kickazz

Sure, defense is really important. But my point is without offense you will most likely NOT win a championship and that quote "offense wins games, defense wins championships" is nothing but a myth/fairytale line in todays hockey. And yes our problem has become twofold now. It used to be defense in 2013-ish and now we've got both offense and defensive issues.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

That quote is so outdated and untrue. Look at every MVP in playoffs and look at every team that's won the Stanley cup the last few years. Each team had maybe 1 actual top D man but the offense is what carried them. Crosby, Kessel, Malkin Hossa, Kane, Toews Kopitar, Williams, Carter Duncan Kieth may be the only notable D-man that was the biggest aspect of a Stanley Cup win. Aside that if it came down to anything on the defensive end it's the goalie. Look at Quick and Tim Thomas winning the Conn Smythe. Regardless of how good your defense is, if the goalie doesn't make saves you don't win. Regardless of how good the defense is if you don't score at least one more goal than your opponent you won't win. It's common sense. What's the difference between this year and 2013 when Niklas Lidstrom left? On paper we have a slightly better defensive core with Green, Dekeyser rather than Colovacio and Ian White. So we're technically better defensively. But what about our offense? No longer do we have the elite offensive guys Datsyuk and Zetterberg who scored 49 and 48 points in 47 and 46 games played. No longer do we have Franzen who scored 14 goals in 41 games. Yet in 2013 we went Round 2 game 7. This year with an anemic offense we're bottom of the league in standings out of playoff picture. What does any of the defense matter when we can't score goals? What does any of Jimmy Howard's 40 saves, 30 saves matter when we can't score a goal and thrn get shutout or very close to it?

^ I thought Mrazek was Confidence Boy Wonder..?

Offense. When we still had it we went round two against Chicago game 7 even without Nick Lidstrom as long as we had a solid goalie (that year was Howard). In Mickey Redmond's words "You can't win in this league if you don't score". Break out passes suck true but even in our O-zone play is painful.

He got to play with Datsyuk a good amount of games last year and has been consistently playing with Zetterberg this season, what more can a guy ask for!? Cmon lol. That would be a dream come true for 99.9999% of rookies.

I converted to pro-Howard after seeing how irrational the anti-Howard side was. It was starting to become ridiculous when he got blamed for every single detail.

I guess it's the best time to see what Coreau can do.

A nice positive thread (nice post greenrebellion) turning into Ken Holland too? Come on guys. Leave it where it belongs...

Nothing beats the ones from last year: Swedish Mafia and everything

Wow you think Lucic is at Shanahan's level??

It's so hard to predict good defenseman in the drafts. @kliq made a list of all the top defenseman in the league that were drafted in the first round and not many came from there. Look at Shea Weber.

This (past) week defined nothing more than the (past) week.

Two 2017 draft threads?!?

Lol nvm

Is that team leading?

Anyone got the tl;dr on Rich's posts?

Yzerman never had to deal with this crap once he got good players to play with him. Besides, I doubt Stevie would say anything differently. They're all similar quiet people. We need someone like Ovechkin or something. Need some locker room yelling. Speak for yourself chaps

Royal Oak where Tatar lives http://www.clickondetroit.com/sports/nhl/red-wings/tomas-tatar-locks-self-out-of-royal-oak-home-gets-help-from-firefighters

Down with the canes!

Even if you got rid of the points system and went by something like "wins" like the NBA does, it would still be pretty similar. It's not the point system, it's more like 15 teams in this league are all equally good/bad and only a handful are extremely bad or extremely good.

Drunk in a MIke Illitch hotel right now (Motor cuty casino). Screw em for cancellin

Don't bring that clown up in this thread. He's an embarrassment.

Realistically? Larkin and Mantha will be a notch below "elite" level at best. Optimistically? Larkin becomes the next Zetterberg and Mantha becomes a tad bit better than Franzen was. Pessimistically? They all suck for eternity. The rest I have no idea about. Marchenko is about as good as he will be most likely. I actually think AA has a higher potential than Larkin does but even that I can't really back up with anything besides just watching the way he plays. But his previous numbers speak against that.

Even if we got something outside of top 5, it would theoretically still be better than what we've gotten the last 10 years.