StormJH1

Winging It In Motown ‏@wingingitmotown8m According to @Lindy72 Tomas Tatar just flat refused to go to GR if he clears waivers & is assigned there. Watch Tatar get traded out of this whole mess. And for what?!

Well, now Tatar is has said that he will not go back to Grand Rapids, and is angry. I have no idea why the Wings are toying with their future to keep around another forward that we didn't need. Tatar probably should have been up LAST YEAR for the playoffs, but they left him down to help the Griffins win an AHL championship.

I really appreciated Cleary's contributions to the Wings (particularly the 2009 Playoffs, when Cleary CARRIED us at times), but he had to go. As hard as it is to let go of important veterans, I'm glad that the Red Wings organization is not overly sentimental when making roster moves. We have young players ready to take his spot now that can do it better and cheaper.

I liked this comment. If you listen to non-Detroit fans like Wyshinski (whom I simaltaneously love and despise at the same time), you get a sense that people really viewed the '97 Wings in a way I never did, which was as "underdogs". Philly was just supposed to stomp us to the ground, and Lindros was going to claim the throne because Lemieux was retiring again, and that's just the way the narrative was supposed to go. It actually reminds me of the way people talk about the 2004 Pistons as an aberration - Detroit fans know that team was special, and perhaps one of the greatest defensive teams of all time, but rather than getting credit for stopping a Lakers 4-peat, everyone focuses on the implosion of L.A., even though they apparently handn't imploded enough to make it all the way past 3 rounds and to the Finals. I'm just going to watch how we play and react from there. Of course I'm concerened about how we might handle away games in Montreal (given recent history), and Boston, Pittsburgh, etc. will be tough. But I guess it stems back to 1997 that I simply don't believe the Wings are "in trouble" because they play they're style of hockey as opposed to a North/South physical game. Case in point, Chicago (a Western team) was said to be too small and too finesse to compete with Boston also, and they just won the Cup.

Oh yeah! Let's all subject ourselves to that on a lovely Friday. Seriously though, I had NHL Vault during the season, so I did put on one of those games while working out a few months ago. I think Emrick was calling the game. It was an amazing bit of nostalgia, and not as depressing as I thought it would be. Then again, it was not Game 4 (Game 2, maybe?), so you didn't have that impending sense of doom. I was so depressed by Game 4, we were at Harsens Island that weekend and I don't even think I watched it. Four Cups later, it's much easier to accept losing than it was back before we had put the streak to bed. 2009 was tough losing a Game 7 at home and all, but it's not even in the same ballpark as 1995, or (arguably) even the '99 loss to Colorado or 2001 to the KIngs.

I have it on Comcast (well, in Minnesota), even though I don't remember if I had Speed channel. To me, it's a distant 3rd behind ESPN and NBCSN. The latter dedicates serious time to NHL, IndyCar, and now EPL soccer - three sports that have loyal (if niche) fans in this country that are anywhere from ignored to openly-mocked by other networks. Everything FOX touches in sports (with the exception of baseball and some football coverage) just ends up feeling slimy to me. Erin Andrews and Charissa Thompson on the same network again - that's a whole lot of making duckfaces into mirrors with no actual talent or relevance. As for their editorial coverage - nobody cares anymore. ESPN has adapted very well with some things (website presence, Grantland, fantasy sports, podcasting), yet they still seem to think that SportCenter and debate shows are anchor tenants. There's way too many voices out there now for a bunch of ex-athletes and old gray-haired journalists arguing about stuff to be a real draw for viewership. Show me LIVE SPORTS that I can watch, DVR, or access online, then we'll talk, FS1.

Each one of your statements is true individually, and they add to the qualifications for a guy having his # retired. But to extrapolate each of those into a rule that ALL future nominees must follow like checklist? Sorry, no. Jarome Iginla should have his number retired in Calgary, and he'll have played on at least 2 other teams hopping around looking for a contender. I really don't fault him for it either, and neither do most Calgary fans. Eras are different, business differs by era, and every player's career is different. What if the Wings had botched the '89 draft and didn't end up with Lidstrom or Fedorov. Maybe the Wings make a few first rounds, get bounced, and are back out of the playoffs. Maybe some of those veteran players we later acquire don't want to play for the Dead Wings. You can tell me, with full certainty, that a mid-30's Steve Yzerman who never won anything here, NEVER would have left because he just loved Detroit so much? I don't think anyone can know that. Yzerman deserves the praise he gets, but he wasn't the only one determining his situation. And the Red Wings organziation, with the help of almost a dozen other Hall of Fame players here and there helped to make that situation pretty darn nice. Plus, as has been mentioned, Howe, Sawchuk and other retired numbers didn't play their whole careers as Wings.

So the team that finally broke the '05 CBA (by signing the first Kovalchuk deal), and then put the first crack in the 2013 CBA (by having Kovy retire and getting out of the 2nd Kovalchuk deal), doesn't even have enough money to pay their salaries? I had heard grumblings that New Jersey was in rough shape financially, but this is pathetic. For a team that's had the caliber of players they've had in the last 25 years, won multiple cups, and is in a metorpolitan area that should draw a ton of hockey interest, you have to be pretty dysfunctional to not make that work. At least when Atlanta, Phoenix, Dallas, Nashville, etc. have money problems, people can look at that and go "yeah, I can see how that makes sense".

I'm just here to prepare myself a nice plate of crow for eating. I had thought that Andersson and Nyquist were going to be at or above $1 million per (well, Nyquist more than Andersson). Andersson got "Lashoff money"? Great deal for 2 years. Still haven't decided if Andersson is a future Top 6 forward or just a banger, but I like what he brought last year.

To me, trying to parse through details of what happened with Shanahan in 2005 or Fedorov in 2003 is missing the forest for the trees. By that point, both of those players had won multiple Cups for this team, and were in the waning phases of their careers. I throw up in my mouth a little bit every time somebody cites the "_____ isn't good of a guy as Lidstrom/Yzerman" or "I don't know how much it would mean to _____ to retire their #" arguments. Under that logic, Sawchuk (who was not a perfect human being, nor did he have a great relationship with the Wings at all times) wouldn't have gotten his number retired long after he died, since it obviously doesn't "mean anything" to a guy who isn't alive. I think both Shanahan and Fedorov are potentially deserving of having their number retired, but you CANNOT have Shanny and not Fedorov. Fedorov was a Hart-caliber player, and it was he and Lidstrom that made this into a pernnial Playoff team. Yzerman, for how great he was, was a one-man offensive show for years on a team that wasn't all that good. You can't put Shanny in the rafters as a reward for showing up in October 1996 and capping off a nearly-finished product...while ignoring what Sergei Fedorov was a part of for SIX seasons before that, including making the Playoffs every year and a Cup Final in '95. I would feel legitimately sick if this organization spent years tooting its own horn as the "United Nations" of hockey clubs, celebrating the Russian Five, and the first European captain to win the Cup, but then pisses all over Fedorov's legacy because he's Russian and left in free agency at a time when he only had one good year left in him anyway. The Wings basically stole him from Russia at the Goodwill Games as a teenager, and he gave us 13 of the best seasons ever to be a Wings fan. All the rest of it is just crap. Shanny and Fedorov, or neither.

Yeah, I was going to say, there really isn't a defined "top line", and if there were, Yzerman and Fedorov probably weren't both on it in 2003. Wasn't Abdelkader basically on the "top line" for the end of 2013 and the Playoffs. Somebody's gotta carry the piano!

The MTV comparison stole the point I was going to make. I don't have access to CBC or TSN here in Minnesota. But after beating this argument into the ground for so many years, it's almost come full circle to the point where ESPN is controlling less and less of the narrative nowadays. Yes, they're still HUGE, and they are definitely a major player in covering events and dictating the narrative of sports culture. But SportsCenter is no longer a monolithic force in telling you what events are important. ESPN competitors, like NBC Sports and Fox Sports One, have been traditionally mocked for focusing on niche sports and missing out the big time contracts. But just like how MTV stopped showing music videos and replaced them with reality shows and cultural material, sports is also succumbing to our "a la carte" society. If you're a racing fan or a soccer fan, you may spend more time on NBC Sports than you do on ESPN. You don't need ESPN for highlights or news, that's what the internet and smartphones are for. Any shocking highlight in ANY sport with any type of following will be posted on Deadspin with a YouTube link within an hour, and passed around on Twitter. Just thinking about the joke that the OLN network was in 2005 and to think about what it is now as NBCSN is pretty amazing. The reality is that NHL hockey probably does have 2.7% (or less) of the collective sports interest in this country. Football itself may occupy over 50% of it, and baseball and basketball are also huge players. The NHL is a regional "niche" product, but the fans are very loyal. "Mad Men" gets about 1/4 of the viewer ship of "The Walking Dead" on the same network, but that really says nothing about the quality of product or the depth of enjoyment by its fans.

The "Between the Boards" thing, which was basically invented for Pierre because he's about 4'8", was what made him particularly intolerable. His enycolpedic knowledge of the game actually is quite impressive. It's also completely jarring and unwarranted when you allow him to interrupt live game action with whatever school or junior team the guy carrying the puck played for. The guy does work for TSN also (IIRC), so it's not just NBC that seems to value him. He's just incredibly disturbing and obnoxious, and it's not surprising to read the story about him as a coach and see that his own players and media viewed him similarly.

I mean, okay, we can find some truth with the first part of the statement. Maybe. But that doesn't explain why the sport has had an explosion in popularity in other U.S. markets. It's only perceived as a "decline" here in Detroit because the sport was huge here while it sucked as an event in so many other markets. I agree that Bettman and Company have been guilty of catering too much to the non-fans in terms of the shootout and things that affect the actual product, but I also seriously doubt that "real" hockey fans stop watching because of that. We just complain about it, present company included.

I read this and was stunned and entertained by it. I honestly had no recollection/knowledge that he was a former coach. I'm 31, and my hockey interest kicked in during the mid-90's, but I certainly didn't follow much outside the Red Wings until later in the decade. And with no real internet coverage, that was mostly whatever The Deuce (ESPN2) was showing. If you really look at NBC's lineup, it's just littered with guys that have been more or less discareded by the game of hockey. Compare that to the NFL, where the same network employs legendary, accomplished coaches like Cowher and Dungy. Milbury's one of the worst GM's in NHL history. Pierre was a pompous brat and a terrible coach. Roenick betrayed his own union and the fans after the 2004 lockout. And Eddie Olczyk is f$%&ing Eddie Olczyk!

That is a good point. While Detroit isn't exactly a "destination", there are better fan bases in the East that will travel for games, and the allure of seeing their favorite team against an Original Six team could give a little additional attendance.

I think he was joking, but it's obvious selection bias to come to an internet forum for discussion of a particular NHL team and remark how popular hockey seems to be around these parts... There IS a problem of waning popularity with the Red Wings in metro Detroit, however. In the late 90's (when it was a very special time to be Red Wings fan), we could look to cities like Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, etc. and it was easy to feel like we were "Hockeytown". Those cities have excellent fanbases now. It will be interesting if moving to the East has any impact on the appeal of the team. Detroit was already a fixture with the national media, but will be moreso now that we'll play and compete for position with the likes of NYR, TOR, MTL, BOS, etc. The mid-2000's, unlike the 90's, had us playing a huge chunk of games against recent expansion teams in crappy markets, namely Nashville and Columbus. Who was our biggest "rival" in the 2000's....the Ducks? You could argue it the Hawks later, but they didn't get the upper hand on us until the decade was over. The Penguins "rivalry" only applied to two consecutive finals. Think about East Coast markets that have flourished recently, and all of them have several huge rivalries that seem to matter even when one or both of the teams aren't that great (PHI/PIT, NYR/NJ, NYR/WAS, PIT/WAS, MTL/TOR, etc.) Detroit had nothing like that dating back to Colorado, and I think that really hurt the interest.

This is why Wings fans are so spoiled: You could make a Mt. Rushmore for Detroit just of players who got a cup of coffee with the Wings, or played in their later days, but were legendary players: Coffey Fetisov Hasek Wendel Clark Brett Hull etc. etc. I agree with the original poster's selections, which I think were Howe, Yzerman, Lidstrom, and Lindsay. Sawchuk is tempting, but I have trouble elevating Original Six goaltenders from that era to any kind of pedastal because it was such a different game back then and they were tied to great teams for long periods of time. So it's kind of the Osgood problem - if scoring increases in the league someday, people will look back at what Osgood did and it will have to be explained to them why he isn't as good as the numbers and accomplishments make it look. He played on a great team right in the middle of the dead puck era.

I liked this point, though you could argue that 2 years of Tootoo at just under $2 million each is arguably worse. If it weren't somebody would've taken him off our hands by now for a conditional 7th by now. Sammy, IF he actually played and stayed healthy for more than a few days, could theoretically do some things that occasionally border on a Top 6 forward. There is literally zero chance of that with Tootoo. But at this point, neither of them are particularly harmful - it was just the combined impact of several crap contracts all at once. And yet, we had a built-in (cheap) fix for the problem because Holland had been assembling these Griffins players with late 1sts and 2nd rounders over the years.

Unless Alfie looks considerably older than he did even last season, I don't consider them too comparable. I understand your point, which is both of them are declined stars and Alfie is paid a fair bit more. But Jagr did basically nothing in the Playoffs. Part of that was a poor fit with Boston, which is a north/south team, but most of it is age. The Wings don't have room for any more forwards and there wasn't really a veteran defender that we reasonably could have afforded that I would have wanted, with or without Alfie's contract. I know a lot of people weren't high on the Alfredsson deal, but there's every reason to think he'll "fit" on this team, and it's only one year.

I certainly DO remember being angry about it then, but it's not like I predicted this degree of injury and uselessness either. I just felt that his effectiveness had declined in Vancouver (after a decent first year) and he's badly overvalued as a right-handed shot on the power play. Unfortunately, you don't have access to all of that information at the time you make the deals. The team was reeling from a summer where it was expected we would get at least one of Parise, Suter, or Semin, and ended up with nobody. We didn't know if Brunner would be NHL-worthy, and more importantly, we didn't know if we could depend on Nyquist, Tatar, Emmerton, and Andersson to the extent that we did. I would still have preferred that risk over signing a moderate risk, low reward deal for Sammy.

I think they could just delete the phrase "high risk high reward" from the title. Then it'd be accurate. I wanted Brunner back, but the more this has played out, the more I understand what's going on here. If Brunner were just a career NHL in his late 20's as a free agent, is that the type of player the Wings would target, irrespective of price? Probably not. I really do think he can be a 20-goal scorer in the NHL, but he if he does it while offering no assistance to the PK and causing costly turnovers, that isn't the type of player the Wings want on their bottom 6. Everybody compares him to Fabian Brunnstrom, but his career path could be more like Patrick Eaves. Eaves scored 20 goals in 58 games as a rookie with Ottawa in 2005-06. He never evolved into the finisher people hoped he would be, and had to learn how to be a useful defensive player to stay in the league. The difference, of course, is that Detroit has paid him $500k to $1.2 million per year to do that, as opposed to the $3 million+ Brunner wants.

I understand the logic, but the reality is that basically nobody is signing now. There was that huge spending orgy on July 5th, likely spurred by the two-day negotiating period, and then teams took a look at their cap situations and have done basically nothing since. Derek Roy (on July 6th) is the only guy to get a contract TOTALING more than $2 million after the first day, and that was just a terrible overpay on a one-year deal. http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/feature/?id=25880 Brunner picked a really bad year to "test the market" unless he had clear signals from at least one other team that they were close. Even then, Brunner is more of a "Plan B" type of signing. With limited cap money, I don't think any team's plan for the offseason revolves around a "show me" deal for a guy with that kind of track record. Still, I never expected it to go this long, and certainly didn't expect a Brunner free agency thread to stretch to 39 pages! Are his opportunities limited to the Devils or Switzerland now? (Or a dramatic reduction in price).

Here's some reading material for you on a very similar topic I started 2 months ago: http://www.letsgowings.com/forums/topic/74703-971-the-ticket-hocketown-dead/ It is an interesting topic to me, though, especially now as an out-of-market fan. Detroit is a good sports town, all-around, but I think it's a very balanced sports town. I'm almost 32 now, so I grew up through a very unique period where the Wings really were the biggest and best thing in town from maybe 1997 to 2002. The NFL is the biggest and most popular professional sport, whether you're talking about New York, Detroit, or some market that doesn't even have a team. On that basis, you could always say that the NFL is king. But I've never bought that the Lions have EVER been the most beloved local sports team in Metro Detroit. There's a lot of schadenfreude going on with Lions viewership. Even here with the Minnesota Vikings (which has its own painful history of losing and disappointment), it's still undeniably cool to be a Vikings fan and wear Vikings stuff. When I grew up in Detroit, you literally got made fun of in school if you wore Lions stuff. That's definitely changed nowadays, but the stink of hilarious failure will stick with that team until they take a knee to close out a Super Bowl win, IF that ever happens. I disagree that the Tigers have "always" been the favorite, but since 2006 (or perhaps the NHL lockout), the passion that the average Detroit sports fan used to have for the Red Wings has shifted to Comerica Park. I moved away in 2003, so it's been bizarre for me ever since to see all this love for the Tigers on Facebook for people that I know could have cared less about the team when Buddy Bell managed them. But sports fans are all frontrunners. You could argue that the Pistons "owned" 2002 to 2004, also. The Wings popularity in the late 90's was great, but it was also an anomaly. Just like Rangers in '94, the true fans will stay, but you can't recapture the magic of a really good rivalry (in their case, NJ), coupled with killing a 40-year Cup drought.

Maybe this is the way to go. If ESPN only showed NASCAR for a whole decade so they could say "Dick Trickle", would they cover Preds games just to show the yellow ice? I bet everyone on the East Coast knows who Filip Forsberg is by January if they do that in-season.