Toronto Maple Leafs at Detroit Red Wings: Preseason Game 8

Time: 7:00 PM EST

Location: Joe Louis Arena, Detroit, MI

Broadcast Info: TSN4

After the SuperMarlies and the MegaGriffins fought out a game last night, the Leafs and Red Wings will show down tonight with nearly their real squads.  It’s the final game of the preseason for both the Leafs and the Wings, and what we see tonight should be close to what we see from these teams to start the regular season.

Despite this afternoon’s deep cut, there are still a few players on the bubble of the Leafs’ roster.  Most prominently: Connor Brown, Peter Holland, Colin Greening, and Frank Corrado.

Holland, I think, is the most interesting issue; he’s had (so far as I can tell) an excellent preseason, but the Leafs’ roster crunch seems like it might still cost him in his job, probably to noted good citizen Brooks Laich.  If he gets into tonight’s game, I’d love to see him make that choice tougher.

Other things to watch for:

-The Gardiner-Carrick pairing has worked well on the back-end; less so Marincin-Rielly and Hunwick-Zaitsev.  Marincin-Rielly at least went decently last season, so there’s some reason for letting that play out.  But Matt Hunwick’s Toronto tenure last year was mostly as part of a miserably unsuccessful pairing with Morgan Rielly.  Mike Babcock nonetheless seems to believe Hunwick provides excellent tutelage to offensive-minded young defenders, so it looks like we’ve got that coming.  Keep an eye out for how their games integrate; hopefully our star coach has caught something not immediately obvious.

-Milan Michalek, lest ye forget, used to be a pretty damn good top-six LW, and he seems to be in reasonably good health.  If he can approximate his old game, the Leafs may actually have three legitimate scoring lines—and some deadline trade bait.

-Matt Martin, for the most part, has been playing on the fourth line.  With some of the worry he’s going to be playing up the lineup diminished, we can enjoy watching him play Matt Martin hockey and body-check people into space.

-The Red Wings are entering the post-Datsyuk era.  I can think of worse young forward groups to build around than Larkin, Tatar, Nyquist, Mantha, and Athanasiou, although as per Red Wing custom two of those guys aren’t actually young.  The Red Wings have some interesting defencemen rising, but they’re still led by the decaying Nik Kronwall and the overrated Danny DeKeyser.  Mike Green is actually here and playing pretty well, so that’s fun.  Larkin is the one to watch, though I think Zach Hyman probably spiked his production in college.

Lineups

While we await the tweeting of actual lines, Helene St. James has tweeted the lineups for tonight’s game. Josh Leivo looks like a scratch waiting to happen; no Colin Greening in sight, though he did play yesterday.

This is the last tune-up, and the Jays don’t play till tomorrow.  Enjoy the game, and go Leafs go.

Edit: Henny has line information.

Scratches (per Nafio) are Froese, Greening, Kadri, Leivo, Prust, Soshnikov, Campbell, Corrado and Polak.