Updates
Per head coach Don Granato, Owen Power and Jacob Bryson will play tonight. #LetsGoBuffalo
— Buffalo Sabres (@BuffaloSabres) December 29, 2022
In case you’ve forgotten, the Sabres are riding a four-game winning streak into tonight’s game. It’s their first game in 10 days. Today was their first practice in a week.
— Joe Yerdon (@JoeYerdon) December 29, 2022
Red Wings Lines
Michael Rasmussen – Dylan Larkin – David Perron
Adam Erne – Andrew Copp – Lucas Raymond
Dominik Kubalik – Pius Suter – Oskar Sundqvist
Jonatan Berggren – Joe Veleno – Elmer Soderblom
Ben Chiarot – Mortiz Seider
Jake Walman – Filip Hronek
Olli Maatta – Jordan Oesterle
Magnus Hellberg
Ville Husso
Sabres Lines
Jeff Skinner – Tage Thompson – Alex Tuch
J.J. Peterka – Dylan Cozens – Jack Quinn
Casey Middelstadt – Tyson Jost – Victor Olofsson
Zemgus Girgensons – Peyton Krebs – Kyle Okposo
Mattias Samuelsson – Rasmus Dahlin
Kale Clague – Owen Power
Jacob Bryson – Ilya Lyubushkin
Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen
Craig Anderson
Three Keys to the Game
Now that’s some moxie! News flash: if the Wings went down 4-0 two seasons ago, they’d be dead in the water. Last season, it would have been only nominally better. This season, you can’t count the Red Wings out of a game. Whatever word you want to use, whether it be moxie, swagger, pluck, or whatever, it’s something they didn’t have in the past. Let it buoy you on tonight, Wings.
Keep passing like stormtroopers shooting a sand crawler. Did you see some of those passes last night? Did you see Ras’s pass to Perron for the game-tying goal late in the third? Maybe I’m jinxing Detroit because of the comparison to a line from Star Wars that is then contradicted by every single stormtrooper in the entire trilogy, but those passes were SO good. Keep it up.
Similarly, keep yo-yoing the puck in the zone! A lot of Detroit’s success against Pittsburgh came from them successfully getting the puck in deep, then pulling it back out to the perimeter and passing laterally to pull apart to Penguins’ defensive play. Hopefully that sort of puck mobility can work again tonight against the Sabres.
