Detached twins

There was something significantly different about the Vancouver Canucks' practice lines during Tuesday’s morning skate in anticipation of the team’s face-off with a red-hot Predators squad in Nashville:

Byron Bitz-Henrik Sedin-Mason Raymond

Roberto Luongo

It is a rare sight: Sedin twins Daniel and Henrik operating on different lines.

Although Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault remained vague with the press after the practice, Vancouver fans would be curious to see how well the Swedish brothers execute without their familiar linemate.

"I have split them up a few times during (my) six years for short amounts of time just to sometimes create a little something new," Vigneault told the Vancouver Sun. "But at the end of the day those guys are better together, I think we all know that and we all agree.

"But right now, basically if you look at the Boston game (Jan. 7), it's been a month where they have been a little bit off. We have got the afternoon to decide if a month is enough."

Henrik has 11 goals and a league-high 44 assists for 55 points this season. Daniel has 22 goals and 30 assists for 52 points.

Daniel and Henrik, 31, had been split up late in the Canucks’ last two games, but it's been a long time since they have not at least started a game beside each other.

Although Henrik says that he’s always meshed well with his brother on the ice, there was a time when they regularly played on different lines.

“We played on separate lines until we were 12 years old. He was a centreman as well. I was the first centreman, he was the second centreman,” Henrik explains. “Then after that he moved up to playing left wing, and we’ve never had any problems. It’s been good ever since. When we were 12, they moved us up to playing the older guys, so that coach put us on the second line together. The first line was made up of older guys.”

If Vigneault does stick the line-juggling he experimented with during Tuesday’s skate, Henrik will again be the first centre, but Daniel will be a second-line winger.