number9

DD, Just looked into it. Bowman stated in an interview that Feds was complaining about his ice time and that he told him only way he was getting more is if he played defense. Sergei obliged. Nothing to do with screwing with him or his D abilities.

Where neither understands each other and anyone watching can only glean half of what is actually going on *hilarity ensues* I imagine like a weird three stooges, except there's two of them, and one is the Swedish Chef from Sesame street. Man... really need hockey to start soon...

Who told you that, Bowman? To Feds credit he did very well playing defense, and i believe the Caps experimented with him at D late in his career when they didn't have enough Dmen on the roster.

Never thought of it like it, but very true. I think it's more Datsyuk than it is the NHL though. He's like the quietest, shyest, most humble hockey super star there is. Doubt he wants the attention. Crosby can be the ambassador, Dats lets his moves do the talking... Also he speaks very broken English lol

Damn I like that guiy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmGu6AVFRgc I really like this one. The guy who made it matched the music perfectly to Datsyuks goals. Gets me pumped for hockey season.

In like 7 years this exact same argument is going to happen with people comparing Nyquist and Mantha to Datsyuk and Zetterberg. The point is Datsyuk and Zetterberg are elite. Yzerman and Federov were elite. We might as well argue "No one will ever be as good as Gordie Howe was"

Other teams players have said the most surprising thing about Datsyuk is how strong he is, cause he doesn't look it, and how difficult that makes him to push off the puck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy37oxyUUAE

Is it just me, or is Malik ALWAYS complaining about how sick he is?

Good god cold water doesn't even faze him. Almost seemed like he liked it lol.

I dunno how he got the contract. Weber played on a worse team and scored more points in less games while, IMO, playing equal to if not better D. Shea makes 7.8 for a long time. Now a short time later PK makes 9 for a long time??? Anyone wanna make bets on when the next lockout will be? I thought Shea would be the bench mark for guys like PK Suter at 7.5 Karlsson at 6.5 Chara at 6.9 Letang at 7.2 Pietrangelo at 6.5 This guy is no where near the bench mark. I don't like Kovalev, but he ain't wrong. I guess it makes up for the cheap deal he took last year.... MTL f***ed up

https://twitter.com/KKurzCSN/status/502201324524425218 This may have been posted elsewhere, but I thought it warranted a discussion considering it's August. They stripped Jumbo of his C. That's a pretty big blow to a good player if you ask me. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the last captain to lose his C was Luongo to Henrik? Which made more sense since he's goalie. To me this screams a Thornton trade is coming. No way Joe is happy about this. I think any player would take it personally. Sorry, can mods correct typo in title?

I think they'll keep Marleau, just cause he's their only career Shark. But hey, if they are willing to go these lengths then maybe his heads on the chopping block as well. The one thing I love about Marleau is how much he pisses off JR. God I hate JR.

Remember when Holland spent 4.9 million on Samuelsson and Tootoo?

Except other teams pull out maybe 1-2 dark horses a decade and we're riddled with them. Heck I guess we're just really lucky!

But can they do magic?

So say, in the future, they need to select 5 HOFers, and it comes to this generation. The decade after the first lockout. Who would be the top forwards of this era? Crosby Ovechkin Datsyuk Stamkos Malkin St. Louis Toews Besides Ovechkin and Crosby, those other four can be argued either way as to is better I think. Those players were just off the top of my head, so please add anyone I forgot.

But like I asked earlier in this thread, then who do you want? There's not going to be any good GMs on the chopping block this year. Maybe Poile if things go bad? I really doubt Illitch is going to hire some upstart nobody from somewhere else, and there's no one in our organization that can fill Holland's shoes at the moment. If Nill or Yzerman were still around this would be a different story. In that sense maybe we should be blame Mr. I, not Holland, for not letting Holland go sooner and promoting one of those guys. People are mad we're not letting him walk, but forget that we have to replace him with someone. And GM of the Red Wings are HUGE shoes to fill.

That was a different time. Sheppard had 52 goals, and Kozlov scored 34! We'll be lucky if any of our forwards hit 30 goals this season.

We took guys like Datsyuk in late rounds because we knew we could. No one else scouted him. Or like with Zetterberg, Hakan saw something no one else did. I can't remember but wasn't Zberg like really underweight kid when we drafted him? Or something like that.

He's really gone down hill huh

And our 90s team was like... out of this world. Datsyuk would have had the best linemates available like Feds did.

Exactly what I was thinking. If I'm Pav, Couture, or Vlasic I'd do my time there, and do it well. But when my contract is up I'm telling them I saw what kind of "loyalty" they display to their vets and how they treated them. Then I'd hit the market.

I think they've been great so far, and of course cause they've learned from the best. Just not ready to call them the fersure next great thing yet. Yzerman has done some great drafting (didn't he steal some of our scouts? Or was that Nill?) But I think Nill has made better trades and signings. EDIT: And Nill hasn't had much time to draft so far, so it's kind of hard to draw a conclusion on his drafting right now.

Datsyuk never had to play on a defensive pairing because he wasn't playing defense at forward