Thursday skate update
Posted on January 15th, 2009 – 12:44 PMBy Michael Russo
Well, I could put a ton of exciting stuff here, but I’d be making it up.
I didn’t make it out ot the arena this morning because I had something else going on, but I know Stephane Veilleux skated. But as far as a lineup, you’ll have to wait till pregame blog.
I did get plenty of notes yesterday, mostly from Edmonton’s room, so you can read that in tomorrow’s notebook.
With both the Wild and Oilers tied with identical records heading into tonight’s first meeting of the season, Oilers coach Craig MacTavish believes the winner of this series will go a long way toward determining which team makes the playoffs and which team doesn’t.
Lots of talk about Derek Boogaard in the Oil room. Boogaard has been highly effective over the years against the Oilers, especially knocking their guys out of the lineup (Ladislav Smid and Ales Hemsky to name two) — all with clean hits, I may add (in my opinion). Plus, Boogaard has drawn a ton of penalties with disciplined play, like when he took punches a few years ago from Steve Staios and Raffi Torres — if I remember correctly.
Speaking of Boogaard, he pointed me in the direction of this YouTube mock interview with Wade Belak on Sportsnet two seasons ago. When you watch, you’ll know why he told me about it.
Chatted with Eric Belanger yesterday about how the Wild nearly practiced outside. He was pretty funny on the subject, although he wasn’t kidding when he said it wouldn’t have been a very good idea. It was scrapped because of the dangerous cold. You can read that in tomorrow’s notebook, too.
Anybody notice that Johan Franzen got the benefit of another controversial high-stick goal last night against Anaheim? Almost identical to the circumstance here, and the replays Anaheim TV showed, it certainly looked like Franzen’s stick was again higher than the bar.
That’s it for now. Talk to you tonight.
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