Notes: Wings continue to battle hard in practice

DETROIT -- A win on Tuesday night did not mean a light workout on Wednesday.
Instead, the Red Wings once again competed in battle drills in a hard, 50-minute practice at the BELFOR Training Center at Little Caesars Arena.

"It was good today to be able to have a good work day and battle," Wings coach Jeff Blashill said. "We'll do a little bit of battling on Friday to get ready for Saturday, too. You don't have many days in the year where you have three days like that. We're going to take tomorrow off just because part of that is when you haven't gone three days before a game all year, it's hard to all of a sudden in December throw it in. The only time we did it is out of camp so we'll take tomorrow off and we'll get back and make sure we're battle-tested on Friday so we come Saturday ready to go."
The Wings have a rare lull in the schedule between games. After Tuesday night against the Winnipeg Jets, the Wings don't play again until they host the St. Louis Blues in a Saturday afternoon contest.
"We had a good practice today, worked on a lot of the battling and two-on-two, three-on-three, five-on-five, some good skating up and down the ice," Justin Abdelkader said. "At the same, it's good, we're going to have a day off tomorrow so we'll be able to get some rest and we'll get a full day as we come up to the schedule where we're playing every other day. It's a nice little break in the schedule. Time to get refocused and get a push until Christmas."
Said Gustav Nyquist: "I think it's good for us. Those are the things that we need to get better at, to win those battles, and doing them in practice, it'll help us, I think."
While you can't replicate game conditions in practice, players often feel the battle drills are the next best thing.
"It's great," defenseman Danny DeKeyser said. "I think the down low stuff is very game-like, as in the majority of the game is played below the tops of the circles in both ends. So that's probably the most important part of the ice is winning your battles there, in the D zone, win the battles and get it up to the forwards and getting it into their end and trying to create offense that way."
One of the things that worked well for the Wings against the Jets, especially in the first period, was being harder to play against by making the Jets go through them to get where they wanted to go.
"I think the past few practices we've been working on not swinging away, less stick checks and playing more through guys," DeKeyser said. "Getting your stick in there and then kind of playing through and finishing the hits from time to time when you can, not giving them room out there to operate, easy room. So if they get room, they got to earn it. We're trying to play through guys more and make it harder on opponents to get to our net, harder for them to get the red line and chip it in, stuff like that."
Blashill said the battle work they've done is not about fixing their system play, it's about executing at a high level.
"It's been more making sure that we're at that, one, competitive level in terms of winning stick battles and two, we've had a chance to play some small games here the last couple times and the things small games does is it allows you to make plays," Blashill said. "I talked to the team about that on Monday. You have to play to win, you can't play afraid to make mistakes so you got to put them in situations where they can make plays. So I was satisfied with us being able to do that the last few practices."
NO ZETTERBERG IN PRACTICE: Zetterberg did not take part in Wednesday's practice.
Blashill said it was just a maintenance day for the captain, who will now get two days off the ice as the team has Thursday off.
Luke Witkowski skated on Zetterberg's line with Nyquist and Abdelkader.
BEST AT THE BATTLE: When it comes to one-on-one battle drills, there was one player who always dominated - Pavel Datsyuk.
So now that there's no Datsyuk, who is the best on the current team in these drills?
"He was so much better than everyone, it's hard to say," Abdelkader said. "Everyone presents different challenges, whether you're going against (Jonathan) Ericsson and he's big and strong or a guy like (Nick) Jensen who's not as big but is strong on his skates and has a low center of gravity. I wouldn't say anyone sticks out like Pav did, but guys present different challenges for sure."
Zetterberg and Datsyuk had some legendary post-practice battles going one-on-one so it's no surprise whom some consider the best now.
"I would say Hank is probably the best at down low stuff," DeKeyser said. "He's got great strength on his skates and he's hard to knock off the puck. He's kind of got, I'd say a lower center of gravity where you push him and he doesn't really move so he's definitely tough down low."
Nyquist said Datsyuk would pick a player after practice to battle, but it wasn't that fun for whoever it was.
"You usually didn't get to touch the puck," Nyquist said. "It was just getting frustrating. He was pretty good at it."
Nyquist said Datsyuk's technique stood out but it's a hard thing to emulate.
"I think one of the strongest on his stick I've ever played against," Nyquist said. "He kind of almost didn't touch the puck, he was just kind of slashing your stick away from it, you couldn't really get to it. He had kind of a special technique for it. I'm not going to try to do what he did out there."