DETROIT — Ryane Clowe not only didn’t make it into the lineup Tuesday night for Game 6, he didn’t even make it onto the team plane.
“He’s got an upper body injury and stayed home in San Jose,” coach Todd McLellan said after word spread about Clowe’s absence an hour before the team’s morning skate.
Clowe’s status for Game 7 on Thursday night is uncertain.
McLellan would not divulge what caused the injury, but said it was not the heavy hit that Red Wings defenseman Niklas Kronwall delivered late in the second period of the 4-3 loss in Game 5.
Ben Eager replaced Clowe in the lineup Tuesday, but the absence of the Sharks’ top playoff scorer prompted McLellan to open the game with a new look for all four of his forward lines.
Logan Couture moved alongside Joe Thornton and Devin Setoguchi on the top line with Patrick Marleau centering Dany Heatley and Torrey Mitchell on the second. Joe Pavelski, Kyle Wellwood and Benn Ferriero formed the third line with Scott Nichol between Jamie McGinn and Eager on the fourth.
Clowe had four goals and nine assists for 13 points to lead the team through 11 postseason games.
McLellan used set lines for the last six weeks of the regular season, but had mixed and matched his forwards until that point. At the time he also said he wanted his players to be prepared to play in a variety of settings because teams often have to deal with playoff injuries.
“Nobody, tonight, when we hit the ice, is going to say, ‘Aw, I don’t have any chemistry with this guy’ because we’ve played with each other quite a bit this year,” Sharks captain Joe Thornton said before the game. “No excuses.”
Defenseman Douglas Murray stressed the nature of hockey as a team sport in looking ahead to the game without Clowe in the lineup.
“It’s obvious he’s a great player and he’s one of the leaders on the team,” Murray said. “He obviously produces and plays physical. But at the same time, no team ever wins because of one guy and no team ever loses because of one guy.”
Clowe missed seven games this season with two different lower body injuries, and the Sharks were 5-2 in those games.
Babcock turned to veteran Mike Modano as Franzen’s replacement, using the longtime Shark-killer for the first time in the postseason since Game 4 of Detroit’s first-round sweep of Phoenix.
There was speculation as to how Marleau might respond on the ice, but his performance Tuesday night was relatively uneventful. He took a boarding penalty for a hit on Modano midway through the second period, but got off only one shot on net, won three of six faceoffs and registered one hit in his 18:58 of ice time.
But going into Game 6, Murray suggested he and his teammates needed to focus more on the Red Wings on the ice with Datsyuk than on the man himself.
“I’m not going to take away from the game he played,” Murray said. “But the biggest problem was not him beating us one-on-one last game. We actually kept him on the outside. The problem is we didn’t take care of the guys that were open around him.”
Try to double-team Datsyuk — who had an assist on Detroit’s winning goal Tuesday night — and that just creates an open target for him to dish the puck, Murray said.
“That’s more important — one guy takes care of him and everybody else does their job,” he added. “That’s where the breakdowns were.”
