Fun ‘n’ games

It’s that kind of fall (again): Greg Mauldin left practice about halfway through after tweaking something; “lower body” was the only report. Anton Klementiev departed early, too, though it wasn’t clear if that was injury-related or not.

Mark Flood (lower body) remains out, but everyone else skated, which brings us to that annual exercise: Even though this isn’t the final roster and everything will be torn asunder by Thursday morning, here are today’s line combinations:

Bentivoglio-Haskins-Joensuu
Haley-Romano-Figren
DiBenedetto-Mauldin-Martin
Hughes-Marcinko-Sixsmith
Morency

D-pairs, without Klementiev:

Kohn-MacDonald
Piskacek-Gleed
Wotton-Gannon
Katic-Westgarth

And the three goalies.

Hey, check out the first line at last year’s first-real-practice. It’s a cute little coincidence, but it points out the futility of the exercise: That line played together only a handful of times during the year. The point, Jack Capuano reminded us, is just to get guys in combinations and work on systems, skate, work on conditioning. Looked like a good skate; lots of work on breakouts.

Chris Botta has today’s Islanders lines.

Elsewhere, appears Keith Aucoin and Alex Giroux are among Washington’s cuts. Sure, claim Rob Schremp.

I’m stumped as well. Something about bocce and lightning, maybe. And, OK, I laughed. Sorry.

Edit: Two BTWs: The team plans a press event of some sort Tuesday night to officially unveil the new uniforms; you got a sneak peek during the exhibition game’s national anthem. And Mike Russo says Jaime Sifers appears to have made the Wild.

Michael Fornabaio