Jacques Lemaire was right. The Wild coach felt today’s practice was sluggish compared to yesterday’s - the first after the two-day Christmas break.

“It is what I thought,” Lemaire told reporters after this morning’s skate. “Oh, my Lord. Anyway. What else?”

As far as practice goes, the “what else” other than Lemaire’s correct prognostication I wrote about in yesterday’s post was a lot of odd-man rush situations. Two-on-ones, three-on-twos … you name it. Lots of time spent on this today.

There was also an extended period of scrimmages (it was a longer-than-usual practice, that’s for sure). During that time, Erik Reitz caught either a stick or a puck to the left side of his face (he will be fine) and Marek “Pele” Zidlicky kicked a wayward puck across the blue line to Kim Johnsson, who further kept the play alive.

Yup, there’s your action for the day.

From the personnel files, Marian Gaborik again did not skate and he is not on the list of players scheduled to take the ice tomorrow morning. Lemaire said Gaborik likely will not skate again until Wednesday.

The Wild is treating tomorrow’s game with Chicago (a 5pm start) like that of a back-to-back situation. There will not be a formal team-wide morning skate. Only nine players (Harding, Nolan, Foster, Pouliot, Kolanos, Weller, Boogaard, Gillies and Reitz) are scheduled to skate in the morning. The others will wait until just before warm-ups to lace ‘em up.

I’m on for tomorrow’s game while Russo travels to Calgary. So you’ll be hearing from me yet again tomorrow.

I’ll leave you today with line combinations from this morning’s practice, and a studious quote from Lemaire on his plan for tomorrow night.

Miettinen-Koivu-Brunette
Veilleux-Belanger-Clutterbuck
Gillies-Sheppard-Bouchard
Boogaard-Pouliot-Weller-Kolanos

“We have to check. Check, check, check, check, check, check. A lot of checking.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 27th, 2008 at 2:15 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.