kipwinger

Either way, the overall point is that Detroit has general drafted pretty good the last handful of years. At the very least, our drafting during that span hasn't been anything like a disadvantage. However the fact that we basically don't have a single decent player over the age of 26 might better explain our current predicament.

Yup I got that Boeser's draft position wrong, don't know what I was looking at there. Edited the earlier post to reflect his actual draft position. Overall we still drafted better than Vancouver though.

Not really. Here's a quick head to head. I'm not super familiar with VAN's farm club so I limited it to guys already on the NHL roster and/or 1st round picks. 2013: Horvat (9th overall) vs. Mantha (20th) and Bertuzzi (58th). Despite worst draft position we got the best player (Mantha) and the better quantity. Give VAN some credit for getting a top center, but we still win especially when considering the draft position. 2014: Virtanen (6th) and Shinkaruk (23rd) vs. Larkin (15th) and Ehn (106th). This is a win for Detroit, obviously. Despite drafting twice in the first round VAN got a player they want to trade and one that is stuck in the AHL. 2015: Boeser (23rd) vs. Svech (19th). Win for VAN. Easily. 2016: Olli Juolevi (5th) vs. Cholowski (20th) and Hronek (53rd). This is laughably lopsided. Win Detroit. 2017: Pettersson (5th) vs. Rasmussen (9th). Win VAN, but look at the draft position. We couldn't have taken Pettersson and nobody drafted after him is as good as he is. 2018: Hughes (7th) vs. Zadina (6th): Win VAN, no caveats. 2019: Podkolzin (10th) vs. Seider (6th). This one is too early to tell. Conclusions: In these seven years we outdrafted VAN in three despite having worse draft position (2013, 2014, 2016), they outdrafted us in three but had better draft position in one of those (2017). Twice (2015 and 2018) did they get a better player despite worse draft position. Additionally, since 2013 six players selected by Detroit are already playing in the NHL (5 for VAN) Another three (Svech, Ras, Zadina) are likely to be in the NHL full time, (none for VAN). This is excluding Seider and Podkolzin who will both likely play in the NHL soon enough. Including Sieder and Podkolzin that's 10 NHL level players for Detroit, and 6 for Vancouver since 2013. Both teams will obviously have depth players from these years as well, I just left them out because A) they're depth players, and B) I'm not super familiar with VAN's farm club.

And the hits just keep on comin'!

Excerpt: "...the most infamous player in the Sabres’ 50-year history would do it all over again. Given the chance, he’d willingly accept the pain, the depression, the three-drug cocktail regularly injected into his hip, the losing, the eroding of his skills, the embarrassment of zero goals and – of course – the unbelievable gobs of money. But as he weighs those three years in Buffalo, as long-gone emotions return to bring him down, he pauses. There’s one thing he could have done without. “I guess I would have loved not to catch so much s***,” Leino said, “but it is what it is.”

Why bother? Yzerman just traded for Perlini who's basically the exact same player for a 10th the asking price of Puljujarvi.

Don't agree. Since 2013 Holland and his team drafted the following: 1st line center (Larkin) Two top line wingers (Mantha, Bert) A top four defenseman (Hronek) Several "wait and see" guys with top end potential (Ras, Zadina) Several guys with middle 6 potential (Cholo, McIsaac, VEleno, Berggren, Svech) And a boat load of depth guys. I don't think any other team has drafted as well in that period of time. Particularly given our draft slots in each year. IMO the disreputable state of this team is more likely attributed to the 8 years (or so) before that when we only had about 3 first round picks and whiffed on all of them (Smith, Kindl, Sheahan). Aside from Nyquist and Tatar we basically didn't draft or develop any higher end talent (and no talent at key positions) until we landed Larkin. We suck today, in part, because of the poor drafting of 8 or 10 years ago not the drafting of the last hand full of years which has been quite good.

Joe Hicketts sucks. Did anybody watch that sequence last night there he was knocked off the puck in the defensive zone three times in one shift by the same guy? Literally wasted an entire shift in our zone because our defender couldn't protect the puck and advance it. Anybody who thinks he's better than Daley or Green is delusional. While both those guys are bad, they are at least functional against NHL caliber hockey players.

Yikes, Joe Veleno with a team worst -11 through 10 games. Next highest on the team is Zadina with a -6. Kid's getting CAVED at even strength.

The counter-point to trade AA is that he's an RFA and so he's still under team control. If he has a bad season this year we might be able to lock him down on a reasonable contract for a few years. While there are definitely deficiencies to his game, he's still got the ability to change games and put up big numbers in small minutes. Say you can re-sign him after a bad year at 2-3 years at 4.5-5 million to ride out his RFA years. That's a huge advantage down lineup.

You just blew this case wide open. I use Wikipedia. It feels so good to finally get that off my chest.

Winnipeg. Ottawa wasn't a buyer at the trade deadline.

This isn't the one I'm thinking of, but it'll work.

Holland said after the fact that the NTC never factored into any potential returns. But that's sorta beside the point. If you were getting basically a 3rd and a 2nd no matter what you do, just take a 3rd in 2019 and a 2nd in 2020 when they were sure to be worse. Instead we got a 2nd in the year they were reasonably good and a 3rd in a year they're pretty terrible. All of which could have been deduced with information available on trade day.

Remember that time we traded the Sharks Gustav Nyquist and Doug Wilson absolutely swindled Ken Holland on the conditions? That's the exact moment Ken Holland jumped the shark (no pun intended). Condition 1: We get a 2nd in 2019 and a 2nd in 2020 if SJ makes the Cup finals. Otherwise it's a 3rd in 2020. Condition 2: We get a 2nd in 2019 and a 2nd in 2020 if Nyquist re-signs with SJ. Otherwise it's a 3rd in 2020. Why did Ken Holland get swindled? San Jose had no cap space and Nyquist was hitting UFA for the first time in his career. So he was never re-signing there. SO, in order to get the 2nd in 2020 we had to A) Bet on SJ doing well in the playoffs (ahahahahahaha) or, B) get a worse pick (basically a 3rd rounder) in 2019. Ouch.

Bold strategy. Obama can't take them away if you don't even have any.

That's Comrade Smarty Pants to you.

Mozambique gained its independence through a Marxist (i.e. Leftist) revolution, hence the rifle. Marxists, as you'll certainly remember from books that aren't the bible, have a long history of putting working class tools on their flags (e.g. the Hammer and Sickle). Hence the crossed rifle and plow. FRELIMO, the Marxist party that won independence from the Portugese, had the same plow on their flag. So despite your best efforts to interpret that flag through a right wing prism, it turns out you're actually quite fond of a leftist flag. Coincidentally, both you and them (meaning left wing communists) find common ground on the necessity of firearms. The more you know.

Of the guys you mentioned I'd really only be interested in Markstrom. Maybe Krug, but I have concerns. I don't like Krug on a top pair, as he's pretty easily out muscled in the defensive zone, which means he'd have to be on a 2nd pair with Hronek (hate that combo for obvious reasons) or a 3rd pair where the lack of minutes would cut into his offense (thus negating any reason to sign him in the first place). I don't like Namestnikov because I don't like the idea of paying UFA prices for a 3rd line winger who's only topped 20 goals once in his career. I think we can probably find similar or better internally (Hi, Jonatan Berggren!). Ditto for Janmark, whom I like but who is probably not better than Veleno or Rasmussen are likely to be. I suspect we'll take a center in this year's draft as well, meaning only one of those two needs to be better than a Janmark. I don't think any of those guys are bad players mind you. I just think we have what they're offering (aside from Krug). I'd rather we not look at free agency until the following summer unless we're addressing the goalie issue.

I mean, I'm not advocating trading AA. I'm just suggesting that it wouldn't surprise me given A) the likely return on a guy like him to a contender, and B) the type of player he is vs. the type of player Yzerman seems to want. I do think if it's not for a 1st then it definitely doesn't happen at all. Basically there are four ways to improve this team over the next two years: 1. Let our crop of 1st rounders in Grand Rapids develop into impact players. 2. Trade something of value for a 1st rounder and hope the pick is an impact player (alongside your own 1st a la Zadina/Veleno). 3. Trade for an impact player a la Trouba (unlikely given people don't trade impact players often) 4. Sign an impact free agent (unlikely given those guys down want to play for bad teams). Obviously Yzerman will do the first one. Trading AA is the only way to do the second one. And the other two are probably just not going to happen at this point in our rebuild.

For sure. Stack them draft picks. At this point they're likely not going to factor into our next Cup window, but having them around for trading stock is never a bad thing. I also think there's an outside chance that AA gets traded at the deadline, having nothing to do with how bad his season is going either. He an RFA with a track record of scoring, he's not really an Yzerman kind of guy, and he's likely the only asset on the team that is both expendable and likely to yield a 1st round pick.

I'm gonna need the Wings to keep Helm on that top line. Aside from the fact that spreading our offense out has seemingly made the team a little better, he keeps getting quality chances. Pump them stats up and someone will trade for him at the deadline. Bound to happen. And since we're likely not trading Glendening, and Green's trade value has fallen pretty dramatically, getting a 2nd for Helm might be the best case scenario on deadline day.

Can't stand him. He's a 42 year old man who acts, and speaks, like a millenial. "Connor McDavid is fire". "Ovi winning the Cup gave me all the feels". Ugh. What a b*tch. Buccigross is a legit hockey fan though. Love that guy.

None of which bothers me (or is as scummy) as basically every single thing they did with respect to the new arena development.

Sure, but that's beside the point. The Illitch family is hiring a PR firm because the public has correctly identified that they are scumbags too. An easy way to solve that would be to stop being disgusting. Or just hire a PR firm I guess.