Red Wings, Avalanche announce initial Alumni Game rosters

As the Stadium Series showdown against the Colorado Avalanche gets closer and closer to puck drop, the two teams have announced a small sample of the rosters that will be showing up for the Alumni Game on February 26th.

Confirmed to be dressing for the Red Wings are Doug Brown, Dino Ciccarelli, Kris Draper, Steve Duchesne, Jiri Fisher, Tomas Holmstrom, Joe Kocur, Martin Lapointe, Nicklas Lidstrom, Kirk Maltby, and Larry Murphy. The initial Avalanche roster is a little bit bigger, featuring Craig Billington, Rob Blake, Ray Bourque, Adam Foote, Peter Forsberg, Claude Lemieux, Curtis Leschyshyn, Sandis Ozolinsh, Mike Ricci, Patrick Roy, Joe Sakic, Chris Simon, and Stephane Yelle. Adam Deadmarsh will join the team from the bench.

Obviously, both sides are expected to add more players to their roster, though I doubt that the Wings will bring as many former players with them as they did when they faced the Toronto Maple Leafs in the 2014 Winter Classic. That year, the two sides needed two separate games to fit their rosters, which in Detroit’s case, featured 26 forwards, 12 defencemen, and four goaltenders.

Scheduling could get in the way as well. Steve Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov are two glaringly obvious absences from this roster, for example, but the both run the risk of being busy with General Manager duties for their respective teams (the Tampa Bay Lightning for Yzerman and the KHL’s CSKA Moscow for Fedorov). 

Unsurprisingly, the games are expected to be played by the book; three twenty minute periods of action. With many of the players expected to be from the 90’s and early 2000’s rosters that infuriated each other so much, expect the two sides to take this game very seriously; Colorado’s Patrick Roy, for example, has already been practicing after finishing drills with the present Avalanche as head coach.