First, on Dennis Cholowski: Wings Nation lost it’s collective mind this week when Cholowski was a healthy scratch on his own bobble head night and then sent down to Grand Rapids. With the trade deadline quickly approaching though, there’s a good chance he’s back up in a week’s time. Cholowski has had an impressive season that nobody expected. If you could go back through Twitter time, you’d see how everyone expected him to be in Grand Rapids all season with Filip Hronek being a frequent call-up. He was better than anyone thought and he earned a roster spot, but he’s had a real tough go as of late. Dominating the AHL won’t be a bad thing for him. This is going to be such a small blip on Cholowski’s career that nobody is going to remember in three years, five years, or even next year. The team isn’t going to win this year anyways. Take a breath. Everything is going to be okay for Dennis Cholowski.

Now, onto the game at hand. The red hot Philadelphia Flyers are playing host to the Red Wings in a matinee game that’s the first half of their home-and-home taking place today and tomorrow.

With today’s 1:00 P.M. start, we won’t be getting any updated lines, but Tyler Bertuzzi is expected to be back. Expect him to slot in somewhere in top-6 and for Christoffer Ehn to come out of the lineup. Bert’s been out with an upper-body injury since the All-Star Break.

The top line of Nyquist-Larkin-Mantha has been pretty good. It’s nice to see Big Mo getting time with some good players and thriving. Him and Larkin connected on a beauty goal for Andreas Athanasiou against the Senators on Thursday.

There’s not much to discuss outside of that. The D-corps is the D-corps. They are going to have their hands full with the Flyers top line, but hopefully if they play good enough Holland can convince a team to take one of them at the upcoming trade deadline.

After spending some time in the basement of the standings, the Flyers have gone on an impressive run. They’ve won 11 of their last 13, stringing together an eight game winning streak through the end of January. Though the wins have mostly come on the back of Carter Hart, Sean Couturier has led the offensive charge with 9 goals and 19 points. He’s received support from the trio of James van Riemsdyk (9G, 5A), Jakub Voracek (3G, 11A), and Claude Giroux (3G, 11A).

It may be too little too late for the Flyers, but another moderate winning streak could bring them close enough to make it interesting. At the time of this writing, they are still eight points out of the second wild card spot.

Jimmy Howard vs. Carter Hart

We’re likely going to see all four goalies in action this weekend, including the newly acquired Cam Talbot for the Flyers. Today, though, Howard will lead the Wings in the first half of their back-to-back in an effort to extend their winning streak to three games.

In the Flyers end, Carter Hart has proved everybody wrong about his readiness to play in the NHL. Since his call-up against the Red Wings in December, Hart has played in 18 games, going 11-6-1. He has a .924 save percentage and 2.48 goals against average. He’s been very good.

Puck drop is at 1:00 P.M. ET today and you’ll be able to watch the game on six channels across North America, but you only really need to know about Fox Sports Detroit (featuring Larry Murphy!) and NHLN.