Why sit the kid he already missed like 10 games. I’m sure he’s fine for like game 6?
If I'm putting myself in the org's shoes, and parroting what they've said, the reason for the dev plan is to minimize injury first and foremost.
Injury happens typically with heavy workload in a short period of time. Despite him missing 10 games, there are 4 games in 7 days this week.
I would have Smith miss one game (yesterday) and Celebrini miss the next (today) so that they can both play 3 games, and we have both of them for the hardest game (Rangers), and the last game on the road trip (Pens).
This is why I guessed Celly might be out... which would be sad. But makes sense, and also has minimal impact on the lineup. I wonder if they have data from his practice session or some kind of PT / physical test to determine whether he goes this evening... otherwise, not sure why they would have to wait until the afternoon to determine if he's going to be in the lineup or not.
EDIT: Timely,
here's an article in The Athletic about Catapult, the data tracking service that 80% of NHL/AHL teams are now using, measuring workload, injury recovery, etc. There's probably a better place to share this, but here are some highlights:
- Teams target 4.5 "games" worth of workload per 7 day period, or "1,000 player load"
- It's not just about minimizing workload, actually for some players it's about increasing practice workload since they're not getting it in game
- The tech is voluntary, and some players love it and some players don't like it
- It's especially focused on for return to injury
- The workload metric is a build-up from every movement on ice (every direction and down/up) so you can also see, e.g. when returning from injury, how close to 100% the player is on stride strength and L/R balance, for example
So, yeah, if I had to guess, maybe they are making sure Macklin's load wasn't too high at practice and/or analyzing performance related to injury recovery/ trying to get predictive on injury vulnerability. Or, there's some real-world physical test to measure mobility/strength he has to go thru post-nap or something.