Observations From The Morning Skate

I took you on a look into the numbers in the post below. But I thought I would share some of the info I got from this morning's skate.

As Heather already posted, Barry Brust and Nolan Schaefer are pretty much being counted out for the playoffs. I was a bit surprised to hear that from Kevin Constantine, as Schaefer has supposedly been on the brink of returning to action since the San Antonio series to end the season. But Constantine said that the rehab for his lower body injury isn't progressing as planned, and that no one is more frustrated by this than Schaefer. Barry Brust is battling a broken foot, and he's pretty much out for the length of the playoffs, but if something should happen, he's the closest one to a full recovery.

So that pretty much means that the Aeros will be going with Anton Khudobin for the rest of the playoffs. Constantine says he pulled Khudobin on Saturday night to basically give him a rest, and because he just had this feeling that the team wasn't going to pull off one of its comebacks.

"Anton had played pretty good, and he’d made some great saves early to keep us in the game," Constantine said. "It wasn’t a thing of Anton being bad, it was a thing of, well, he’s played every game for us, let’s give him a breather and let him come back."

Jesse Schultz, meanwhile, is skating, but not with the team. He's able to get on the ice and move around a bit, but he can't place too much pressure on the ankle and he obviously has difficulties with the sudden movements a hockey player has to make on his ankle. I didn't see Schultz while I was at Toyota Center this morning, so I couldn't check with him, but Constantine implied that it would pretty much take a miracle for Schultz to make it back for this series.

"He’s trying to work his way back," Constantine said of Schultz. "You never say never, but we just don’t feel at this point that he’s close to making his way back."

I can't really say much about Paul Albers's injury. I saw him on the ice with the rest of the team this morning, and he appeared to be fully participating in all of the drills. If he was in any kind of pain, it didn't show. Of course, he could end up being a game time decision.

The rookies, J.P. Testwuide and Marco Scandella, are getting playing time because of Albers injury. Testwuide had been working with the forwards in practice, so when Albers was injured, Constantine thought of putting him in at his natural position, but chose to stick with him at forward for because he brings a little added size up front and put Scandella in at Albers spot instead.

Constantine thinks the key to tonight's game is the team worrying less about what Milwaukee's doing, and concentrating more on making their plays. He was happy with their play last Thursday, but much less so with Saturday's play. So I look for the team to play more like Game One when they seemed more concerned with pressing the action and forcing Milwaukee to react to them, than like they were on Saturday, when they seemed to be more reactive to what was happening.

*******************
I also took a little time to talk to the newest Aeros goalie, Matt Climie. Climie says that he is "ready, and I’m just waiting for the opportunity to go in and prove myself." He knows that his job at the moment is to sit on the bench and stay prepared for sudden action, and he says he's got a game plan for dealing with that.

"I just try to keep loose," he says. "I don’t place a lot of emphasis on preparing mentally. Where as a lot of guys spend two hours visualizing and thinking about making saves. I just try to stay loose and have fun with it. And then when there’s a chance to go in the net, I focus and regroup quickly because you get thrown in there, and it doesn’t take long to focus. I just try to make the saves."

*******************
And for those of you who Kevin Constantine talking about the flipper play between periods on Saturday night, I got an explanation. And it's just as it sounds. One of the guys at the far end of the ice flips the puck high in the air toward the other side in hopes that one his teammates will be able to get under the puck and take it in for the goal.