Red Wings @ Oilers Preview; Smid on LW

This is Steve Staios as a Vancouver Canuck. He is seen playing RW here. The Oilers will be hosting the Red Wings tonight. Full preview here and here.

-------------------------------------------

Besides Strudwick, Staios' main D-partner has been Ladislav Smid, who happens to be playing on LW tonight against the Red Wings. Out of all the D-men, Staios has the most experience at the F-position. MacBlender has played with the D-man @ F-position idea before, suggesting Souray and Staios among others.

And he has played them there before. Staios (RW/D) a few times. MacIntyre (LW/D) the entire time.

Smid is among the defenseman more prone to rush the puck and keep it in the opposition zone. He hasn't done it often enough to get consistent results from doing it, but we will see what chemistry he has with it tonight. According to the Oilers web site, he hasn't done it since he was in grade 3. Not along history of success.

Now, the Oilers ripped up the Columbus Blue Jackets on Tuesday with 7 goals on 19 shots. The Red Wings will most certainly outshoot the Oilers in much the same fashion as on Monday and as the Blue Jackets did on Tuesday and one wonders what kind of affect this will have on the team chemistry by moving Smid up.

There is also the possibility that the Columbus win was a fluke, considering Leclaire just returned from a high ankle sprain. But the Oilers have a chance tonight to (A) prove it wasn't a fluke and (B) get redemption for the Conklin shutout loss.

Here is the perceived lineup from comments on the Oilers web site:

Moreau-Gagner-Hemsky
Penner-Horcoff-Cole
Nilsson-Cogliano-Stortini
Smid-Brodziak-Pouliot

Souray-Visnovsky
Gilbert-Grebeshkov
Strudwick-Staios
(with short instances of 37-71 and 77-44)

Dwayne Roloson *starts
Mathieu Garon

Liam Reddox is a healthy scratch. Which makes me wonder why he isn't playing on the wing instead of Smid, but I guess MacT thinks Smid brings more spunk than Reddox. Whether that spunk will be useful, we will see.

Expect Penner to have a huge game.

I will be Live with hockey master-statistician Suneil Parmar of Addicted to Oil and we might meet up with hockey journalist-philosopher David Staples of Cult of Hockey.

See you there.

GOILERS!