Penguins On the Road Tonight

Gibbons really flew under the radar and nabbed a spot as a top six forward.

The Wilkes-Barre Scranton Penguins will look for their first win of the season tonight when they battle the Rochester Americans in western New York. This is the first road trip of the season for the WBS Penguins, and they are hoping it will jump start their stats in the W column.

As reported earlier, it looks like Brad Thiessen will get the start in net for the Penguins. The Amerks will most likely counter with Drew MacIntyre. This is the only game scheduled in the AHL for tonight so all eyes will be on these two teams at 7:05 p.m. EST.

A familiar face will be in the Amerks lineup tonight. Former Norfolk Admirals forward Paul Szczechura signed with the Buffalo Sabres in the off season and is ready to lace them up against the Pens tonight. He was always a Penguins killer - let's hope the change of scenery is enough to change that.

As for familiar faces for the Penguins, both Nick Petersen and Jason Williams practiced with the team this week. Both started the week wearing the red no-contact jerseys but Petersen practiced yesterday with the regular jersey - a sign he might be close to making a return to the lineup. I don't expect either to play tonight.

The line combos at practice this week were continuously changing but here's what I was able to gather:

Tangradi-Gibbons-Dimitrakos
Walker-Lerg-McDonald
Thompson-Sill-Craig
DeFazio-Chupp-Schnell
Petersen-Williams-DiDiomete

The Pens will likely rotate multiple line combinations to find a way to create more offense. After scoring two goals in the opening night loss to the Hershey Bears, they were unable to find the net against the Connecticut Whale in their 1-0 shoot out loss this past Sunday.

Three games this weekend for the Penguins and I expect them to get it in gear and get that goose egg out of the wins column.

Go Penguins!

Game thread at 6:30. Live in-game updates on the blog's Twitter feed. Stay tuned.