Good dreary Monday to you all. The depressing weather outside made being stuck indoors at Parade Ice Gardens for today’s Wild practice not so bad. Oh who am I kidding, it could be 70 and sunny and I’d take watching hockey indoors over being outside. Seriously.

The only news out of practice today was the absence of Owen Nolan. I wrote yesterday that Nolan left practice a little early and Jacques Lemaire said he was fine. Nolan wasn’t there at all today, and again Jacques said it was nothing. He passed it off as the 36-year-old forward just needing a little bit of rest. He’s expected to be in the lineup for this trip.

In Nolan’s place, Colton Gillies skated Monday with Pierre-Marc Bouchard and Eric Belanger.

The coaches held a lengthy team meeting at center ice at the beginning of practice. Jacques said the talk was about Saturday’s game and how “we don’t want to play it again.”

He was mostly concerned about positioning and support. Naturally, the team then practiced 5-on-5 getting the puck out of the zone.

Then it came time for shootouts. No spin-o-ramas from anyone. Veilleux and Belanger scored with back-to-back slap shots on Josh Harding. Other than that, nothing too fancy.

After practice, Lemaire was again asked about line combination changes - or the lack of them.

“I’ve been thinking deeply about switching certain guys,” he said. “But I don’t know if we’re going to do it yet.”

He then laughed.

“The thing is I had a lot of confidence. Let’s take Gaborik with Sheppard and Veilleux: They had a great camp. They did great stuff. I was really happy with the way Gaby was playing. He was working as hard as the other two kids. They were on the puck, making plays, playing straight hockey. Then we come into the first game, and it’s like they never met each other.”

He said after that, he had no choice and had to give the three another try. And will do so again, presumably tomorrow in Atlanta. He also said two players, Miettinen and Brunette, were the only ones who complemented each other well against Boston and all told it could take 5-10 games to get it all figured out.

Talked to Craig Weller today, too. He said the coaches got on him about needing to take shorter shifts in the games he played during the preseason. It’s among the “little things” Lemaire said Weller needs to work on to crack the lineup.

And from the local ties department, former Benilde-St. Margaret’s player Andrew Alberts - a defenseman who was a scratch for Boston on Saturday - has been traded to the Flyers for Ned Lukacevic and a conditional pick in the 2009 Entry Draft.

Russo live from Atlanta, Sunrise and Tampa the rest of the week. Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Practice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.