Ralph Krueger shuffles his lines; VandeVelde recalled

The New Lines

Thoughts

• The first thing to keep in mind: Friday’s opponent is Detroit, which means that the Oilers needed to have two strong lines to match up against the Datsyuk and Zetterberg lines. In a lot of ways, this rotation to me looks like a way to spread out the wealth for road games against teams with a deep group of forwards.
• Obviously, if Sam Gagner and Ales Hemsky are expected to perform in a power-vs.-power role, they weren’t going to do it with Yakupov. Taylor Hall is a more rounded player and at this stage of his career certainly a far superior possession player than the Russian rookie. Moving Hall to that line makes it much more difficult to play against.
• Hartikainen joining Nugent-Hopkins and Eberle is something that’s been talked about for quite some time; he adds size to that line but more importantly he’s going to be a good fit in the offensive zone. This is a line that’s likely still going to face relatively tough competition – especially against Detroit – and it will be interesting to see how they handle it, particularly given that Nugent-Hopkins is likely less than 100%. I’ll also be curious to see how often Yakupov gets spotted in place of Hartikainen on this line.
• I’m also curious to see whether the third or fourth line gets more ice-time against the Wings. Despite the fact that Yakupov’s on the nominal fourth line, I’d be surprised if the two units weren’t used roughly the same amount – Eager’s just coming off a concussion and Smyth is playing centre, so that third line is less than ideal; on the other hand, VandeVelde is likely to initially slot in for Belanger on line four.
• With special teams taken into account, I imagine the Oilers’ top two lines get roughly the same amount of ice-time (with Hall leading the way) because I expect we’ll see Nugent-Hopkins, Eberle, and Hartikainen still forming the core of the first power play unit. For that matter, Yakupov’s bound to continue to see time on the power play, too.
• Looks like Smyth/Petrell and VandeVelde/Paajarvi are the natural primary penalty-killing pairings up front. 

Update

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