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A Life Less Ordinary: Blackhawks vs. Wild preseason preview

The lineup looks awfully close to a regular-season one.

Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports

The final home game of the Blackhawks preseason slate arrives on Thursday night with the Minnesota Wild as the evening’s dance partners.

And based on the morning skate, the Chicago lineup for Thursday’s game looks pretty dang close to what the opening-night lineup will be next Tuesday in Pittsburgh:

The two main omissions are on the second line, where Philipp Kurashev remains out with a wrist injury that may carry into the first week or two of the regular season and Andreas Athanasiou has returned to practice after being out with an illness earlier in the week but is not in the lineup for this one.

Here’s the situation in net:

Given the lineup, seeing who’s on the ice for the Blackhawks during any power plays or penalty kills could be a harbinger of the regular season. One possible PKer? Lukas Reichel, as coach Luke Richardson discussed Thursday morning.

As for the Wild, the lineup they’re sending to Chicago also looks more like an NHL-level one.

It’s still the preseason, yes, but for a Chicago team with so many younger players on it, any opportunity to skate against NHL-level competition is one not to be wasted. Seeing what the Blackhawks can get from names like Reichel and Kaiser and Korchinski and Vlasic and — of course — Bedard will be the main course on the menu this evening.

The results ultimately don’t matter but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to have a preseason game worth watching, right? This one’s arguably more worthy of attention spans than the other “professional” team in the city of Chicago with a game on Thursday night.

Let’s go Hawks.

How to watch

When: 7:30 p.m. CT

Where: United Center, Chicago

TV: NBC Sports Chicago

Webstream: ESPN+

Radio: WGN 720

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