Game #33: Minnesota Wild vs New York Islanders, Saturday December 17, 7:00pm (CST), Xcel Energy Center [GAME PREVIEW]

Many of us remember the classic Golden Books.  The above title was released in 1950, and while it has become one of the most requested Golden Books of all time, it is not one that I remember.  However, it was probably my mom’s favorite book as a young girl.  What she remembers most, is that the book came with actual adhesive bandages, six of them in total.  For whatever reason, kids seem to love bandages, as can be witnessed at your pharmacy with the variety of colors and cartoon characters.  Some kids will wear a bandage just to wear one, not because they’ve cut themselves.  The premise of Doctor Dan, the Bandage Man is that Dan gets a scratch on his finger, which when he goes home, his mother covers it with a bandage.  From there on out, he is fascinated by the bandages, and he then decides to act as doctor to his friends, pets, and even toys.  The book also served as a bit of clever marketing, as the bandages weren’t just any bandages, but Band-Aid brand bandages.

For the Wild, and for the Islanders as well, it feels as if they could use their own Doctor Dan.  You almost hate to go into another game, because you have to wonder who we’ll lost next.  Now injuries truly haven’t hurt us as much as they had in the past.  We’ve been lucky, because it seems that no matter who gets recalled from Houston, tends to play a decent game (or few) while we wait for the Wild injured to heal up.  One of the knocks on the Wild on their recent wave of success, is that they won’t be able to sustain that success when the injuries catch up with them.  Either the experts haven’t been paying attention or they’re simply that clueless, is that we have been dealing with considerable injuries.  With this newest batch of injuries that have claimed Mikko Koivu, Devin Setoguchi, Pierre-Marc Bouchard and Guillaume Latendresse (again), we’ll see if we can truly continue this run.  Hopefully, we follow our current history as opposed to the history of previous seasons.

With the newest batch of injuries, Minnesota has now recalled Jared Palmer from Houston.  With that call-up, everyone else will simply get shifted around.  For example, tonight’s top line with be Matt Cullen, Cal Clutterbuck and Dany Heatley.  The second line will be Darroll Powe Kyle Brodziak, and Nick Johnson.  At the start of the season, no one would have imagine such combinations.  But these are the kind of random combinations that we’ve had to come to expect.  Heck with all the injuries, I feel as if we’ve almost gone back to the constant line juggling of the Jacques Lemaire days.  Now Lemaire just juggled because it seemed he could.  Mike Yeo has been forced to juggle due to situation.  Clutterbuck made sure to point out, that our top goal-scorer is Brodziak, a usual third-line player.  While Clutterbuck is amazed with the number of injuries to forwards in our top six, he’s impressed that the team is able to still score, and get those critical from the likes of Brodziak.  The key to tonight’s game according to Yeo, will simply be to outwork our opponents, because right now they simply don’t have the better skill.

Now, if Doctor Dan the Bandage Man had some magic bandages that would heal up the team that would be wonderful.  Even more wonderful would be if those bandages would somehow protect the players.  Sadly, no such magic bandage exists, but Minnesota will simply do what it needs to do.   

Injury Report:

Minnesota:    Devin Setoguchi (leg), Mikko Koivu (lower body), Guillaume Latendresse (concussion), Justin Falk (lower body), Pierre-Marc Bouchard (broken nose), Casey Wellman (wrist) 

New York Islanders:  Mark Eaton (knee), Jay Pandolfo (foot), Rick DiPietro (groin), Andrew MacDonald (leg), Brian Rolston (concussion), Steve Staios (concussion)

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