Of Red Wings and Blue Jackets-related note ahead of the teams’ match-up tonight at Little Caesars Arena (7:30 PM EDT on Bally Sports Detroit/Bally Sports Ohio/97.1 FM), subsequent to the game-day skate and the post-skate media availabilities (videos of coach Jeff Blashill and Pius Suter included):
- MLive’s Ansar Khan posted a varied notebook which discussses Thomas Greiss, Moritz Seider’s ups and downs, Marc Staal’s status, and the atmosphere at Little Caesars Arena now that fans are back in the stands:
[Red Wings coach Jeff] Blashill noted that the atmosphere at LCA the first two games has been as charged as it has been since the building opened four years ago.
“I think the atmosphere has been great. Both games were highly emotional, which is a positive,” Blashill said. “We want to play with lots of compete, lots of emotion. The crowds have been awesome. It’s a loud building. It’s been a while since we had that (due to COVID restrictions last season). The first game in this building (in 2017), we didn’t have enough people in the seats. There were lots of people here, but they were either in the club level eating or checking out how beautiful the arena is. Now everybody is in the seats, and it just seems really, really loud.”
A loud building can provide a home-ice advantage.
“Playing at the highest level of compete and emotion every night is not easy for 82 games and most teams can’t do it,” Blashill said. “It can be a separator if we can do it on a night-to-night basis. We’re looking for every way we can to separate ourselves from other teams, and this is one way.”
2. ColumbusBlueJackets.com’s Jeff Svoboda posted a game-day update which includes the following:
Continue reading Red Wings-Blue Jackets game-day notebooks: On the atmosphere at LCA, and Blue Jackets notes