Morning skate notebook: Grubauer starts, while most players take the option

An optional skate this morning here at the Pepsi Center, and probably more than half the team decided to skip going on the ice.

Hey, no big deal to me, these guys are pros and a 25-minute twirl around the ice isn’t going to magically instill in them things they can’t already do. But with a bunch of new lines being formed for tonight’s game, against the defending Stanley Cup champions?

Yeah, I guess I would have thought they’d have wanted to be together as much as they could, to form as much line  chemistry as possible. And, of course, this team has lost four straight at home. Maybe the rest will be just the tonic some of these guys needed though, we’ll find out starting tonight at 7:30.

Philipp Grubauer will get the start in goal. He has not won a game in about a month, so tonight would be an ideal time to get one. This team needs a win (thank you Captain Obvious), but especially Grubauer needs one, or else he’s going to start facing questions of “Is he really No. 1 material?” That’s the way this business works.

Here, again, are the new lines:

Landeskog-MacKinnon-Donskoi

Calvert-Kadri-Nichushkin

Nieto-Compher-Rantanen

Jost-Bellemare-Burakovsky

See you tonight