Morning Player Notes in the Draft (Mar 12)

With the return of Anton Stralman from illness, coming out of the Tampa Bay lineup was defenseman Matt Carle, who hasn't been a healthy scratch in a while, until last night.  Carle hasn't had a very productive year, having only 2 goals and 3 points in 51 games with the Bolts this year, ranking 692nd overall in pool scoring.

Of course, for Wes, at the beginning of the night, it didn't look very positive.  His player comes out for a player from his PIM pool rivals, Derek & Dan.  By the end of the night, nothing really happened there, so it wasn't a huge loss, but still, not a good feeling to start a game.

Late in the game between the Penguins and the Blue Jackets, Pittsburgh forward Evgeni Malkin left the game with an upper-body injury, believed to be to his shoulder, and didn't return.  As of this post, there hasn't been much of an update on his status, but with the Penguins not playing again until Sunday afternoon, away to the Rangers, they still have some time for evaluation.

More bad news for Wes, as his team dips back into 27th place this week, now 2 points below Grant for the honour and his scoring players are not keeping him afloat and getting hurt.  Don't forget, Malkin also has 65 PIM in 57 games this year, which is a reasonable contributor to his only money cause.

An early note from the morning skates around the league... the Montreal Canadiens are expecting to be without forward Lars Eller again tonight, as he is feeling under the weather.  The team announced on Friday, that they had made a couple of emergency call-ups, so there must have been some reasonable expectation ahead of time.  Since the Habs are not necessarily in the playoff race, it does give them an excuse to see a young player or two, while Eller gets back to 100% again.

Stacey M.'s team is really working hard to make it down to the bottom of the standings, having only 7 points this week and dropping down to 25th.  Her team is only 5 points from Wes' team, but has a couple more projected games to play, in theory, this week.  We'll see how that plays out.

While we're at it this morning, let's throw on an update to Winnipeg forward Nikolaj Ehlers, as the Winnipeg Jets have said that his eye injury has been keeping him away from any strenuous action and that they won't know too much more until this coming Thursday, when he has his next doctors appointment.  The expectation now is that he won't be playing again until next weekend, at the very earliest.

Ehlers' projected games had already been stricken from Scott's totals, since he was labeled as being out indefinitely, but his participation in the race for 3rd place has been greatly hampered by his absence.  In 63 games this year, the rookie has posted 31 points, so there is a decent sized hole, where his spot in the lineup is.  Scott starts Saturday, 17 points from 3rd place.

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