from Helene St. James of the Detroit Free Press,

Eight games will be plenty to give both Alex Nedeljkovic and newcomer Ville Husso enough starts to get comfortable. On defense, Moritz Seider has spent camp paired with Ben Chiarot, Filip Hronek with Olli Määttä, with a presumptive third pairing in Simon Edvinsson and Gustav Lindstrom — but Lalonde has repeatedly said there'll be lots of experimentation during preseason to see who gels with whom.

"We haven’t really stressed about it," he said. "I couldn’t give you any looks at all. We are going to take the full eight games and let it play out and go from there. We do put a lot of time into a ballpark matrix. We basically a guy a number we want to see and then work back from there. It never works that way. It changes daily. It’s already changed many times. But we ballpark what we want to see out of each guy."

What Lalonde wants to see, starting Tuesday, is how well the Wings are implementing the emphasis on playing good team defense.

"We have to take a step every day," he said. "Establishing some compete, some attitude, work on all those things. I feel fortunate we have eight games this year to fine-tune somethings before our home opener."

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