Justin Fontaine likely to debut Friday; Lineup shuffle in the works

The Wild had a long, workmanlike practice today at Xcel Energy Center and is about to take off from MSP for Orange County, where it will spend the next few days prior to Friday's game at Anaheim.

Good afternoon from MSP myself. The team will have an off-ice workout Wednesday, a golf outing and team dinner before ramping back up at practice Thurday in Anaheim.

Justin Fontaine looks like he will make his season debut Friday night on the right side of the Thomas Vanek-Mikko Koivu line.

Coach Mike Yeo is looking to keep his real quality Nos. 1 and 3 lines intact, especially that solid Nino Niederreiter-Erik Haula-Charlie Coyle line. Ryan Carter said today that line reminds him of a certain Anaheim young line that helped lead the Ducks to a Cup in 2007. The names on that line -- Ryan Getzlaf, Corey Perry and Dustin Penner -- became eventual stars (at least two of them), and that's not what Carter's saying. He's saying the makeup, the role and the age is very similar.

Carter centered the fourth line today with Jason Zucker and Matt Cooke. Kyle Brodziak was switching in and out.

I think Carter will indeed center that line Friday and Yeo talked more today about just how much Carter knows his role and is playing it well.

Last week, I mentioned how I thought Fontaine would slide into the second line because the best that line has looked so far came with Fontaine there in training camp and the Pittsburgh exhibition game.

Fontaine also played the No. 2 power play with those two in practice instead of Niederreiter or Coyle. Yeo said that may not be a full-time thing, that he wanted to give them more time to skate together.

BUT, it sure sounds like that's what he's thinking to start.

"We're trying to find the right mix there," Yeo said. "I wanted to give him a good opportunity to go in practice today. Both those guys – Nino and Charlie – had a chance to factor in on the power play, but I grabbed them before that I wanted them to really have a good focus on their penalty killing today. Nino's really been doing a great job and I've been using him a lot and Charlie, I would like to get him more involved in it as well. It's not just a power-play practice when we're working that stuff. We're working our penalty kill too and I just like that we're much closer to a place where our penalty killers are penalty killers and our power-play guys are power-play guys. There's not much crossover. The guys that go out on the penalty kill, that's their baby and they have pride in that, and I think we've seen that so far and likewise on the power play."

Keith Ballard was paired with Matt Dumba today and Nate Prosser played the left alongside Christian Folin. Folin had been playing the left, but that's really not fair to a young guy to put him on his off side when he's rarely done it before. The irony is Prosser in previous years was always the healthy scratch when the Wild needed a left-shot D because Yeo didn't feel he could play that side.

Regardless, it's pretty clear the plan is for Ballard and Dumba to play one game together this weekend and Prosser and Folin the other. Subject to change, of course, but the Wild doesn't want its extra D sitting around for three weeks not playing and when the two rookies played together in Denver, they only logged 9 and 10 minutes, respectively.

BUT, Yeo said, "When I talked about trying to get everybody in, [Backstrom's] part of that equation too. It's too early to predict what's going to happen right now. We were considering heavily putting him in last weekend, but Kuemps really didn't give us a chance. Just going forward here, we are very conscious of trying to get him in. The schedule's pretty light right now, but there will be a time where it will pick up and we're going to need both goaltenders going and we just have to make sure he's prepared for that."

Stu Bickel cleared waivers and was assigned to Iowa.

Also, if you remember back at the draft, Richard Park interviewed with GM Chuck Fletcher for a player development role. In almost a tryout basis, Park then worked development camp as a coach. Today, in a move that was coming for some time, Park was officially hired as a player development coach to work in Iowa.