Morning Skate: Red Wings at Maple Leafs

7:00p ET, Air Canada Centre

Toronto, ON

TV: FS-D, TVAS

Radio: 97.1 The Ticket/1270 AM

Leafs Blog: Pension Plan Puppets

Plenty of familiar faces will be on hand in Toronto. It’s Hall of Fame weekend and it’s filled with Red Wings. Off the ice, Nicklas Lidstrom and Sergei Fedorov will be inducted into the Hall this weekend. On the ice, well, near the ice, Mike Babcock will be on the bench coaching against his former team once more. Eventually, we’ll move on past the whole battle versus the former coach thing, but right now, it’s still early in the season and worth mentioning.

Last time these two teams met, the Wings cleaned up winning 4-0 on opening night. Justin Abdelkader got all of us curly fries thanks to his hat trick. Since then, the Wings have been inconsistent and the Leafs… have been the Leafs. They’re better thanks to Babcock, but, as expected, still near the bottom of the league in the standings.

Speaking of the standings, the Wings find themselves tied with Boston, Florida and New Jersey at 13 points and the final Wild Card spot. It’s not quite American Thanksgiving yet, so the standings aren’t super crucial at the moment, but it wouldn’t hurt for the Wings to pick up a 3rd straight win and get closer to the top of the Atlantic division.

Reinforcements may be on the way to help the Wings do just that. Mike Green’s availability will be determined after the actual morning skate. Green alternated in practice yesterday with Alexey Marchenko. Hopefully that was just a practice thing. If Green comes back, I wouldn’t mind seeing him back with Danny DeKeyser and maybe move Jonathan Ericsson down to the 3rd pair with Marchenko. I’d scratch Jakub Kindl, but sadly, while I may share a first name with Jeff Blashill, that doesn’t give me the power to make lineup decisions (however, it should). We’ll make sure the lineups are updated later today.

As far as the forwards go, Tomas Jurco rotated in on the 3rd line in practice. In a perfect world, he’d replace Joakim Andersson on the left wing. Again, it’s not a perfect world and I don’t get to make the lineup decisions. Regardless of who gets in the game, let’s hope the team is still motivated to kick Babcock’s ass once again. Can’t waste the opportunity to take 2 points from a bad team.

Detroit’s Expected Lineup

Forwards

Defensemen

Goaltenders

Scratches: Tomas Jurco

Injuries: Mike Green (maybe), Pavel Datsyuk, Kyle Quincey, Brad Richards, Johan Franzen

Toronto’s Expected Lineup

Forwards

Defensemen

Goaltenders

Injuries: Jonathan Bernier (lower body), Stephane Robidas (knee), Scott Harrington (upper body)

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Game Day Prediction Contest

Would you like to predict the outcome of the game and potentially become internet famous? Well you’re in luck, because here’s your opportunity. Here’s how it works.

Make your game predictions on the winning team, final score, and who the Wings player of the game will be. Enter the required information into the form below using the formats indicated in the questions. If you don’t use those formats, your answers will be disregarded. All submissions are timestamped and will be accepted only until the official game start time. All other submissions after that will be disregarded. Only one submission per person, please. POTG will be determined by the collective of WiiM writers.

Each correct winning team prediction is worth 1 point. Each correct player of the game prediction is worth 2 points. Each correct final score prediction is worth 5 points. If you get all three correct you’ll receive 15 points.