-
Content Count
1,767 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
3
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Gallery
Calendar
Articles
Store
Downloads
Member Map
Everything posted by xtrememachine1
-
Rebuild on hold? Red Wings reportedly eye Girardi, Hainsey, Daley http://nhl.nbcsports.com/2017/06/27/rebuild-on-hold-red-wings-reportedly-eye-girardi-hainsey-daley/ I mentioned this in another post, I'm okay with us picking up "band aid" veteran defensemen until the younger defensemen are ready for the NHL. I'm just unsure as to how Holland expects to sign these guys. Defensemen, regardless of quality, get paid pretty well these days and we don't exactly have a ton of cap space.
-
I'm curious to see how he'd do on the Wings. He's low risk, high reward and I've wanted him ever since the first trade rumors about him came out. I don't know if Detroit, or more accurately, Blashill, is the right place for him. Seeing our younger players regress this past year under him, my confidence in Blash to turn someone like Yakupov around is pretty low. Yakupov could turn things around, but I feel like he'd need to be on a team that's like the perfect fit for him.
-
This is why I think Rasmussen was the right choice. The Wings organization has made the decision to change the make up of their team. To get bigger and be a more physical type of team. You don't draft a sniper over a 6'6" goal scoring center when this is the way you want your team to look now. All of their picks were big and fit into this new image, this new type of team. A player like Tippett does not. As Coach Herb Brooks said when he was building the U.S. 1980 Olympic hockey team: "I'm not looking for the best players - I'm looking for the right ones."
-
Well it could really be any number of things. Its a team sport, afterall. Could be linemates, strategy, coaching. All the scouts can really comment on is his individual ability which sounds pretty good.
-
Well several scouting reports disagree with your assessment. "Rasmussen can score goals and for a 6-foot-5 player, scouts are impressed at how well he gets around the ice." - Jeff Marek of Sportsnet "He knows how to use his 6-foot-6, 215-pound frame to his fullest advantage. He has shown more confidence this season with 51 points (30 goals, 21 assists) in 46 games. Does a fine job getting to the dirty areas to provide screens and get deflections, and knows how to protect the puck with his reach." - Mike Morreale NHL.com "A big kid with strong puck protection skills. Works hard all over the ice and has good playmaking skills. Uses his good vision and passing skills to distribute the puck effectively. " - Dennis Schellenberg Hockey Prospectus There are others, but you get the idea. He's not perfect, he has some aspects of his game that he needs to work on, but honestly they all do. No one is going to come out of the draft and into the NHL and be perfect. With all these teams going for the speedy defensemen, I want to know who's going to stop him from scoring goals in front of the net. If we can get a couple d-men that can shoot the puck hard from the point and this kid in front of the net, this is a good formula for plenty of PP goals in the future.
-
First, I'd like to say everyone dumping on Holland and saying he's an "idiot" or whatever need to understand he's not making these decisions entirely by himself. These draft picks are the collective input from scouts, coaches, staff, ownership, etc. Some of you act like Holland is just ignoring the voices of reason and doing whatever he wants. Ultimately, he makes the decision, but he's making these decisions based on the input from a lot of other people. Second, while there are players I would have rather drafted in the first round, I have to give him credit for going against the grain. Back in the 90's, everyone looks for high octane offensive minded players and we went with speedy two way guys. Since we were pretty much the only team going in that direction, we had our pick of pretty much anyone we wanted. Today, the game has changed and there are a lot of teams drafting those types of players, trying to replicate that success. There's also a lot of teams shifting their defensemen to be more offensive minded puck moving, speedsters. After watching this draft, the Wings are clearly moving towards being a bigger, more physical team, which kind of makes sense. Most teams are not built the way the Wings are apparently going to be built now. Its a copycat league and if everyone is building their team to be fast, who's going to handle these big forwards standing in front of the net? Who's going to be strong enough to get the puck off our power forwards? Maybe this will end up not being the best idea and it won't work, but I'm going to give Holland and the rest of the front office decision makers credit for trying to do something different. Nobody ever got ahead by being like everyone else.
-
Exactly. Draft picks are kind of a crap shoot. Sure they look good on their junior team, but it may not translate to the NHL. They might be in the wrong situation. Wrong coach. Wrong strategy. Wrong linemates. I'm not a big fan of hating guys that just literally put your teams jersey on their body for the first time tonight. Give the guy a chance to fail before calling him a failure.
-
I'm really surprised Tolvanen hasn't been picked yet. He was my choice for a first rounder. If we get him in 2nd round, I'll be pretty happy.
-
I'd love to see Tippet in Detroit. He did pretty well with Dallas when he was there and got the Coyotes to the playoffs twice despite having very little talent on that roster. He always gets great play out of the goalie position too. Unfortunately, Blash isn't going anywhere anytime soon and I doubt Tippet would take a assistant coach position here.
-
Official Expansion Draft/NHL Awards, Crosby love fest thread.
xtrememachine1 replied to MabusIncarnate's topic in General
I was expecting either they would go cheap in the expansion draft, hit the cap floor, and build through the draft over the next few years. Or hit the cap limit by selecting the best players available or waiting to sign UFAs in a couple weeks in hopes to lure new fans to the arena with bigger name players. Selecting mediocre players with somewhat sizable cap hits with the intent of trading them for more picks is kind of risky. If the other team doesn't want to waste picks for these players, then you're stuck with them. -
Official Expansion Draft/NHL Awards, Crosby love fest thread.
xtrememachine1 replied to MabusIncarnate's topic in General
The defensemen they got are nothing special, I don't see why these assets are what other teams would want especially at their cap hits. The forwards are way overpaid for their production and again, I don't know who would want them, outside of James Neal and David Perron. If the plan was to trade assets for picks or prospects, they should have gone with players that teams would find tempting. Looking at their roster on Capfriendly, its like a list of bad NHL contracts throughout the league. You're putting a lot of faith in a couple of unknown KHL players, players that don't typically do well in the NHL and Fleury, who's GAA was over 3 playing for the defending Cup champions. -
Official Expansion Draft/NHL Awards, Crosby love fest thread.
xtrememachine1 replied to MabusIncarnate's topic in General
Pretty underwhelmed by this Knights roster. I figured they'd either grab the best players available and be near the cap limit or draft prospects, get to the cap floor, and just build through the draft. Instead they took a ton of average to below average players with some pretty sizeable cap hits considering their quality and are up against the cap limit. If you're going to be against the cap limit, you should probably have some good players. Fleury, Neal, and Perron are the only ones that I would say are worth anything. The rest are overpaid. -
I'm inclined to believe this report simply because I see Mrazek making the same mistakes over and over again. I was blaming the coaching for this, but if he is cocky and overconfident, I could see him ignoring the coaches. I wonder if this was the locker room problem that derailed the 2015-2016 season. We were almost in first in our division at the all star break and then collapsed horribly, even with a very favorable schedule down the stretch and backed into the playoffs. Maybe the vets wanted the coaches to do something about him and didn't and that turned them off or maybe it divided the locker room in some other way. This is all speculation on my part, but there was such a sharp decline in play for the Wings in the second half compared to the first half that I figured something had to be wrong in the locker room. Maybe leaving him unprotected is a way to try and knock him down a peg and knowing that there's a high probability he won't get picked, its low risk. Attitude aside, his numbers were not that great last year and the second half of the year before were not great either. With Fleury out there, I don't see why they'd pick Mrazek.
-
Based on what I saw from Coreau while he was with the Wings and how he played in the AHL playoffs, he is not a suitable option to even be our backup. I think we need to go into a new direction at this position. Similarly, I feel the same way about our defense. If we lost any of them, they wouldn't be missed and there really isn't too much, prospect wise, that's filling me up with any confidence. Maybe Holland should consider cycling in "band-aid" veteran defensemen (Polak, Russell, Girardi, etc) until we have something that looks promising come up. I feel very good about our forward situation. They have lots of promise and letting these young guys take the reigns makes sense, but with the defensemen, not so much.
-
How much Hasek and Osgood made in 2000-2004 is irrelevant, as I said 07, 08 and 09. It doesn't need to be older goaltenders either and the situation CAN be replicated. 2006: Cam Ward and Ty Conklin 2007: Ray Emery 2010: Anti Niemi and Michael Leighton 2012: Jonathan Quick (made less than $2 mil that year) 2013: Corey Crawford ($2.6 mil) 2015: Ben Bishop ($2.3 mil) 2016: Matt Murray and Martin Jones ($3 mil) 2017: Matt Murray Most of these goalies made less than or around a million and either played in the Finals or won the Cup, so it can most certainly be replicated.
-
I've been critical of Holland for his activity or inactivity, but with this whole Mrazek or Howard thing, I'm okay with them protecting Howard instead. The truth is, neither is that good right now, I wouldn't mind if we went an entirely different route here. Howard is a former all star that was actually pretty good for a few years, but then got injured a bunch, and lost his confidence. He got some of it back and played pretty decent in the 30 games he played. Mrazek played great last year until February, fell apart and his collapse continued into this season. We really don't know what to expect with Mrazek. He showed flashes of brilliance at times, but other times, he's been downright awful. It probably doesn't help that our defensive group isn't any good either, which just makes these two look even worse. I don't think Mrazek is the next Hasek or anything here, so losing him isn't the end of the world, if LV drafts him. I would like to see us go back to paying next to nothing for the goalies and putting all that cap space towards blueliners like we did in 2007, 2008 and 2009. Osgood and Hasek made barely over the league minimum when they played for us those years.
-
Congrats to the Grand Rapids Griffins! With all the terrible things that have happened for the Wings over the past year... it feels damn good to win this one!
-
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
Doesn't matter who it is. Just think of how sweet it'll be to take back that title as the last team to repeat FROM the Pens. -
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
Oh yeah, that was kind of my other point, I forgot. It makes sense that Chicago and Pittsburgh are the top two teams in the salary cap era seeing as how they were the two worst teams right before it. So going into the cap era, they accumulated all this young high end talent through the draft, which is pretty much the only way you can win now because of the cap. You can't really build a championship caliber team through free agency anymore. Now 6 of the last 9 championships were won both those two teams. So basically the system kind of helped them too. -
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
Come on now, they earned those championships. Even the one against us, as much as I hate to say that. You can blame Bettman all you want, but there are several reasons why they went back to back: 1. They replaced meltdown Fleury with an elite goalie in Murray. 2. Sullivan knows his players and knows how to get the most out of them. Letang got injured, didn't matter, they just plugged in another guy and kept going. 3. Crosby's not the immature player he was 5 years ago. He's always been talented, but now that he's acting more like a leader and less like a spoiled brat, its contributing to the teams recent success. 4. The Eastern conference is actually pretty weak right now. The Caps are the closest team to being considered elite besides the Pens and they haven't gotten past the 2nd round since they lost to us in the Finals. No fault of their own, but Pittsburgh really doesn't have much competition to get to the Finals. Then to boot, in the Finals they played the Sharks (11th best team in the playoffs last year) and then the Predators (worst team to qualify for the playoffs this year). They're taking advantage of a good situation right now. -
Well if Holland's free agent signings are any indication of where his head is, I think NOT making trades is a good thing.
-
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
The Pens wouldn't have gone all the way with Fleury in there. The Pens were stacked for years between 2009 and 2016 and Fleury melted down in the playoffs over and over again. The only time they made it beyond the 2nd round was when Vokoun came in after Fleury nearly blew it against the Islanders in the 1st round. They get Murray in there and he wins two Cups in a row, not to mention back to back shutouts after Nashville tied the series. Murray is an elite goaltender for sure. It was a bad season, but the "dustbin of hockey history" is a bit much. The Wings were an elite team for way longer than anyone else could have possibly imagined and eventually they need to rebuild. I'm looking forward to seeing the new championship we produce in the near future. Not sure why people care about this. It stood for almost 20 years and it was bound to change hands eventually. The Pens repeating today doesn't erase what we did then, nor does it make it less impressive. -
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
-
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
I'll take it one step further, the Pens win/loss sequence in last year's Finals was identical to ours in 2008. Now they're following the same pattern that we did in 2009. -
2017 Stanley Cup Finals: Nashville Predators vs. Pittsburgh Penguins
xtrememachine1 replied to Hockeytown0001's topic in General
Looks like Matt Murray will be in goal tonight for the Pens. I'd say that's the right call. He's a better goalie in pretty much every way imaginable and he's been getting a lot of work these past few games. The real goaltending question will be, which Pekka Rinne will show up?