Alzner, Sloan in town (updated)

Karl Alzner and Tyler Sloan are on the ice here at Kettler for the morning skate. The other seven defensemen began the skate on the ice, but John Erskine left pretty quickly.

Both of those guys did not play for the Bears last night in their Game 2 win against the Baby Penguins.

UPDATE: Bruce Boudreau said both Alzner and Sloan are up for now on an emergency basis. He also hinted that they might be around for a while, but didn't commit to it. He said Erskine is questionable for tonight, and the team also didn't want to go forward with only six healthy defensemen (so Jeff Schultz isn't close to coming back then) so that is why both Sloan and Alzner are here.

"We’ve only had six healthy defensemen up here, and I think we were playing with fire if somebody were to go down in warm-ups," Boudreau said. "We’ve got John banged up a little bit, so he’s going to try it and see if he can go. We thought we should take a little bit of a precautionary measure."

Alzner said both he and Sloan had the "12-hour flu," while Sloan called it the "d-pair flu." They found out they were coming up last night and left for D.C. around 8 p.m.

Sloan's dad had driven from Calgary to Hershey to watch some AHL playoff games, so now's there a chance he will get to see his son play in an NHL playoff game.

"It would be full circle for this whole year," Sloan said. "It would be pretty special. My dad’s here too, so to have see me play a game would be pretty awesome."