Iafallo, “week-to-week for now,” returns home for evaluation - Tuesday morning skate updates
# Iafallo, “week-to-week for now,” returns home for evaluation - Tuesday morning skate updates
# Contributors
# Summary
Notes from the second half of the Detroit-Nashville back-to-back
# Players
# Staff
# Notes and Quotes
# Todd McLellan
We’re trying hard right now as a group to find our games within our team game,” McLellan answered. “Individually, collectively as lines, we don’t want to throw a lot into the blender. I think then you’re starting all over again. Our lines will stay pretty much intact. I’ll look at filling that Iafallo spot with somebody else, whether it’s Arthur or Grunny or Lemieux or somebody like that, and we’ll make that decision and then go from there. There are always the opportunity for in-game adjustments if it’s not going well.
I think it takes a few regular season for non-injured players to find their games, so you can imagine what it’s like for Arvy coming off of back surgery, Sean Walker, who hasn’t played hockey in a year. Those are tough situations. Now, every team has one or two of those guys, for whatever reason, and the quicker we can get ours up and running I think it can be an advantage. If we don’t get them going quickly, it’ll be a disadvantage.
They buzzed, they created opportunities not only for themselves, but they handed off a real good shift to lines one and two.
We didn’t win the first two while we were doing that, we won the next two, so that’s a really good sign. Offensively we’ve been able to capitalize on some of our chances, which always for our team hasn’t been an easy thing, but there are still areas to improve on.
If you can stay out of the box, then you do yourself a favor. Goaltending in back-to-back games is huge. It’s the backbone of playing, especially early in the year. Other than that, it’s an old cliché, but you need everybody, especially early when your body and your mind may not be used to it.