GDT: Avalanche at Blackhawks 1/14/2014, game 46

Good evening ladies and gentlemen! Tonight your Colorado Avalanche take on the Blackhawks of Chicago in a Central Division collision.

Since we last saw our boys in burgundy tearing the hearts out of the Wild's playoff chances, there have been a couple of roster and lineup changes. Karl Stollery, who by all accounts did fine in his NHL debut, was sent back to Lake Erie when there was an issue sending Ryan Wilson back for his conditioning assignment. J.S. Giguere developed some back spasms and isn't able to play so Sami Aittokallio was called up from Lake Erie.

Tyson Barrie and Nick Holden return to the lineup after missing Saturday's game. Unfortunately, Paul Stastny will not be able to play tonight and instead of calling up a forward from the Monsters, which they had plenty of time and roster space to do, the staff will be going with the 11/7 plan and Nick Holden playing wing again.

It's not a travesty, and I'm not hopping off the bandwagon here, but there's no reason not to have an extra forward available tonight, if only to enjoy the delicious United Center nachos. But the team is now in the position of playing a guy on defense they tried to send to the AHL a couple of days ago, while icing a 4th line that's even more useless than usual. Makes little sense.

Anyway... check out these lines! (thanks to Rick Sadowski for the info and Dan for the link)

FORWARDS
Gabriel Landeskog -- Matt Duchene -- Ryan O'Reilly
Nathan MacKinnon -- John Mitchell -- Jamie McGinn
Cody McLeod -- Marc-Andre Cliche -- Max Talbot
Nick Holden -- Brad Malone -- Patrick Bordeleau

DEFENSE
Jan Hejda -- Erik Johnson
Andre Benoit -- Cory Sarich
Ryan Wilson -- Tyson Barrie

GOALIES
Semyon Varlamov
Sami Aittokallio

It's just crazy enough to work.