Wild's anticipated opening night lineup; Mike Yeo on today's roster decisions

Following today's moves to send Jason Zucker and Jake Dowell to Iowa, here is the Wild's anticipated 22-man opening roster and lineup Thursday night vs. Los Angeles (this is barring transactions; the fact the Wild sent Jake Dowell down, too, opens the door to perhaps a waiver pickup Monday):

Forwards

Zach Parise-Mikko Koivu-Jason Pominville

Nino Niederreiter-Charlie Coyle-Dany Heatley

Matt Cooke-Kyle Brodziak-Mikael Granlund

Justin Fontaine-Zenon Konopka-Torrey Mitchell

Injured: Mike Rupp (knee)

Ryan Suter-Jonas Brodin

Marco Scandella-Jared Spurgeon

Keith Ballard-Matt Dumba

Extras: Clayton Stoner, Nate Prosser

Goalies

Josh Harding

Fontaine will make his NHL debut; Yeo said there's a good chance of Dumba as well.

Fontaine is very excited to make the team, and both Fontaine and Dumba say they're not taking anything for granted. They know nothing is cemented in stone. Dumba said he's well aware he can still be returned to Red Deer before he plays in a 10th game without the first year of his contract being burned.

Zucker tweeted: @Jason_Zucker16: Nobody to blame but myself.. Have to be better and will be better! See you soon Minnesota! #JustWait #MNWild

As for Zucker, I'm shocked at frankly the shock out there. It's been clear the last four days that he was on thin ice. He got hurt at the wrong time in camp and was outperformed by Nino Niederreiter for the second-line left wing spot -- for now. He can be back at anytime.

Again though, he will play games here this season. He's 21 years old. The AHL is a developmental league and most the great players in this league have played in the AHL. He hasn't even had to spend a full year in the minors (55 games), so chill.

Here are Mike Yeo's thoughts on today's moves, particularly sending Zucker down:

Zucker conversation: Obviously everybody's goal is to be here, so you'd be pretty concerned if a player was happy or didn't show some disappointment. As far as Zuck, it really comes down to we're not prepared to put him on the fourth line right now and we're not prepared to have him be a healthy scratch. What you saw on the ice today was us gearing up for Game 1 and we're really not focused on anything beyond that.

Nino and Granlund: He earned it, as far as I'm concerned, the games that he played. We like what he can add to the [Coyle-Heatley line]. Playing against a team like L.A., we've got a bigger body. You've got a guy that can shoot, a guy that can skate, a guy that can handle the puck. He played like a top-6 forward in training camp and we're giving him that opportunity up there. Granny had a good camp, too. We spent the entire camp really looking at him as a centerman. We feel we can get a lot out of him as a winger, too. He had a good camp. He showed that he's battled harder, he's showed that he's faster, defensively he did a very good job for us, and we feel he can be a good complement to the [Cooke-Brodziak] line. You have two guys with size and two guys that play a strong, hard game, so we feel putting a guy there with Granny's ability to distribute the puck, it could complement that line plus give Granny a bigger role.

Message to Zucker: Just make sure you're on top of his game because we don't know when it's going to be. We know that he's there and to be perfectly honest, I like the idea that everybody on our team knows that he's there. It shouldn't be too difficult to make sure that you're ready to go knowing that there's a guy like that waiting in the wings.

Interchangeable parts: Or Granny can go up, or Granny can play center. It even gives us some flexibility even in the game. Having Granny in the lineup is also big for our power play. It gives us flexibility through the course of the game and night to night to throw out different look.

Dowell: The message was pretty clear. We're being honest with it that our focus is sort of for this game -- getting ready for this week and then thing can change in hurry.

Not carrying an extra forward to save salary cap/proximity of Iowa: But also it doesn't help anybody to sit around and not play. So it's just a matter of Iowa is close and they're playing the same game, the same system, so let's just concentrate on the group that we're going in with. So to have anybody up here who's not going to play and just sit around and be an extra, it doesn't help the guys that are in the lineup and it doesn't help them.

Dumba NHL debut Thursday: I would say there's a good chance of that.

How will you use him: Again, this is a game one focus for us with this group. With the amount of young guys that we have, I think it just has to be something that we stay on top of night after night.

What do you want to accomplish the next four days: Well, bigger picture things. Obviously there's tactical parts that we want to get into. We've got the team building trip which will be nice. Bottom line is our main focus is on pace, making sure that we're doing things at game speed, the speed that we want to play games at when we drop the puck on Thursday. Number two is the competitiveness. You saw a lot of battle in our practice today. Number three would be the detail and the habits. And number four would be the execution -- just making sure that we're sharp and crisp and we have a good feeling going into game one.

How fluid will the lineup be: Most of the time, you're not making a lot of changes to your lineup when things are going really well. So I hope that we play 82 in a row with the same lineup (laughing). But I don't think that that's going to happen. And even at that, we won't be afraid to change the lineup if we win. We won't be afraid to change the lineup if we lose because we've got moving parts. Because we've got guys that are capable of playing different positions and guys that are capable of pushing. So I think that's going to be interesting following the story line of that as things go on. Again, we don't know what it's going to look like in Game 5. We know what it will look like in Game 1.