The Red Wings begin a set of back-to-back games closing out their exhibition season against the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight (7:30 7:45ish -:8:00PM EDT on FSD/Sportsnet/97.1 FM), and the team will head to Boston to play the Bruins on Saturday (5:30 PM EDT on the NHL Network U.S.)
The Wings won't have Tomas Tatar, Darren Helm or Jonathan Ericsson in the lineup this evening, and the team officially placed Pavel Datsyuk on the IR though he practiced (albeit in a non-contact jersey) with the team on Friday.
DetroitRedWings.com's Bill Roose reported that the Wings took a large roster to Toronto...
MLive's Ansar Khan listed tonight's Wings lineup...
Here are tonight's lines and defense pairs:
Gustav Nyquist-Henrik Zetterberg-Johan Franzen
Teemu Pulkkinen-Joakim Andersson-Justin Abdelkader
Stephen Weiss-Tomas Nosek-Daniel Cleary
Drew Miller-Luke Glendening-Landon Ferraro
Niklas Kronwall-Danny DeKeyser
Brendan Smith-Alexey Marchenko
Xavier Ouellet-Nick Jensen
Jonas Gustavsson (whole game)
Petr Mrazek
Darren Helm (groin) and Jonathan Ericsson (hip flexor) both said they expect to play Saturday.
And the Toronto Star's Mark Zwolinski listed tonight's Leafs lineup:
The Leafs’ top line will likely feature Nazem Kadri between Joffrey Lupul and Josh Leivo.
Tyler Bozak, David Clarkson, Phil Kessel and Cody Fransson are all out with injuries.
The second line will have Mike Santorelli between William Nylander and James Van Riemsdyk.
The third line will have Leo Komarov between Daniel Winnik and Brandon Kozun.
The fourth line will likely have Peter Holland between Carter Ashton and Matt Frattin.
The defence pairing will be captain Dion Phaneuf with Stephane Robidas, who will be making his debut on the Leaf backline. Robidas is coming off a broken leg suffered in the playoffs last season with Anaheim. He broke the same leg earlier in the season when he was playing for Dallas.
The other defence pairings will be Jake Gardiner and Roman Polak, along with Morgan Rielly and Stuart Percy. Cody Franson is injured.
Jonathan Bernier will be the likely starter in goal.
If you really want to enjoy yourself with nine full minutes of Randy Carlyle's pre-game comments, please go ahead and do so; I believe that FSD is going to re-air the Wings' preseason special prior to tonight's affair.
The game-day post should provide for all your Red Wings needs, and I appreciated this little quip from the Hockey News regarding their 37th-best-ranked player (out of 50):
37. HENRIK ZETTERBERG | DETROIT | C | LY: 26
He will never be the player he once was because of injuries, but we still like what he is.
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