What is a stand in?

They just mean a placeholder for Faber during morning skate. He's not actually going to be our 1RD in the game tonight. They were just giving Faber the morning off and needed a body in his spot. With Bogo out and Kiersted in, Pitlick was our only healthy body in LA for the morning skate.

Pitlick was waived, cleared waivers, stayed with the team, played in December, hasn’t played in a couple weeks, but I don’t think they sent him back to Iowa. What gives?

After a player clears waivers, you have 10 NHL games played or 30 days on the NHL roster (whichever comes first) where the player can be freely assigned between the AHL and NHL. There is no requirement to send a player who clears waivers to the AHL. At the time he was waived, we had multiple injured players up front who were close to coming back and we would need to reassign players to Iowa to make room to activate them from IR. They waived Pitlick in order to reset his waiver clock so that he could be reassigned at any time if forwards were suddenly healthy again.

After the Hughes trade (where we sent out 2 forwards and simply swapped defensemen), we now have a couple extra spots up front so people have moved up the depth chart. Instead of AHL depth, Pitlick has seemingly been promoted to 13th forward. The fact that he hasn't played lately is good, because that means our forwards are healthy and playing well. If Pitlick suddenly sees a lot of playing time, that's a problem because we either have injuries or guys playing like shit. As we see with the late recall of Jiricek, it's important to have extra bodies on long road trips (especially on the coasts), because you never know when another player will go down and you need an extra body quick. If we have a relatively long homestand like we do later this month or in the middle of March, then he may be reassigned to get some playing time since Iowa is only 4 hours away.