Wombat

I don't have numbers to back me up, but I seem to remember that a lot of times during the 90's/'00 glory years, Detroit didn't have guys in the top of the league in scoring because the team was balanced. No one dominated the score sheet or ice time because there were 3 or 4 really good lines, plus the team played a lot of defense. But again, that's just going by memory so I could be quite wrong.

You're right that it would be treading on thin ice to go that way. Personally, I don't think it's the way to go for the Wings, as you wouldn't want to throw Franzen into the playoff mix without playing since October if you can avoid it.

With more injury/cap space talk happening with Williams going down, I thought it would be good to bump this thread. Thanks doggy and CaliWingsNut for answering my question. I think the issue though is the provision in the LTIR clause that states: "However, if the unfit-to-play Player once again becomes fit to play, and the Club has not otherwise created any Payroll Room during the interim period, then the Player shall not be permitted to rejoin the Club until such time as the Club reduces its Averaged Club Salary to below the Upper Limit." You guys are right that should the Commish think this scenario is a de facto circumvention of the salary cap, he could punish the Wings. I had not read that part before, so thanks for posting that. But the clause does essentially state that if a guy gets healthy, but you don't have cap space for him, he stays on the LTIR until there is cap space, regardless of his health. Maybe someone should call into Bettman's radio show and find out what he thinks of this scenario!

There was some play by play guy on Versus a couple years back that would always call the power play the "man power advantage" and it annoyed me to no end. He might still be doing games, but at least dropped that vernacular. Personally I really like Doc Emerick's calls. But he might now have sort of a Madden status... people love his calls or hate his calls. But generally, when you hear his voice, it means it's a big game (unless it's just some Devils regular season game).

Not being able to tell how much he was bleeding... I would think it would have been better to roll him off on a stretcher quickly instead of helping him slowly skate off the ice. Hopefully he's OK and makes full recovery.

A guy like Quincey sure would be nice around now... But seriously, the problem with the bottom pairing is that neither is that good at defense. At least Ericsson has some offensive upside and it looks like his defensive game will come around. Neither Meech nor Lebda is the answer on the bottom pair. The Wings need a stay at home defensive guy for the bottom pair. Then, each pair has a nice defensive player (Lidstrom, Stuart, and Unnamed Stay At Home Guy) and has some offensive punch (both Lids/Raf, Kronwall, Ericsson). You'd think there would be a team that would like some extra speed on the blueline and would give up a pylon-type d-man for him. I'd take the pylon at this point if he could be a crease clearer.

Hopefully it's just a precaution and there isn't any damage to his eye... MLive Snapshots blog

My take is similar to some above but with a bit of a twist... I think a lot of hockey fans get used to listening to their own local, biased announcers for most games. That becomes the "norm". In our case, it is an 80% focus on what the Wings are doing (both on and off the ice). When the Wings get on a national telecast, we then have to watch national guys that have to do a 50/50 split on the teams. They aren't as comfortable with the names/stories of the Wings, and since they don't talk up the Wings as much as we're used to, it seems like bias. But it's not. They are generally giving both sides fair coverage, but we are so used to "over the top" Wings coverage that it looks biased by comparison. You don't see that in football because no team has local TV announcers that cover the games. They are all national, and so we are always used to hearing the same 50/50 coverage. Of course some exceptions exist, such as all NFL guys having to talk about Favre and seemingly all NBC telecasts needing to talk about Crosby. But overall, they do a good job.

Sorry if this was posted earlier, but I looked and couldn't find a topic about it. Ken Daniels mentioned Pete Cusimano's passing on last night's telecast. Here is his obituary in the Macomb Daily Thoughts and prayers go out to his family.

I do hope the Wings honor him before an upcoming game, or dedicate something to him. It's not every day that you can pinpoint the actual creators of a long standing, much appreciated sporting tradition such as this. The Wings are better for having him as a fan. Most fans want to impact the teams they love, and he did!

Thankfully, no serious damage! MLive Article It could have been a lot worse. I do wonder if they'll make a call up for the week, or just roll out with the 12 forwards they have.

The Wings were able to give probably their best defensive showing of the year with Ericsson not playing. What that tells me is that it might be a good thing to switch up the defensive pairings when Ericsson comes back. No more Lebda/Ericsson, they turn it over too much in the zone. Maybe try: Lidstrom/Rafalski Kronwall/Ericsson Stuart/Lebda

I'm just trying to be the friendly neighborhood marsupial here! To me, the key always is having roles for each player, and situating your expectations to those roles. Anyone that is expecting '02 Bertuzzi is kidding themselves. That's just not attainable for him, nor is it his actual role on the team. If Lebda and Rafalski play an equally bad game, then Rafalski is much more disappointing because he has a bigger role and bigger expectations.

It happens in all the sporting leagues... for a while, the East in the NBA was horrible compared to the deep West, but now it's evening out. It happens in the NFL too. You're probably right that it is a function of the salary caps in the leagues, as it promotes a spreading of talent to everyone. But it still takes a good organization to make a good team. Look at the NFL... everyone complains of parity, but 8 teams are great and 8 teams are impossibly bad. Despite all the work to help the bad teams, badly led franchises will still be horribly bad. The Penguins (to bring it somewhat back on subject) took great advantage of being a horrible team to stockpile great talent. Just about any mouthbreather would have been able to assemble their drafted core (Crosby/Malkin/Fleury/Stall). But the Penguins have become a good organization and a good team by assembling an excellent supporting cast for the corp. I'm interested in seeing how the Pens do with Malkin out of the lineup. they seem to do well when Crosby misses time, but we haven't seen them do without Malkin as often.

He's also the 8th highest paid forward on the team, tied with Williams. Take out Franzen, he's 7th, so being 6th in forward scoring is at least slotting him about where he should be. I definitely agree with another post of yours that he's a shell of his former self, but his former self was the best power forward in the league. At his current state, he can still help a team and I think he's giving the Wings a pretty decent bang for their buck.

I was thinking the exact same thing! the conferences are pretty equal across the top, but the Western Conference has a bit more depth. At least on paper... perhaps by the end of the season some of the 5-8 seeds on the East will get a bit frisky. The Pens will be there in contention... they are a really good team.

I thought the Edmonton game was the worst he played as a Red Wing this year. Sure, he scored, but he was making a lot of bad passes, turnovers, and had some lazy plays. However, on the aggregate, I think he's been playing VERY well. I'll take 1 bad game every 10 or so games from someone making $1.5. I've been in favor of Bertuzzi being a Wing before they traded for him and I'm glad he's back. He made the right financial decision to go for the 2 year contract in Anaheim, but it may not have been the right decision for his overall happiness. Go Bert, time to step up!

Doggy, thanks for posting this and trying admirably to sift through the misinformation posted in this thread. I have a general question for everyone regarding the "example" scenario in the CBA (posted earlier by Doggy) I bolded the last sentence in the example. Here is what I am wondering... let's say the Wings make a trade for a player that makes less than Franzen (let's call him the Replacement Player). It seems like the CBA is saying that Franzen cannot be activated from the LTIR until the Wings are cap compliant (no other punishment for Franzen being "healthy" and being over the cap with him + his replacement player). So couldn't the Wings replace Franzen with a trade, and simply keep him inactive on the LTIR until the playoffs start? Hopefully I didn't confuse the point too much, but it reads to me that the NHL punishment for a team being over the cap when a long term injury ends is to keep the guy on LTIR, and thus ineligible to play. Players on LTIR can practice. Franzen probably won't be in game condition until mid-March at the earliest (4 months is VERY optimistic). So, why not replace him with a quality player via trade, and keep Franzen on LTIR until the playoffs. Then, the cap doesn't matter, so he can be activated and the Wings can play everyone regardless of contract value. Sure, it means Franzen doesn't get any warmup regular season games to judge how he is. But really, he's not going to be himself until next year at least with this knee injury (he can be in playing condition earlier, but won't be back to full form until next season). Perhaps he can help the Wings as a 3rd/4th liner this playoff season, and keeping him hidden on LTIR allows the Wings to add another bona fide 2nd liner to the fold. Again, apologies if I'm not clear in my question.

either you shoot, or you deke. When a player shoots, it doesn't look like he's "trying" because it isn't very creative. But it can be successful. And I'm sure they were trying. If the average shooter is successful on about 1/3 of his shootout attempts, about 30% of the time by random occurrance your team will not have any of their 3 shooters score. you'll get 1 goal about 44% of the time, 2 goals 22%, and have all 3 score in the shootout about 4% of the time. Getting shutout on the shootouts isn't that rare. Actually, I kind of liked that they didn't luck their way into a free 2nd point... maybe they can use it as a teaching point to give effort ALL game long so they can actually get 2 points!

I agree that it's attitude and more importantly, accountability. while I don't want players calling each other out in the papers, there's a little too much "I'm OK, you're OK" going on with the team. The guys that aren't playing well (IMO, Osgood, Rafalski, Lebda, Leino) need to admit that they aren't playing well and start playing well! I just am not seeing the players holding themselves accountable, and perhaps that is partly a coaching/management problem for not holding them accountable. I think Babcock is a great coach, but I think he started the exact same line in the last two games and the same thing happened both times... the other team scored instantly!

Lilja isn't the answer. He played almost every game for the Wings up until last February and the defense/PK were still brutal the whole time. Sure, he'd help over Lebda, but Lilja is not the defensive panacea. When everyone is actually playing and playing smart, this is still a formidable team at both ends of the ice. It just isn't happening 60 minutes every game.

I agree. I think the D are not being patient with the puck and are forcing high-risk fancy passes. When this team was working it's best in the 07/08 Cup year, the defense was machine-like in how it moved the puck. They would pass back and forth and wait for the easy, smart play. Now they seem to get the puck and try to move it up ice as fast as possible. To me, puck possession style denotes patience, and the Wings are not showing enough of that when they have the puck.

Back then, I wanted the Wings to keep Quincey. Not because he was necessarily better than Lebda or Meech, but because he was a different type of defenseman than them. Lebda and Meech are basically the same player, which is basically a faster, less skilled Rafalski. The Wings already had a lot of that type of player on the blueline. Quincey was a bit more of a stay-at-home guy that could drop the gloves if needed and be a more physical element on the blueline. That's why I wanted him to stay. I doubt if he did stay that he'd be the player he is today. His growth would probably still be stunted. We'll never know, but it seems to be about universally acknowledged that signing Chelios for last year was a bad move, and losing Quincey was a result of keeping Chelios.

Just something to think about... if a team goes 3-2 through every 5 games in a season, they win 50 games. So a 50 win team is only winning 60% of it's games. It's been 5 games. It's a long season and every team gets curb stomped once in a while. To me, it's too early to make any real judgments. Do we actually think they are a 32-win team because they are 2-3 through 5 games? Give some more games first.

You're looking for the wrong player then. He hasn't been that player since he was in Vancouver, 5 teams ago for him. Whether it's easing off because of the Moore incident, injuries (particularly to his back), age, or a combo of all of those, he has not been the player he was that gave bone crunching hits and ran people consistently. maybe if he feels healthy he can do some of that again, but I'm not expecting it. To me it seems like another case of expecting too much out of a player. Should we expect him to use his body and hit some? Sure. But I think it's folly to expect him to crush people almost every shift.