The Caps just wrapped up the morning skate at Wachovia Center. Because the Flyers skated in Voorhees, N.J., they went an hour earlier than normal. It was a light skate and the mood was pretty loose.
There are new lines to report. Eric Fehr will replace Tomas Fleischmann in the active lineup, but will skate on the fourth line. Brooks Laich moves up to the second line, Matt Bradley moves up to the third and Matt Cooke slides down to the third unit.
Ovechkin-Backstrom-Kozlov (red)
Laich-Fedorov-Semin (grey)
Cooke-Gordon-Bradley (green)
Brashear-Steckel-Fehr (white)
Fleischmann-Laing-Clark (in orange)
The 'D' pairings will remain the same, and Cristobal Huet will be in net. Fehr will also replace Fleischmann on the second power-play unit.
"Bigger and stronger, pretty well that's it," Bruce Boudreau said of the decision to insert Fehr and take out Fleischmann. "They are a pretty physical team. [Fehr] is pretty strong and pretty good along the boards."
The Caps signed Francois Bouchard to three-year entry-level contract today. He has already been playing with Hershey on an ATO deal and has a goal in four games. A second-round pick in the 2006 draft, Bouchard led the QMJHL with 125 points last season in 68 games, but his production slipped to 92 points in the same number of contests this year for Baie-Comeau.
"Sometimes you have a different makeup of the team, sometimes the team isn't as good," Caps general manager George McPhee said Bouchard's statistical decline. "We're not concerned about that. He's shown he can do it."
Mathieu Perreault, another member of that draft class who also excelled in the "Q" will join Bouchard and the Bears today after his Acadie-Bathurst squad was knocked out in the second round. Perreault, a sixth-rounder in '06 who led the league with 114 points this season, signed his entry-level deal late last month. Maxime Lacroix, a fifth-round pick in that same draft from the Quebec Ramparts, is expected to sign an ATO with Hershey as well. Lacroix had 62 points in 67 games for the Ramparts this season.
There was also some interesting reactions in the room to the new rule enacted yesterday, which will be forever known as the Sean Avery Rule. After Avery's antics against the Devils on Sunday, the NHL quickly moved to make any sort of sillyness like this illegal.
Bruce Boudreau said he actually asked players to do something similar a couple of years ago when he was coaching the Bears.
"I thought it would be a great way to [make them] defend and to score goals 5-on-3," Boudreau said, "I wanted to put a guy to do that, but no one had the, the [long pause] to do it. And Avery did it. There was never a rule there. Any loophole anybody finds, they're going to try to do it. I don't think it was morally right, but he did and got away with it."
Avery is quite the unpopular guy around the league (and with his own teammates, according to some) so negative reactions to his actions aren't hard to come by.
"It was within the rules, but it made the game look silly," Chris Clark said. "You can do it. Well, you can't do it now, but it makes a mockery of things."
Added Matt Cooke: "Yeah I saw it. He's got everyone talking about him, which is what he wants. You guys are all pawns in the chess game, and that's all I'll say about that."
Finally, Clark said he felt "the same." When told "the same" doesn't play well in the newspaper he said, "Yeah, I know. You've got to creatively write same."
