The Detroit Red Wings will battle the Toronto Maple Leafs tonight (7 PM EDT on Bally Sports Detroit/TSN4, 97.1 FM) to close out their 2023-2024 exhibition season.
The 4-2-and-1 Red Wings have been told that the Leafs won’t bring their NHL team’s roster to Little Caesars Arena, but the Red Wings still plan on holding a “dress rehearsal” for the regular season, as the Free Press’s Helene St. James notes this morning:
“You can get your lines together, get everyone out there with who they’re going to play with,” veteran defenseman Ben Chiarot said. “It’s like of like a dress rehearsal for us.”
Goaltender Ville Husso is earmarked to play the full game. He has appeared in two preseason games, logging just short of 61 minutes of work and posting a 1.97 goals-against average and .933 save percentage.
As St. James notes, the one wrinkle in the Red Wings’ Friday practice lineup involved Michael Rasmussen skating alongside the duo of Alex DeBrincat and Dylan Larkin.
Wings coach Derek Lalonde made some interesting comments about both the Red Wings’ lineup and the exhibition grind on Friday:
“All exhibition games have had some value to them,” Lalonde said. “Certainly not ideal to play three games in a row, all on the road, back-to-back-to-back, it’s a little bit of a grind. But at the same time, it actually set up Saturday pretty well. Get a practice day, play Saturday, day off Sunday, and then we have three days to get prepared for New Jersey.”
Rosters don’t have to be trimmed until Monday, so the Wings are taking advantage to have 15 on their roster for now: Jonatan Berggren skated Friday with Nate Danielson and Elmer Söderblom, the latter two of which are slated to depart for juniors and the minors, respectively. Defenseman Simon Edvinsson was also with the Wings at Friday’s practice, but did not rotate into any of the pairings; he’s also earmarked for the Griffins.
“Those 15 and 8 you saw today will all be around and available for tomorrow,” Lalonde said. “We’ll probably have a conversation with management if they need to see anything else. But, we want to start getting our lineup together a little bit. I won’t put a whole lot of stock into tomorrow, but you want to start getting emotionally engaged.”
Continued; the Free Press’s Ryan Ford also posted a tongue-in-cheek preview of the game, the Wings’ roster decisions up front, and the looming regular season:
After tonight’s preseason finale, the Wings get a few extra days of preparation — the NHL season officially starts Tuesday — before heading to Newark, New Jersey, for the 2023-24 opener against Jack Hughes (a team-high 43 goals last season), former Wolverine Luke Hughes (a goal and three assists in five regular- and postseason games), John Hughes (“Breakfast Club,” “Pretty In Pink”) and Howard Hughes (aviation magnate behind TWA and the Spruce Goose). OK, maybe not those last two, and not Canucks defenseman Quinn Hughes, either, but still, there’s a lot of brotherly love in the Garden State. The Maple Leafs, meanwhile, will open their season Wednesday at home against Montreal, which has no Hughes brothers (as far as we know) and also no Stanley Cups in the past three decades or so.
After tonight, the Red Wings will prepare for a season where games count for points and every battle for the puck matters.
The exhibition season is a great time to build momentum, work on systems play, and practice special teams situations, but it rarely transfers to the regular season, so we should all take tonight’s result with a grain of salt.
