FlashyG

Holland has made up his mind...he just made a decision you don't like. He's not going all in to win right now, he's banking on the prospects keeping us contenders long term. Whether he's right or not only time will tell. Personally I think this is the worst draft in years to trade up in..I'd rather trade down or trade away the 1st round pick. Buffalo has 3, 2nd round picks I'd rather get them if we're looking to deal. It would be utter insanity. Ekblad may not even be the first defenceman taken in this draft, or the one with the most successful career. If he's lucky he'll become a top pairing defenceman, but he's far from a Franchise player.

What good is a guy who scores 35-40 goals a year if he's on the ice for 70-75 against? I'd rather the guy who scores 20 but is a plus player, especially when you're talking about a center. I'm not opposed to going after Spezza but he'll have to drastically change his game to fit into Babcock's system.. Nobody is going to take Weiss under any circumstances, nor are the Wings looking to deal Franzen. Ottawa wants a 1st, a roster player and a prospect for Spezza.

You can never have too many two way players. Spezza would make our second line better offensively, but lets not forget there were only 4 forwards in the league with worse +/- numbers. He's not the cure to any of the Wings problems.

The whole reason Ottawa is looking to get rid of him is because MacLean shares Babcock's philosophy that any team can be successful as long as they have good 2 way centers throughout the line-up. Spezza is great offensively, but terrible in his own end. They feel that they'd be better off even with a less gifted offensive center providing he comes with a little defence. Not really a good fit for Detroit,

I'm starting to wonder if you even watch the same team as me. Absolutely none of those guys were deadline pick-ups. Shanahan and Hasek were trades but they happened very early in the season. The rest were off-season Free Agent signings. We spent to the cap this past season, and while we got handled pretty easily by Boston, we gave Chicago all they could handle last season and were a Danny Dekeyser Injury away from potentially adding another cup. It's also been 4 years since we played Phoenix in the playoffs and we swept them then, so I'm not sure what you're talking about there. Back to our deadline moves, Holland pulled the trigger on one this past deadline and it's been the most commonly criticized move he's made in years (besides re-signing Cleary). Who doesn't? Are Wings fans so spoiled that we get angry because we've gone a whole 6 years without a cup? Leaf fans have been waiting going on 50 years... have some perspective.

Ericsson, Dekeyser and Quincey are not Jack Johnson type defencemen. Especially not the calibre he was when he was traded. We also don't have the 8th overall pick to offer. As far as how many 2nd and 3rd round picks have worked out...in the Wings case the answer would be many. Ouellet, Sproul, Jurco, Tatar, Bertuzzi, Nastasiuk, Janmark etc. Just because better people have been passed over doesn't mean we didn't get good players with our selections. Hats off to the Kings for their success, but we don't need to emulate every team that wins the cup...The Wings system has been proven successful too.

I don't think there is a baseball player or owner who respects Jose Canseco. In fact you'd probably find it difficult to find a more hated player by both groups. He's also the last person I'd want anywhere near management considering he's so broke he's resorted to taking dives in MMA fights for paydays. Lastly, it isn't a "fact" that hockey isn't as entertaining as it has been before...that's your opinion. Bettman's job isn't to make the sport more entertaining, his job is to make the league more profitable for the owners and he's arguably been the best commissioner in NHL history.

If McGuire hasn't changed his ways since his time as coach of the Whalers he'll be a disaster as a GM. http://articles.courant.com/1994-05-21/sports/9405210429_1_pierre-mcguire-whalers-general-manager-paul-holmgren Although anything that hurts pittsburgh is good in my eyes.

O'Neill picked Tatar in the last round and has picked the Wings a few other times throughout the bracket. Noodles has picked against every single Wing in both brackets every single time though. I think there have been 12 in total where he's gone against us. It will be funny watching him have to decide between the 2 wings in the final, (should Nyquist get there)

I'm not so sure that multiple browsers even works. Some people are saying TSN is logging IP addresses of voters and only counting 1 vote per IP every 5 seconds so we might be wasting time with the extra browsers. Either way there's no point in stopping now with so little time left might as well let them run just in case.

Its going to be funny how drastic the difference in vote totals will be if we get another all Wings final. We'll go from 5 to 6 milion votes in the semi-finals to less than 300 thousand in the finals. I think Oshie and Tatar have more votes in this round than all the other match-ups in the brackets combined.

Unless we get a bunch more people willing to auto vote Tatar is going to lose this match-up to Oshie. He has cut 20% away from Tatar's lead and despite having the chrome script running on 25 browsers on 3 different computers Tatar's still consistently dropping. Who would have thought the Blues would have enough fans willing to auto vote to erase a 200k vote lead.

Its possible you can't watch the video from outside Canada but you should be able to vote.

Tatar is up in the semi finals facing Oshie and Hertl has been brought back by the TSN panel to make this semi final a 3 way. So far Tatar is up, but San Jose's scripters are catching ours. If you want to add to Tatar's total here's how you can auto vote every 6 seconds. First go here Using Chrome hit F12 to bring up the console - In the upper right corner of the console there is a button that looks like ">" but with three - behind it. Click that. - In the bottom line at the blinking cursor paste the following in and press enter. setInterval(function(){$("#page-wrapper > div > div > section.plays > div.match-play.ng-scope.right-play > button").click()},6000) If you want to vote even more open a new Chrome window (NOT A TAB) and repeat the process, you can do that as many times as you want.

Just because he's created the technology to do it doesn't mean it will be cost effective to do it. Your neighborhood rinks are the places that would actually benefit from this considering it would allow them to pack extra games into the facility but if the machine costs a million dollars to install and 10s of thousands to maintain then it will end up as just another fancy invention that never got off the ground. Cost will be the determining factor on whether this invention is of any use at all.

Yeah calling Sochi, Siberia would be like calling Los Angeles part of New England. Or in Canada referring to Victoria BC as part of the Maritimes.

Somewhere The Axe is trying to figure out how to say Emdog in Russian.

No matter what they will have a chance to get into the Semi-final game. If London loses tomorrow then Val d'Or automatically plays Edmonton in the semi-final. If London wins then they play in a tie-breaker game vs the loser of tonight's game, with the winner of that game playing in the semi-final vs the winner of tonights game. Given that Gelinas (Val d'Or's best defenceman) is injured I think they're in far better shape winning this game and getting an extra day of rest.

Some of Guelph's sportswriters think that Bertuzzi is the MVP of that team despite not being near the lead in scoring. He missed a large portion of the year, both regular season and playoffs with injuries but still manages to put up PPG numbers playing on the 3rd and 4th lines. He also gets no PP time and kills penalties, even taking faceoffs in certain situations. Do I think he'll be as good as Mantha...No, but could he? yes.

Nothing he said was inaccurate. He said the Wings future was full of potential...Not full of NHL 1st liners. Just because they have potential doesn't mean they will all reach it. Right now the Wings prospect pool is ranked 3rd in the NHL, not bad for a team that has picked in the top 20 only twice in the past couple decades.

The rankings only show the top 10 but at the end of the regular season this is where the 4 teams ranked. Guelph was 2nd, London was 6th, Edmonton 8th, and Val D'or was not ranked in the top 10 Guelph eliminated the #4 ranked team (Erie) and London in their playoff run. Edmonton eliminated the #3 ranked team. (Portland) London didn't beat anyone in the rankings during the OHL playoffs. and Val D'or defeated the #5 (Baie Comeau) and #7 (Halifax) ranked teams en route to the Memorial Cup.

They actually have a pretty strong defence group, at least depth wise. This game hasn't really shown their strengths but they block shots very well and are very good at moving the puck up to Mantha when he's on the ice.

Considering what it would cost to get them vs what they bring, I think there are better options out there. Edler might be worth going for considering he's coming off a disaster of a season and his value is at an all time low, but I wouldn't even inquire about Kesler. They'll want a ton for him and he's not worth any of the prospects the Canucks would want for him.

From the reports I've read from Storm fans the injuries have done nothing to change Bertuzzi's pest like ways. He was public enemy #1 for the Battalion fans who were dumping beer on him as he went to the dressing room.