This morning, Mattias Ritola was recalled from Grand Rapids. This time, however, he wasn't recalled because of injuries. He'll be in the lineup on Wednesday as Kris Newbury was re-assigned. Newbury wasn't actually as bad as I thought he'd be, but it's time someone else gets a shot. I didn't see a whole lot out of Newbury other than his goal and then one shift where Todd Fedoruk got him mad and he ran around hitting everything in sight.

The promotion will hopefully light a fire under the streaky Ritola. Ritola's definitely an interesting prospect. He was drafted as a "skilled but lazy" player, and so far in the pros has been anything but. His two-way game has been very good, and he still has the great hands to do some damage with the puck. He got into two games in 2007-08 and didn't look too out of place. The following season he got jumped on the depth chart by the likes of Ville Leino and Justin Abdelkader and didn't get another callup. Despite streakiness on Grand Rapids' top line this season, he looked like one of the most NHL-ready prospects in the pre-season, likely why Detroit's giving him another chance.

However, from the looks of how things went yesterday, it's not going to matter. There have been very few losses that don't leave a bitter taste in my mouth. I usually have something to pin the loss on. Maybe goaltending wasn't up to snuff, maybe the defense took the night off, maybe the powerplay went 0-for-1, maybe I just thought the other team didn't deserve to win. Yesterday, though, was a different story.

Detroit was just thoroughly dominated. Sure they could have played a little harder, but there comes a time when the injury bug catches up to you and the problem isn't effort, it's talent. The first period looked like a twenty minute penalty kill. Chicago has three very good scoring lines and a capable, puck-moving defense. Detroit, right now, has a scoring line and three grind lines. I like those grind lines -- they're playing very well, and only the Brad May, Kris Newbury, and Kirk Maltby line looked over-matched. But those lines just don't have the skill to possess the puck in the offensive zone for great lengths like you need to do to beat Chicago.

It's nothing to be depressed about, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. You need to score goals to win games, and even with Cristobal Huet making every save a more difficult task than it needed to be, Detroit didn't have any real sustained pressure or great scoring chances. I could tell within the game's first five minutes that unless Detroit got some major break or Chris Osgood stood on his head, it was going to be a long night.

Credit to Osgood though. The game could have been much more lopsided. Unfortunately, none of the goals he let up were in the particularly "unstoppable" variety, and in fact the second and third goals were quite weak. But he did make almost all of the difficult saves, and probably was the sole reason that the game wasn't 5-0 going into the second.

Two Wings really stood out in my mind. For starters, I think Brad Stuart has been an absolute horse this season and we're wasting him by not playing him 28-30 minutes a night. Nicklas Lidstrom is definitely still the guy that you want against the opponent's top lines, but Stuart has been virtually mistake-free. Stuart's in his prime, he can handle more ice time than he's getting. He's very smart about picking his areas to be physical, he's bailed out both goalies tons of times, and he just looks like he's playing with a boatload of confidence. Even the powerplay -- as much as I wanted Jonathan Ericsson, Stuart has looked very capable, patient, and productive. In my mind, Stuart is not getting the credit he deserves for stepping his game up among the NHL's elite this season.

Abdelkader was also much better after I mentioned the day prior that he isn't doing enough to make the decision to take him out of the lineup easy. He was full of all kinds of sandpaper, decking Patrick Kane, and then baiting Patrick Sharp into a penalty after Sharp had actually stood him up behind the net on a big hit. He had that edge to his game and I'd like to see him use it more. He's been much better this season about not taking costly penalties, even though they come with the type of edge that he has to his game.

The only players that looked absolutely outmatched were Ville Leino and Doug Janik. I like Janik, but I think we all saw why he's in the AHL and Brett Lebda and Derek Meech are in the NHL. Janik's pretty steady, but when the pressure's on he's prone to mistakes. As limited as Lebda and Meech have been this season, both of them can keep their heads when the pressures on them, and I felt that Janik coughed the puck up one too many times and just didn't look very sure of himself. Leino, too. I'm officially diagnosing Leino with Robertlangitis, which is the inability to move one's feet while carrying the puck. Lang was famous for coasting through the neutral zone, trying to dangle (often successfully so) everyone before friction eventually caused him to come to a complete stop. Leino is doing many of those same things, and, even more than Todd Bertuzzi, is causing really stupid and needless offsides.

So, as big as the W would have been for Detroit, all I can say after this one is "oh well." If Detroit had been healthy -- or even had half of their injured guys back, and this was the effort -- I'd be livid. But I think most guys (not Ville Leino) did all they could, they just weren't able to sustain offensive pressure. I think Detroit has a better chance of winning in their own barn because the Chicago crowd was just all kinds of fired up (actually loved the "Detroit sucks" chant. Shows that the rivalry is re-budding, and it also shows that most Chicago fans probably had no idea how the team was doing this decade prior to last season) and the team was obviously feeding off of it. I wouldn't expect a game much different than yesterday's though -- with the way Chicago is clicking right now, it's going to be chaos. We can only hope that Jimmy Howard is up to the task, and it wouldn't hurt if Pavel Datsyuk pulled one or two of these.

But if he can't do it, maybe Ritola can?