Weather cold enough to merit long sleeves and fuzzy things and early morning hockey practices. Maybe it’s my latent hockey-mom genes coming out or something, but I like watching practices almost more than I like watching games.

Courtesy of Pennlive, today’s practice lines:
Red: Giroux-Morin-Mink
Grey: Dubuc-Wilson-Gordon
Blue: Osala-Perreault-Bouchard
White: Lacroix-Joudrey-Reid
Light Blue: Pinizzotto-Boudreau-Maxwell/Corey

D-pairs:
Amadio-Helmer
Arsene-Godfrey
Pokulok-Dovgan
McNeill-Collins

Beagle was also there as a non-contact, and listed as a lower body injury. From what I could see him favoring/fiddling with, my guess is it’s a left knee/left ankle issue. Get better, Fluffy!

Impressions from today were very positive towards Collins and Mink, and still horribly horribly abusive towards Pokulok. Deano is looking 100% better than he was even halfway through last year, and I think between him and Grant McNeill we’ll have enough chippy-ish muscle to keep the little guys from getting pummeled. It’s such great fun to watch him butt-check people.

Other highlights of practice:
* Andrew Gordon completely losing his footing during a drill and starting to laugh so hard he had trouble getting back up.

* The entire team trying to negotiate the number of one drill down from 10, and then turning on Deano when he offered to do 7 instead of 5.

* Mink and Deano play-fighting, with Mink getting up and doing the Louie dance afterwards. (The girl to my right objected vociferously to this. Frankly, I have more faith in Mink’s ability to play, shoot, and take penalties only when needed than I ever did in Louie, so he can do the dance if he wants.)

* The entire team cheering when someone scored on Neuvrith. It looked like some good natured new-kid hazing, and Neuvrith seemed more or less okay with it, even though he got run into more than the Cheez did.

* Beagle working his Grant McNeill/Michael Nylander puck handling skills over in a corner by himself. Of course, this is after my camera battery decided to crap out, so you’ll have to take my word for it.

* My complete inability to decide whether Kyle Wilson was Kyle Wilson or Jeff Schultz.

On the heels of the OFB articles on the old Arena as well, I bring you a few different shots from inside that are wallpaper quality/size:

All are this angle, but there are different things going on on the ice. Take your pick.

Tomorrow’s practice is in Giant Center, so regretfully, we’ll be back to the shiny new plushy seats and all the geegaws and whistles that everyone’s so used to. AAAAND I’ll be taking my backup camera battery.