April 1 practice notes, brief injury updates

Good morning from El Segundo. There’s a lot to talk about today. First, the lines shown at today’s practice, via color coding:

White: Gaborik-Kopitar-Williams
Yellow: King-Carter-Toffoli
Green: Lewis-Stoll-Brown
Blue: Clifford-Shore-Nolan
Purple: Pearson-Richards-Andreoff

-The defensive pairings were Muzzin-Doughty, Regehr-Martinez and McNabb-Greene. Jamie McBain was the extra defenseman.

-Andrej Sekera (lower-body) did not skate and has another doctor’s appointment today. There’s no firm indication on the length of time he’ll miss, though much like the brief conversation I had with Dean Lombardi after the Chicago game, what was shared today wasn’t particularly encouraging.

Reading between the lines on Sutter/Regehr comments, one gets the sense that Sekera’s injury is not minor. Doctor today.

— Rich Hammond (@Rich_Hammond) April 1, 2015

I’m getting that same sense. Other injury news: Jarret Stoll (head) is getting close, and a decision on whether he’ll play against Edmonton will be made tomorrow. Also, Tanner Pearson (broken lower fibula) underwent another X-ray yesterday, and the bone doesn’t appear to be healing as quickly as he would’ve liked. The original prognosis for his injury was three-plus months, and that timeline hasn’t changed. He was injured on January 10. I’ll have individual reports on all three players this afternoon, as well as Darryl Sutter quotes.

–Robyn Regehr, on challenges in switching defensive partners after building chemistry:
It just depends on a bunch of different circumstances – how you’re playing, how your partner’s playing at the time. I think Andrej and I were just starting to feel really good together, and it’s really just horrible timing for something like that to happen, but it does, and it’s happened quite a bit this year with our defensemen and messing up the pairs. The good thing is is that we’ve got Alec back there, who has the ability to switch back and forth between left and right, so now he’ll be back playing the right side, and I played with Alec last year a little bit, so we’ll have to try to get comfortable with each other as quickly as we can.