Spurgeon Is Back

Jared Spurgeon was re-activated from injured reserve Wednesday, about a week after the upper-body injury that kept him out against Winnipeg. It is a quiet but meaningful development for a blue line that has been running thin since before the season's first month was finished.

When I wrote the piece after the Winnipeg game, the situation was genuinely bleak — Hughes carrying the load, Jonas Brodin as the next man up, and Carson Lambos freshly recalled from the AHL as depth insurance. Spurgeon back in the lineup does not fix everything, but it restores some real experience to a group that needed it. The gap between Hughes and whoever was skating third on that blue line had been significant.

Worth noting that the forward group has its own problem tonight — Maxim Shabanov is out with an upper-body injury, per head coach John Hynes. So Minnesota gets one body back on defense and loses one up front on the same day. That is the early-season injury shuffle in a nutshell. The blue line is in better shape than it was last week. Everything else is still being sorted out.