When Detroit got shut out at the hands of Pekka Rinne and the Nashville Predators on Saturday, Tomas Holmstrom wasn’t there to park his rear end in front of the Music City goaltender.
Tonight, Rinne will have that problem.
Holmstrom is a go for tonight’s game against Nashville, making his first appearance since breaking his hand in early January. However, Detroit will be missing center Valtteri Filppula for at least a week after he sprained his MCL on a hit by New York’s Brandon Dubinsky on Monday.
The Red Wings really haven’t been themselves since players started dropping like flies, a point that head coach Mike Babcock commented on:
"We’d like to have all hands on deck," said Wings coach Mike Babcock. "We’d like to find out what kind of hockey team we really have. We’re playing Nashville tonight and they don’t have guys (healthy). That’s just the way the league is. We’ve got to find a way to keep getting better."
The Red Wings won’t call up anyone to replace Filppula since Holmstrom is coming back. But while the team said he’ll miss up to three games (one week), sprained MCL’s can be tricky. Last season, defenseman Niklas Kronwall sprained his MCL on a hit by Montreal’s Georges Laraque and missed 34 games as a result.
Hopefully this isn’t one of those cases, as the Dubinsky hit wasn’t nearly as vicious (or dirty, for that matter) as the Laraque hit on Kronwall.