UPDATE 08/24: The Rangers have confirmed the list below as the roster they’ll be taking to Traverse City.

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Red Wings Central has posted the New York Rangers preliminary roster for next months Traverse City Prospects Tournament.  The roster — as it stands now — features 12 forwards, eight defensemen and two goaltenders, including ten Rangers draft picks, a handful of post-junior and post-college free agent signings, and six unsigned (by the Rangers) invitees.

Five players will be returning to Traverse City for their second go-round: Evgeny Grachev, Justin Soryal, Dale Weise, Michael Del Zotto, and Tomas Kundratek.  Tournament rules allow up to four players with one year of professional experience to participate, but at the moment, the Rangers have only two — Soryal and Weise.  It’s possible, though unlikely, that additional “vets” will be added between now and the end of the month.  It’s more likely that additional try-out players could get an invite between now and the start of the tournament on Sunday, September 6th. A season ago, the Rangers released a preliminary list of 19 players before rounding out the final roster to 25 with free agent invitees.

Forwards
Daniel Bartek*
Ryan Bourque
Chris Chappell
Paul Crowder
Craig Cunningham*
Evgeny Grachev
Roman Horak
Luke Pither*
Justin Soryal
Luke Walker*
Dale Weise
Ethan Werek

Defensemen
Mike Berube*
Michael Del Zotto
Tysen Dowzak
Mitch Gaulton
Trevor Glass*
Samuel Klassen
Tomas Kundratek
Daniel Maggio

Goaltenders
Chad Johnson
Scott Stajcer

*Unsigned invitees

The Rangers will be joined in Traverse City by the prospect squads from the host Detroit Red Wings, the Atlanta Thrashers, Carolina Hurricanes, Columbus Blue Jackets, Dallas Stars, Minnesota Wild and St. Louis Blues.  For the full tournament schedule, see Red Wings Central.

In a sure sign that hockey season is right around the corner, the Hartford Wolf Pack released their preseason schedule on Thursday.  As they did last year, the Wolf Pack will kick off the season with four exhibition games in four different venues against two different opponents: the Worcester Sharks and Bridgeport Sound Tigers.

Hartford’s 2009-2010 exhibition season opens on Wednesday, September 23, when the Pack face the team that ended their 2008-2009 season, Worcester, at the Koeppel Community Sports Center at Trinity College.  Two days later they’ll be at their home practice rink at Champions Skating Center in Cromwell, CT, for the first game of a home-and-home series with in-state rivals Bridgeport.  They’ll face the Sound Tigers again the next night, in their only road game of the preseason, at The Rinks at Shelton, in Shelton, CT.

The exhibition schedule wraps up with another visit from the Sharks, played at the International Skating Center of Connecticut in Simsbury, CT, on Sunday September 27th.  Puck drop for the first three games is 7:00 pm, with the final contest kicking off at 3:00 pm.  For ticket details, see the Wolf Pack web site.

In writing about the fourth and final game between the US and Russian under-20 squads in Lake Placid on Sunday, I commented on the quality of the officiating and mentioned Russian goaltender Alexei Trifonov’s trip to the penalty box. At the time, I assumed that Trifonov had skated into the box on his own, in protest against the latest in a game’s worth of questionable penalty calls against his team. As it turns out, Trifonov’s presence in the penalty box wasn’t an act of civil disobedience by a frustrated goaltender — it was ordered by one of the referees.

Russian under-20 coach Vladimir Plyushchev spoke to Sport-Express about his team’s trip to Lake Placid — and the referees — upon his return to Moscow on Monday.

We put up four good fights, and everything would have been fine, if not for the referees. Of course we expected such a thing, but not to this extent. In the last game of the series it got to the point that the referees planted our goaltender on the [penalty] bench, and forward [Anton] Lazarev got ready to stand in goal. We didn’t have a second goaltender — [Dmitry] Shikin was injured the night before. But then someone let the referees know that in hockey goaltenders do not get sent to the penalty box. If next season a similar trip is offered to us, we will seriously think: do we need this?

Had I not seen the game with my own eyes, I probably would have dismissed Pluschev’s complaints as those of a bitter coach looking to make excuses for his team’s poor performance. But the officiating on Saturday was truly atrocious. Granted, this wasn’t the first, nor will it be the last international hockey game that was marred by sub-par officiating.  But it begs the question: does either side really benefit when an exhibition game that’s meant to allow a coach to evaluate his young players gets officiated so poorly?