Wild Pre-season Line-up: Game 4 (and a bunch of other stuff)

At home against Chicago (against whom we are 0-1 in the pre-season) will be, in no particular order:

Forwards: Veilleux, Brunette, Boogaard, Gillies, Kolanos, Koivu, Pouliot, Sheppard, Kalus, Gaborik, Bouchard (maybe--he's still day to day) Clutterbuck, Miettinen

Defensemen: Skoula, Schultz, Scott, Cuma, Mojzis, Bergeron

Goalies: Backstrom, Harding

Doubt I'll get to listen to it, but I'll update later with any significant happenings. Excited for Cuma to have another game. And sort of amused that they keep hoping Scotty will turn into Chara. Hey, you never know, I guess. Better to roll the dice in pre-season than when it counts.

Updated with the news this morning of Cal filling in for Butch. Huzzah!

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Found out tonight that this Sunday's novice league game will be against one of the the Sugar Land Novice league teams. Our red team will travel to Sugar Land to play against them at their rink, and my green team will play their other team at Willowbrook. I'm excited. It should be good fun to play against a new group.

I feel sure we'll whip them because we actually have quite a few ringers on our team. I mean, they really do play novice, but they could easily play C or B league if they wanted to. But we need them because if we only played with true novice players, I'm not sure we'd get better as quickly as we can playing with good players.

It's big hockey for the next couple of weeks: I'm going to try and steal away during lunch Friday for a bit of a skate on the other rink at the Aeros practice facility, and catch the boys practicing a bit, if I can. Then Friday night is the pre-season game. Then Sunday is this novice "championship" (not sure if we're playing for first or third place). Then Saturday is the Toyota Center game and then the Aeros game that night, as well as the first Wild game that night.

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I've fully updated the Aeros TC Roster post with info about each of the tryout players who will be in camp. At least, the ones I know about so far. An interesting assortment of guys. I bet there will be a gem or two in the mix, like Rosa and Awe were last year. Just good, hard-working guys who manage to hustle their way out of the ECHL.

In case it's not painfully obvious, I so miss the boys and cannot wait for Friday to see them on the ice again. Seems like only yesterday was my birthday with the boys losing out of the playoffs (to no one's surprise, unfortunately). I think it's going to be a good year if they can get the chemistry going sooner than later.