 20 Stanley Cup Playoff games last season.

Edmonton reached Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final, a 2-1 loss to the Florida Panthers. Kane missed the last five games of the best-of-7 series because of a sports hernia.

“I think the goal there was to determine the best path forward with his injury,” Bowman said. “Sometimes when players — he can probably speak to this better than me — when players are injured there’s often times a couple of different ways you can proceed. You get a diagnosis and sometimes it can be rehab and sometimes it’s definite surgery, sometimes surgery is an option, but you might want to try and rehab it before. At the end of the day, nobody really wants to have surgery. There’s always complications that can come from that. Evander would probably better suited to speak on that.

“But the way we always handle it with our players, at the end of the day, it’s their body, it’s their decision to make. They can listen to the recommendation of doctors, but they have to get to the point where in their mind this is definitely what I want to do. It was recently where we reached that point with Evander, and he can probably explain his though process on that.”

Edmonton added forward depth by signing forwards Viktor Arvidsson (two years, $4 million average annual value) and Jeff Skinner (one year, $3 million) as unrestricted free agents July 1. Bowman said Kane will, for now, avoid long-term injured reserve.

“We have the salary cap room, he’ll be on the regular roster,” Bowman said. “As we get into the season, if we run into a number of injuries that are shorter term in nature and we need to bring bodies up, then we have the flexibility to put him on long-term injury. But part of the reason we made the moves we did over the summer is so that we would not be required to start the season with long-term injury and that hasn’t changed.”

Selected by the Atlanta Thrashers with the No. 4 pick in the 2009 NHL Draft, Kane has 617 points (326 goals, 291 assists) in 930 regular-season games with the Thrashers, Winnipeg Jets, Buffalo Sabres, San Jose Sharks and Oilers, and 43 points (26 goals, 17 assists) in 76 playoff games.

NHL.com staff writer Derek Van Diest contributed to this report