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Leafs Blog: Pension Plan Puppets
The time has almost come! In six days the Wings face off against the Toronto Maple Leafs in their first regular season game. But before that we have one final preseason game to play.
The Wings beat the Maple Leafs 4-2 last night at Joe Louis Arena, after goals from Justin Abdelkader, Drew Miller, Henrik Zetterberg, and Brad Richards. The Wings face the Maple Leafs again tonight, this time in Toronto.
The Wings will need to finalize their roster soon and one player in particular to keep an eye on is Dylan Larkin, who continues to make a very strong case for making the Wings roster. Which means that he will almost certainly start the season in Grand Rapids (see Nyquist, Gustav).
It will also be interesting to see how Petr Mrazek, who is starting tonight, performs. My gut instinct tells me that Jimmy Howard starts game one of the regular season for the Wings, but Mrazek still has a case to make.
The Wings may also see some changes on defense from yesterday’s game, with Kyle Quincey and Jakub Kindl potentially returning to the lineup. Teemu Pulkkinen might also be ready to play. Here’s last night’s lineup (except the goalies). We’ll update with lines as soon as we know what they’ll be.
The Expected Lineups
[Updated 10:48am via tweets from Ansar Khan]
Forwards
| Tomas Jurco | Andy Miele | Teemu Pulkkinen |
| Anthony Mantha | Tomas Nosek | Luke Glendening |
| Tyler Bertuzzi | Andreas Athanasiou | Mitch Callahan |
| Dan Cleary | Joakim Andersson | Landon Ferraro |
Defensemen
| Kyle Quincey | Brendan Smith |
| Xavier Ouellet | Ryan Sproul |
| Brian Lashoff | Nick Jensen |
Goaltenders
| Petr Mrazek (starting) |
| Jake Paterson |
- Defense pairings updated at 1:10 pm. Brendan Smith didn’t practice today for “personal” reasons but will play tonight. Robbie Russo is the odd man out.
