Bosc wrote:
I don't think Tatar shied away from the dirty areas much in Detroit.
No, that's not what I meant, he's built to do that very thing--it's that when he was with Colton and Wood he seemed a bit redundant, with MacKinnon and Rantanen he's able to be the "Landeskog" there and dig pucks out for them to create scoring chances. Conversely, Drouin shies away from a LOT of dirty areas so he just wasn't effective alongside 29 and 96, but looked a lot better on the third line with two grinders.
Moot point anyway because Bednar appears to have liked the additional tinkering he did around mid-game against and so we'll be seeing this lineup against Chris's Islanders tomorrow:
Lehkonen - MacKinnon - Nichushkin
Tatar - Johansen - Rantanen
Wood - Colton - Drouin
Cogliano - Olofsson - O'Connor
Apart from Toews-Makar I'm not sure what defensive pairings will be. The one guy really struggling right now is Bowen Byram. They have him on the right side paired with Sam Girard and it's just not working. He's taking a ton of penalties and just isn't looking good at either end of the ice. Unfortunately even when they bumped him down a pairing, he still had to play the right side with Jack Johnson. Not sure what the solution is there because, while Girard is better on the right side than Byram, he also seems to take a step back when he's over on that side.
Avs also called up Corey Schuenemann from the Eagles for the road game. Kinda odd considering that they signed Caleb Jones right before the start of the season to be the 7th defenseman, but I suppose they want him playing for now.