On the bright side, Loktionov won't be traded!

As everyone probably knows by now, per Rich Hammond:

• Marco Sturm was claimed off waivers by Washington.
  
• Andrei Loktionov injured his left shoulder last night in Manchester and will get an MRI tomorrow.

Here are my free-associating observations:

• Notice how last night we heard that Loktionov hurt his wrist (oh no, but at least it's not his shoulder), and possibly re-injured his shoulder (OH NO!) and it turns out the next day that he did not injure his wrist and did not re-injure his shoulder. He injured his OTHER shoulder. Last year, the right one. This year, the left.
• Interesting that a reporter speculating that he may have re-injured his shoulder didn't notice that the side he was favoring (holding his wrist, etc.) was not the side that was injured last year.
• I am hoping the fact that nobody saw doctors trying to pop his shoulder back in (as opposed to last year, when everyone was talking about it) means that the injury might-might-might not be so unbelievably horrible. But I am just hoping against hope probably.
• I really don't know what to make of Sturm getting claimed. Yes, Washington has been in dire straits lately. But did Lombardi think or know he would lose Sturm, or did he make the (reasonable, I thought) gamble that Sturm wouldn't claimed, and lost the bet?
  
• Whichever, he had to have calculated that it was worth it even if Sturm was claimed, because of the flexibility waiving Sturm bought him over the next few days.
  
• Or else he just didn't care that much, because he knew he could bring up Loktionov.
  
• That totally makes sense to me.
• F***ing hell.
  
• I expect the next running theme we'll hear in message-board-land is that "Deano" now "has to make a move." My response is, yes, just like he had to make a move when Jack Johnson went down with a shoulder injury, or when Ryan Smyth, or Justin Williams, or Willie Mitchell got hurt. Of all the GMs I am familiar with, Lombardi strikes me as being the least likely to make a move because he has to.
• I would be surprised if Lombardi didn't make any deals between now and Monday at noon. But I don't think he'll do anything major that he wouldn't have done had Sturm not been claimed and Loktionov not hurt.
  
• For example, he's not going to say, "Gosh, I really didn't want to trade Brayden Schenn, but now I guess I have to!"
• He may well make a deal about which he will comment, on LAKi, on Monday or Tuesday, "losing Marco and the kid on the same day made me adjust the plan a little, but you always do that, that's hockey, injuries happen." Something like that.
• About tonight's line-up, my guess is:

Handzus - Kopitar - Simmonds

Smyth - Stoll - Williams

Clifford - Lewis - Brown

Ponikarovsky - Richardson - Westgarth

Alternatively, Richardson as LW1, Handzus and Lewis as C3 and C4. And yeah, an Oscar Moller recall seems pretty likely, depending of course on what else Lombardi has up his sleeve.

My only other thought right now: Sturm was basically invisible in his time here. Yes, I know he was recovering from injury. But if that weren't the case, we wouldn't have gotten him for nothing in the first place. He was never going to be on the roster next year. So Lombardi had to think he was going to do more than he did over the last three months.

Or he would have sent down Alec Martinez, just to be safe.