The Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan added this as a note at the bottom of his Red vs. White Game #3 scrimmage recap, but it’s worth noting: the Red Wings and the NHL’s other 30 teams have to submit their final 23-man rosters and “taxi squad” rosters to the NHL’s front office by 5 PM on Tuesday, January 12th. That likely means that the Wings will place several players on waivers tomorrow:
The Wings, and the rest of the 30 NHL teams, need to finalize rosters by Tuesday at 5 p.m. (EST).
I’m expecting the Wings to keep Mathias Brome on their NHL roster for now, and, for the moment, anyway, Dennis Cholowski, Gustav Lindstrom, Michael Rasmussen, Givani Smith and Taro Hirose to head to the “taxi squad” for a month before heading to Grand Rapids when their season begins on February 5th.
Likely waiver candidates are forwards Riley Barber, Kyle Criscuolo, Dominic Turgeon and Turner Elson (I believe that Chase Pearson is still waiver-exempt) [edit: though I expect Evgeny Svechnikov to be waived once he gets healthy], defensemen Dylan McIlrath, Brian Lashoff and Joe Hicketts, and goaltenders Kevin Boyle and Pat Nagle (again, I believe that Kaden Fulcher is waiver-exempt).
Update: Speaking of which, per DetroitRedWings.com’s Brett McWethy:
Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill, Executive Vice President & General Manager Steve Yzerman and the rest of the front office will now turn its attention to the Opening Night roster and taxi squad decisions.
“My plan is, as soon as I leave you guys here, we’ll go back in the room, and I’ll have further discussions with our coaching staff and our management and Steve (Yzerman), and start to pare down what we think the roster is going to look like come Wednesday,” Blashill told the assembled media. “Start to make those decisions on the taxi squad and those types of things, continue to have those conversations based on the information that we got tonight.
“We’ll go through practice tomorrow, and hopefully have made a lot of decisions. We have Tuesday off, so by the time we get to Wednesday, we’re going to have our team and get ready to play Carolina.”
