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I love free 3rd round picks.

They lack a #1 center. That doesn't mean he needs to play Sheahan, Glendening, Abdelkader, et. al. as much as he does, or bench AA and Mantha for things he ignores from vets, or tell some of his players to completely change their games. Sent from my LGLS676 using Tapatalk

and sometimes, your goalie just has to stop a puck. Just sayin....

I worked all day yesterday and most of today, non-billable work I cannot get done during the week when the phone is ringing, and clients are freaking and conference calls and webinar consume my day.

Whoops I made one too, and you made 3 just for good measure!

This thread started two days after they lose to us. I mean, I guess that game didn't have a lot of meaning for them... and they did have a solid win against Minny today. ...but have they really been gone?

When has that ever been a problem this season?

As I said, say that to Yzerman and Bowman in the early 90s. You do realize this is a team sport right? Coaches can't exactly have players go out there and play free-for-all just because "WELL THAT'S HOW I GREW UP PLAYING HEHE" Coaching entails having players work as a unit and play strategically. In Blashill's case his strategy is failing and all the other stuff we both seem to agree on (inconsistency in his decision making with certain players). That's the difference. For instance look at Quenneville with Chicago. In Jurco's interview he says that Chicago's style is all about creativity and making plays first rather than dump and chase. Well what if Player X never played with creativity in juniors? What if Player X has always preferred to play "safe hockey"? Does that make Quennville a bad coach for forcing Player X to break off from his safe style of play and start being more creative? No it doesn't. Oh but Quenneville wins so he gets a free pass.. no judging Joel. My overall point is you're taking an extreme argument on Blashill. He's bad, but not terrible.

Asking a player to improve in an area where you're weak is one thing. Asking them to go against everything that they've ever done and change their game is another. I don't think anyone is arguing against the idea that Mantha needs to play hard every shift to maximize his impact, or that AA needs to be defensively responsible. Blashill's taking those concepts and putting them to the extreme, though. Everyone has an off shift or a bad period. When AA or Mantha have one, Blashill benches them. When Nyquist or Tatar, or Sheahan, or someone else has one, he ignores it. He praises zero goal Sheahan for doing "good things" and gives him PP time, and the most AA gets is a back handed compliment peppered with criticism. Larkin's best asset is his speed, Blashill wants him to sacrifice that in order to get bigger and become something he's not. And it's not working. At all. Who has met or exceeded expectations this year? Zetterberg, Vanek, Nielsen, Howard and Green. Five guys who have been around long enough where Blashill more or less leaves them alone. Everyone else is playing below their ability.

To play the devil's advocate here, I don't think that people are necessarily upset that Blashill is trying to "change" guys as a concept, but rather about how he's applying it. It would be like if Holland made a bad trade and someone defended him by saying "well ALL GMs make trades". Of course they do, trading wasn't the problem. Bad trading was. Perhaps what irritates people about Blashill is that he'll bench guys for not being defensive enough, but his whole team isn't offensive enough and nobody gets benched for that. He'll bench guys for being careless with the puck, but only SOME guys, because veterans apparently are immune from turnovers. He'll bench guys for not being "assertive enough" (Sproul) but guys like Marchenko and Ouellet get lots of time despite being unnoticeable. I think Blashill, like Babcock before him, came up with lots of post hoc justifications to rationalize the preferences they already had. In Blashill's case I think it's pretty clear that his preference is for defense-first hockey players, and that he doesn't mind if you're one dimensional as long as that dimension is defense. Which is well and good, but then it's pretty hard to take him seriously when he's benching guys ostensibly to "round out their game" or whatever. He pretty clearly doesn't care about a well rounded game or Miller, Glendening, Sheahan, Ouellet, Ericsson, Kronwall (at this point in his career), etc. wouldn't all be playing hockey on the same team at the same time.

He's not good no. I'm ranting because he's being put out as a guy that's doing all these "terrible" things, when clearly other coaches do the same thing. It just happened that those coaches were successful so nobody ******* about it. Blashill's got a crappier team to work with and on top of that he's not nearly as experienced. For the record I'm no fan of pure defensive hockey either. I prefer a mix, we obviously had good offense along with good defense when we won those cups.

We're getting Nolan

OK, my point was he coached differently. You appear to agree. His methods in GR brought in positive results, his NHL style negative results. To me, that says he shouldn't have changed, at least not that much.

MRWGA

We're gunna win it dude. We're going to make the Red Wings great again.

I dont believe any teams management will be forthcoming with their players about who is protected and who's not. There's zero need to release that information, and that information will only be used by players agents to their advantage. Fans shouldnt expect to recieve internal knowledge like that. It compromises business. That being said, if teams wanted to do it, id be all for it. Just doubt they do, which is exactly why i expect theyre choosing not to.

Good info. Samberg is also ranked 89 by future considerations and I'm sure, assuming they use them, the wings will target defenseman with the three third round picks.. hoping one pans out long term. By what you're saying about Samberg, it seems like a decent chance we target him with one of our third round picks. I'd be for it.

And in GR he didn't preach the same style he does now, where hard work and the "process" trump everything else. Sent from my LGLS676 using Tapatalk

Yiiiikes. Tomas Jurco burying the Blashill system. "The biggest difference is that here we're told to make plays instead of just making safe plays and chipping it in and playing safely," Jurco said. "Here you actually should create something if you want to stick in this lineup because there's so many creative players." "I try to play it safe and it doesn't work here. You obviously can't be risking it at certain times of the game or situation, but most of the time you should try to create something, hold onto pucks and don't just chip it in and go for it."

Ya'll are crazy for rating Z so low. Yzerman - 10 Zetterberg - 10 Lidstrom - 8 Y and Z were both scorers whose bodies broke down later in their careers and they still battled harder than anybody else on the ice. Yzerman had many losing seasons early on, but at that point the team wasn't really expected to do much. Once the team started winning the pressure was to win cups with stacked teams, not to continue a playoff tradition with a poor team. Everyone in the hockey community but you jokers sings Zetterberg's praises for the effort he puts in every night and the example that he makes.