Wild players never took the ice today for practice, as scheduled. Instead, the team had a meeting and then players were off to do dry-land workouts. Or so we were told. I never actually saw any players. But I’ll take the team’s word that everyone was there and participating.

There was some action on the ice. A few kids (I think those of Mike Ramsey, Matt Shaw and Tony DeCosta) were showing their stuff out there this morning. Oh how fun it must be to be young and have the Xcel Energy Center ice all to yourself. Bet those kids felt like superstars. I was jealous. I would love to get a skate in on the X’s ice.

I was able to snag coach Jacques Lemaire for a few minutes after the team meeting. We talked over a couple of things I’ll have in a notebook-style story for tomorrow’s paper. In short: Defenders need to play defense, Gaby doesn’t like being placed on the point for power plays (like he was for a bit last night) and young Colton Gillies didn’t play against St. Louis because the Blues are a bit too physical of a team. Hence why Weller was in.

OK - that’s it for today. Happy Holidays to you all. I’m away from the Wild until the 26th. Russo’s back tomorrow to take you through Tuesday’s game and into the NHL break.

I’ll leave you with this random holiday fact, courtesy of Charter Cable music channel 924 (which is currently on here in Casa de Stensaas): Department stores, hoping to lure customers, first began using illuminated trees in 1900.

Cheers!

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 21st, 2008 at 1:33 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.