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Ultimately, it's all going to come down to drafting. My biggest gripe with Holland is that his scouting and drafting machinery hasn't produced a single high-end NHL defenseman since Niklas Kronwall, who was drafted 18 years ago. My second-biggest gripe with Holland is that his scouting and drafting machinery hasn't produced a cornerstone player since the Datsyuk and Zetterberg home run picks of 1998 and 1999, respectively. That, more than anything else, is what concerns me about Holland handling a rebuild, where scouting and drafting is everything. For years now we've heard Holland say that "there's no hockey store" and that "this is a draft-and-develop league." Well, money-where-your-mouth-is time is here. The good news: our five most recent first selections -- Mantha, Larkin, Svechnikov, Cholowski, Rasmussen -- were decent-to-excellent choices, Athanasiou was a steal, Bertuzzi's looking like he was worth that 2nd-round pick, and Hronek has been awesome for two straight seasons now. Also: 11(+?) picks in the upcoming draft and 10(+?) picks in the 2019 draft is huge. But, as Holland and Draper and everyone has said, this organization needs home run selections. If we get a couple over the next couple of drafts, Holland is golden. If we don't, then four years is probably the upper limit on how much time Holland has left as GM of the Red Wings.

https://www.tsn.ca/sedins-close-careers-on-classy-thoughtful-note-1.1044626 Truthfully, I feel like I never got to see these two guys often enough to genuinely appreciate them. I hate to say it, but I feel like they would have been even more appreciated in the world of hockey and the sports world in general had they played in a better market.

Good for us. That 4th will now become a 3rd.

To be fair, we also saw "re-build on the fly" Holland succeed between '02 and '08.

It just buys Holland another 3-4 years of incompetence (and bad contracts). I firmly believe we are 2-3 years away, after Holland is let go.

Tatar, Jurco, Smith all went to much better teams and had been exposed. This just goes to show that it's not necessarily coaching. Don't get me wrong, I think Blashill needs to go and we could benefit from someone with a better resume like Sutter. But to me, this shows that our talent pool ITSELF just wasn't very good from 2012-2018. Hopefully the "new" younger guys like Larkin, Mantha, Svech will be better.

IF he really means it and avoids anymore 3+ year contracts to guys 29+ years old who aren't going to be much use in 2 or 3 years, I'll cut him some slack. If he brings Green back for 3+ years with a NTC, signs another Nielsen type forward, etc. I'll burn him in effigy. Sign Witkowski/Booth level players to low salary one year contracts and let the kids compete for the jobs. If they show they're ready, put them on the team over the vets, otherwise the old guy gets an NHL job for awhile until someone pushes past them. Any signings need to be placeholders who are easily waived.

This. We've seen "No Cap" Holland be successful. We've seen "Hold on to the Streak" Holland fail. What we haven't seen yet is "Rebuild" Holland. Many seem to assume he will fail based on the second. It seems to me that replacing him with anyone else at this point wouldn't be anymore of a guarantee of success than giving "Rebuild" Holland a chance to see what he can do.

Even with Dahlin, we're probably not a playoff team next year. Can't seem to find it right now, but I remember reading a Holland quote a few weeks ago, something to the effect of "The team will be changing, but I'm not really looking at next year. I'm more focused on 2019, 2020." I believe he also recently said the organization wants players who can help us four or five years from now -- the implication being that while everyone wants a really quick turnaround, The Powers That Be are pretty much treating this as an actual, honest-to-God rebuild. Not a scorched earth teardown, but also not a we'll-be-back-in-a-year "reload." I'm tired of Holland, but maybe we're starting to see a Holland -- or an ownership-Holland dynamic -- that we haven't seen before. Dunno if that *excites* me, but it does give me some hope.

Meanwhile, in Vegas...

It's no coincidence that as the closer we got, then eventually missing the playoffs, the more talented our 1st round draft picks got. The next two years drafting is going to define this team for the following 20. Sure there is always that sleeper pick that surprises everyone (this year it's Liam Kirk (hopefully one of our 6th(s) or 7th round pick)) but more so than not, you NEED a few top 10 picks to properly start a rebuild along with some shrewd drafting in the teens to 20ish.

Exactly. IMO the way it works, is your owner, president, GM, and the rest of the inner circle at some point have a meeting. At that point, a discussion is had where everyone gives their views, and a direction is laid out, by the owner. The direction can pretty much be 1 of 4 things. Go for a Cup, Make the Playoffs, Re-Build, Tank Job. Then its the GM's job to run with that vision. I just can't see any world where an owner says "meh, I dont care, do your thing". Its just not realistic. I'm sure the contracts themselves were Holland, but the direction had to have been given to him. This is why Illitch likely wants to keep Holland, because why would an owner fire a GM for doing what he is told. From what I read, Al Davis was the worst. There are stories that he used to call the coach during games and force him to call a Hail Mary because he loved the long bomb. That's the worst type of owner, well that or the cheap owner that ONLY cares about money.

Reading this thread's last couple of pages makes me wonder if perhaps you could do with finding greater meaning elsewhere in your life, rather than badgering someone to confess that you, oh wise one, were right all along. Mrazek has shown that he has great natural talent. He has also shown that lacks the positional fundamentals to maximise that talent consistently. The latter should be considerably easier to acquire than the former, but alas he is now further from doing so than he was when he first broke into the league. This suggests greater mental fragility than he demonstrated through his junior and earlier professional career. Can he fix it? Who knows? At this stage there are still a whole load of possibilities from finding himself back in eastern europe for the remainder of his career, to turning it around and becoming a good starting NHL goaltender. Very few goaltenders have become what they will be at his age, and that includes those who start great and tail off, and those who suddenly find consistency. None of us know the guy personally, so can't comment on whether he has the mental strength, flexibility, humility and intelligence to become the player he once looked very likely to be. And now he's not a wing any longer, very few of us care.

Remember when this site worked properly?

I didn't watch one game this year and the same until at the very least Blashill is fired. I believe a GM change would be helpful too but I will give a temporary pass on keeping Holland but Blashill is garbage and has to go... I think 3 seasons of driving in reverse is enough. Look at what Gallant is doing in LV. I believe a real coach would make this same team hard to play against. Blashill stinks but the odour coming from Holland these days isnt much better.