StormJH1

I'm an Ozzie fan, but I didn't see anything inconsistent or inaccurate in that particular scouting report. Ozzie IS a #2 goalie right now (or a platooner at best). He was a starter with NYI and STL briefly, but only had moderate success there. If you want to blame somebody for the perception of Ozzie, blame the Wings, who dumped him a few years after riding him to the '98 Cup, and then reacquired him TO BE THE BACKUP to one of the Top 10 goalies of all time.

I think there's something to that. Whatever it is that happens when players pull on that winged wheel sweater, it's the opposite of the feeling of doom and despair that the Lions view themselves with. There's expectations and confidence that starts from the fan base up, and some franchises just don't have it. The Wings do.

Fans "tolerate" Russian players until they do one thing to get on their bad side, and then they get stuck with the EuroTrash label. This team hasn't been the same since Fedorov left, but funny that nobody makes that connection. Even though players like Yzerman, Shanahan, and other supposed "core" players were still here, and still productive. Not every player is Stevie Yzerman...if you conduct a franchise negotiating contracts with the expectation that everyone has the class of Stevie Y, you wouldn't even be able to fill out a roster. Fedorov has a mystique about him that gave the Wings offense' a whole other dimension, and he was an EXCELLENT 2-way player. Not to mention the impact he could have had on the development of Datsyuk and Zetterberg, helping them to become more aggressive finishers at the net. What Fedorov brought was irreplaceable--and at the time we lost him, there was no salary cap. He should've retired a Wing, and if it were a North American player of his stature leaving, fans would've blamed mgmt, instead of the player, regardless of the true reason for his departure. Shanahan is rightfully credited as the "missing piece", but people tend to overvalue that "missing piece" at the expense of the rest of the puzzle...To make an analogy, yes, the American forces invading at Normandy turned the tide of the Western Front in World War II, but the Soviets fought the Nazis for much longer, and had a more significant impact on the fall of Nazi Germany...Shanahan added a needed element that the Wings lacked, but he was not more valuable than Yzerman or Fedorov, who made up the core of a team that had reached the Cup Finals in 1995, and the Western Conference Finals in 1996. I don't think Primeau deserves to be slammed to the degree he is by Detroit fans. Yes, the fact that he was valuable enough to be traded FOR Brendan Shanahan (well, with an aging Paul Coffey) says something in itself. But he was an outstanding scorer, and a strong physical presence, who just had one terrible playoff year that remains in everyone's mind. He went on to have a solid NHL career, and was actually a very good playoff contributor with Philadelphia years later. In retrospect, passing on Jagr was a mistake, but if you truly believe that Shanny was the "missing piece," then you can't argue that a team with both Jagr and Fedorov scoring goals and getting creamed into the boards would've been any better prepared to beat physical teams like the Devils and Avalanche.

After sticking with Grigorenko for THIS long, you'd have to be nuts not to want to at least take a look at him. If you do that, and he bombs, so what, let him go back to Russia. But the way people talk about Russian kids that they don't know anything about personally makes me think that there's more involved than your analysis of his hockey abilities. It's an easy call for guys like Datsyuk and Zetterberg who were both healthy and practically cant-miss NHL prospects. Grigorenko is recovering from serious injuries and needs to make a living here or in Russia. If he's going to risk leaving his home country and pissing off the Russian hockey officials he'll depend on for a paycheck if it DOESN'T work out here, then I think it's understandable that he's taking that risk for something more than an AHL roster spot, a league full of college washouts and aging NHL has-beens. Ignorant fans took the same hardline with Fedorov, who was an integral piece of 3 Cup teams, but since he demanded market value in his 97/98 holdout and EVENTUALLY signed somewhere else, some fans want to pretend like he never wore a Wings jersey. Jesus, Dany Heatley killed a teammate in his car b/c he was driving like a jackass, and nobody cares because he scores goals now...Grigorenko survives a car accident, and shows up to one camp out of shape, and people are ready to send him to a Siberian labor camp for life...what's going on here!?!

If the price were right, I don't know why Wings fans wouldn't want Shane Doan on this team. He JUST turned 31 on 10/9 and he scored 30 and 27 goals since the lockout on an awful team. Plus, he's 6'2", 217lbs. We have too many Larionov's and not enough Shanahan's on this team.

Lidstrom (#5) --> Unequivocally, yes, his number gets retired Shanahan (#14) --> A lot of the arguments that apply against Fedorov also work against Shanny, he didn't retire as a Wing, and he occasionally bitched at the organization (he complained about playing time during the '02 Playoffs!). Still he won 3 Cups... Fedorov (#91) --> In my opinion, Fedorov is more deserving than Shanahan. Yes, Shanny was "the missing piece," but the missing piece to what? Right...Fedorov and Yzerman brought this team out of the dark ages, and Fedorov was putting up MVP type numbers as a Wing before Shanny even joined the team. Putting aside the attitude and the Russian-ness, you look at what he actually did for the Wings, and I think he should be strongly considered. Chelios (#24) --> See, herein lies the problem...great Hall of Fame player, but which team should he be remembered with? Although he won more with the Wings, his best years were certainly as a Blackhawk, no way he gets his # retired. Konstantinov (#16) --> On merit and longevity alone, there's no way he deserves his number retired. But if the legendary Brett Hull won't even wear your number out of respect, who will? #16 is a de facto retired number, and one wonders if that will ever change. With any great player, you have to ask "Does this person deserve to have their # retired somewhere?" If the answer is yes, then: "Where?" For #91, the answer is Detroit, though I'm not sure it will ever happen. Guys like Chelios, who is more deserving than Paul Coffey, for example, should probably have their # retired elsewhere.

Thank you! Added to the list of problems the NHL doesn't need: 1) Ripping the most popular team out of the West, where they are sorely needed for ticket sales; 2) Adding ANY additional teams to the league, particularly in poor Western hockey markets; 3) Becoming the first major sports league to expose themselves to Las Vegas culture and accusations (legitimate or unfounded) of game-fixing and betting scandals. I think being in the West has benefitted Detroit as much as it's hurt. It's ridiculous to argue that being in the West has anything to do with poor ticket sales when we've had extremely lucrative sales since the whole Western/Eastern concept developed. All of Detroit's division rivals are either in the Eastern timezone, or only one hour away. Other teams (MIN and DAL) have it worse, because every single away game against division rival is in a different time zone, often starting at 9:30pm.

Doesn't everything you wrote there about the D.C. economy and the Caps completely contradict your explaination of the economy and ticket prices resulting in the Wings' attendance problems? If the economy is so good there, why wouldn't more people attend Caps games, then? It's so fashionable and convenient to blame the Detroit economy, as if Detroit is the only city where the economy is struggling, anyway. But most fans that fill the seats of JLA are downtown Detroiters working automotive jobs, and walking to the rink from their plant after work. They're mostly well-to-do suburbanites, coincidentally the same demographic of people who flood internet chat boards. Or, they're corporate tickets redistributed or sold to employees. These people could still afford to attend Wings games, if they really wanted to, THEY JUST DON'T WANT TO. And the reason (here and in Colorado) they don't want to is because there are no more super teams in the NHL like the Wings and Avs of the 90's, where every year, you're signing a new Hall of Famer, whether it's Chelios, Coffey, Borque, Shanahan, Hull, Kariya, or Selanne. Hell, even the Wings 4th lines were dotted with players like Gilchrist and Verbeek who have had amazing NHL careers. The salary cap won't allow that to happen. Joe Sakic is like the Steve Yzerman for the Avs fans, and he's still there. Other guys, like Milan Hejduk, are still around, and they've brought in young talent. But the Wings leadership are quiet guys of European descent, and simply don't sell tickets as well as the super teams of the past. People in other states always ripped on the Hockeytown moniker b/c they considered our fanbase to be a bandwagon group of followers, who would hop off if the team didn't buy itself championships. I'm a Wings fan for life, but now is the time to show people they were wrong, and so far, we're just not doing it.

Right. Up2Here has some good points too. (and no, IMO, Detroit fans are better professional hockey fans than Minnesotans, though if they keep selling out the XCel Center for years and years, that could change over time) Think about if the New York Yankees suddenly developed the payroll mentality of the mid-level market team. They'd still play in the Bronx, they'd still have their history, and they'd still have fans. But they wouldn't be the "Yankees" b/c part of that whole identity is knowing that you're going to have a club full of established, recognizable players, and if it ever gets bad, your team is going to trade for or sign other big name players, regardless of the price. There was no direct equivalent to the NY Yankees in the pre-salary cap NHL, but if one was close, it would have to be the Red Wings (the Avs did this too, to a lesser degree). The salary cap was necessary for the viability of the NHL, but teams like Detroit have to suffer as a result. After years of success, Detroit fans developed unrealistic expectations about having a "Super Team" and retaining star players. In some sports, parity can be a good thing--it's good in the NFL b/c that league already enjoys widespread popularity. But part of the whole justification for the lockout was that small market teams in the NHL couldn't compete. What the league is finding out is that you can't make a non-hockey fan in a bad hockey market into a fan, simply because their team is doing well. But you can destroy the interest of hockey fans in decent markets by turning their "Super Teams" into ordinary teams with less recognizable names, and two lines filled out with young players making the league minimum to stay under the cap.

I live in Minnesota, (but was raised in Detroit) and the people here and in Dallas don't want to hear it. Those two teams have the distinction of being the only two squads where every other team in their division is in a different time zone, which, with the unbalanced schedule, means a lot of starts at 9pm or 9:30pm. You're absolutely right that the Wings are suffering from a lack of rivalries and a lack of momentum, but in the Wings case, I don't think the conference and division have anything to do with it. The NHL isn't like major league baseball, the average fan doesn't generally follow the division standings because they're basically meaningless. The top 8 teams from the division will be in the playoffs, and for 16 years, the Wings have been among them. But our biggest rivals in the past decade have had nothing to do with divisions...Colorado wasn't in our division in the 90's, and that was one of the best rivalries in sports. NHL rivalries come either from the playoffs, or from some freak occurance during the regular season (usually a cheap shot or brawl). That's what Bettman missed when he was hacking up the schedules. Right now, you could argue the wings don't even have a true rival, but if they did, it would probably be Anaheim, and people didn't even fill the building for that matchup on OPENING NIGHT. The schedule is not to blame. Also, during the Wings surge in popularity (1993-2003?), tell me, who was our big division rival then? We played one good series with St. Louis ('96, Yzerman goal), but they weren't a "rival" to the degree of Colorado, or even arguably the Stars and Ducks. And Chicago sucked during pretty much that whole span. You can't argue simaltaneously that a) The NHL needs to stop expanding West and bring some of those teams back East and to Canada; AND b) That the Wings should be moved to the Eastern Conference. If you have a Western and Eastern Conference, the only way we'd deserve to move to the East is if there were MORE teams added to the West, not fewer. Technically, Columbus is further east than us anyway, though I doubt the NHL would do them any favors. If Nashville had moved to K.C., it might have worked out better...K.C. trades places with the Minnesota Wild. Oh well.

Okay, fine. Then why are we not seeing similar declines in attendance for the Pistons (who have more expensive tickets)? And why do Lions games continue to sell out and the Tigers continue to grow in popularity? I think the success of these other teams certainly has some impact, and I'll buy that over the "economy sucks" rationale. But there has to be something else. And I think that "something" is that fans don't identify with this franchise anymore. Drew Sharp said it was because they were more European, but I think it's more a facet of the leadership of this team having zero personality. It's almost unfathomable to think about something as exciting as the Blood Bath game and rivalry with Colorado happen in this decade. And to the fans, anything short of the Western Conference Finals is "been there done that," which is sad because you could argue the team's success in today's league is more remarkable than the days where we were outspending most teams by a 2 to 1 margin. You're absolutely right that there is a combination of factors explaining the problems with the Wings, but... Detroit is NOT a baseball and football town first and foremost. Detroit is a good sports town, but it's a bandwagon town. Certain teams (Wings included) have had stretches where they disappear from the radar altogether. This absolutely was a hockey town in the 90's, but it was hard not to be with the kind of team we got to watch. But the Tigers weren't relevant until they surprised everyone and got good 2 years ago...that doesn't make this a "baseball town". And if you know anything about NFL fan bases, this is not a good NFL fan base. Detroiters are ashamed of the Lions, half of the fans watch them like a comedy, to see how they're going to screw up next.

Sure, the tax increase. Is it possible that taxes were raised at any other point in the past two decades? Or in states other than Michigan? We didn't see attendance this poor in those instances. Also, you need to realize that there's a difference between reported attendance and who actually shows up to the games. If people or companies are buying tickets, and make a conscious choice not to drive downtown, park, get on the People Mover and go to a game, that worries me even more than poor sales. I seriously doubt any one family looked at their bottom line and said "Oh crap, taxes went up, there goes our Wings game for the year." Hockey tickets are disposable income, people spend $70 a year (or much much more) on candy bars, gum, and Starbucks coffee. The point is that they're not CHOOSING to spend it on the Wings, and you can't deny that there are other reasons for that. I moved to another state (which, I suppose, partially explains this phenomenon), and I'm stunned to turn on Wings games and see all the empty seats. But then again, if I didn't stay, how can I expect others to stay and go to Wings games?