kickazz

Well remember what Holland said before the offseason? He wanted team to get bigger. Ott was his way of getting bigger but I guess ultimately it comes down to Blash. I'd keep Ott over Miller if it came down to it. Lower salary and probably has more to offer since he's a centerman.

Wtf were the refs doing. Clearly no one was going to fight him and he just kept hammering away.

Probably better to have another thread for it anyway

Yeah, posted it in the Offseason thread. I agree with your thread title though. Apparently some folks thought it was amazing and cool. One of the players he sucker punched is in the hospital according to the sbnation article. What happened to good old "drop your gloves and fight man to man"? What's that like 3 or 4 sucker punches in a minute?

Pre Steve Ott

The game was cancelled, one of the players was hospitalized after Ryspavey's sucker punch. There's a difference between a hockey fight, a fall and an on ice assault that lands people in hospital. Not even the most famous goons or open ice hitters in hockey history would have any sort of respect for this. But hey if you think people being suckerpunched and hospitalized is awesome, that's your thing. This is coming from someone who is a hockey fight fan btw. ----- Update from KHL. Ryspavey is banned from the league until further notice. Update 8/9: According to the KHL’s website, Raspiyev has been banned from the league until further notice. Here’s a look at their reasoning below: The League imposes the strictest punishments in cases of serious foul play, particularly of the kind which results in injury to opposing players, and also notes that Ryspayev has been a serial offender in this regard, in spite of previous disciplinary sanctions from the League and a stern warning issued to the player in January of this year.

It's people like this guy who give hockey and hockey fights a bad name. Damir Ryspayev of the KHL. Move info on what will happen to this guy soon.

In other news. Zetterberg will be used as a Wing and Larkin will be used as a Center. The line will be Zetterberg - Larkin - Abdelkader according to Khan. http://www.mlive.com/redwings/index.ssf/2016/08/red_wings_outlook_henrik_zette_1.html The good news is Z will be a wing. But on the other hand he will still be on the first line. Not sure how I feel about that.

I don't see why I needed to respond to the other points? You yourself in the post said "I'm not saying D solely wins championships". Which is exactly what the rest of us were saying. Defense is not as important as "the saying" makes it out to be. Everything wins you championships, from coaching, to defense to offense. So what would have been the point of me responding to all that? The only thing I responded to was when you mentioned how I didn't talk about Murray. And I told you why I didn't talk about Murray. He just wasn't as essential in the final games as Crosby was. You don't need to get personal about it and say "typical kick does this and that" or "funny how you only respond to bits and pieces". There's PMs for all that.

If anything your points made me realize Glendening needs better wingers and the 4th line could be even better. So in a way you convinced me of something. Helm- Glendog - Sheahan. I still think that would be one of the best in the league.

Look. The original point made by the other poster was "who needs to play D when the puck is in the offensive zone" to which you responded "offense wins games defense wins championships". Now you're saying the best defensive teams won the championships. But to make the original posters point stronger. He's right. Look at the last Stanley cup wins possession numbers. LA, Chicago, Boston and Ptitsburgh are all ranked 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th in possession year in and year out. Which supports the original posters "who needs to play D when the puck is in the offensive zone". Wow you're actually getting offended over this and attacking me lol. Ok I'm done. For the record I wasn't the only one to point against out your statement of "offense wins games defense wins championships"

You said offense wins games, defense wins championships. From what I saw with Pittsburgh, Murray and HBK won games but Crosby won the championship. Although one shouldn't take what I said literally but in the San Jose series, Crosby took it to another level. Hence why he won the Conn Smythe instead of Murray or any of the HBK.

Because Murray didn't have much to do in the series. San Jose had what? like 19 shots on him in game 6? Pittsburgh's offense piledrived the hell out of San Jose throughout the series. 40+ shots in like 3 games. Absolutely wrecked them. Right so by these numbers then Draper was the better producer. Out of the 3 years you listed Glendening produced more only once but he also averaged the ice time of a 3rd/2nd liner while like your chart says Draper had like 12:43 TOI and only scored 3 less points. So Draper is the better producer so far lol. I mean not by much though but nonetheless Glendog isn't better not yet at least. Far as linemates, Kocur was not one to rely on for help with scoring. Maltby was a good linemate. But doesn't that support my original point? Make the 4th line more of a scoring and defensive line. Rid the Drew Millers.

Tl;dr We didn't use our usual 4th line to try and shutdown Johnson and Kucherov this year OR last year in the playoffs. We use a line that consisted of 2 "scorers" and 1 "shutdown" forward. So why not roll that way all season long? Tatar - Datsyuk - Glendening against the Johnson line. Abdelkader - Glendening - Sheahan against Kucherov/ Johnson/ Drouin. Not our usual Miller - Glendening - Plug. Now I'm not saying we put Glendening on the top line. What I was saying was, can we make a defensively responsible scoring line as our 4th line? I would say yes we could. But there's also the Nielsen line that could be used for tough matchups, so that could be a better option too.

This is a biased argument though. You are comparing Glendening who started playing a full season at age 25 and Draper who never actually played a full season in the NHL until his 6th season.Draper played like 20 games in the first 3 years and in his 4th, 5th and 6th years he only played 39, 36 and 52 games respectively. Not to mention Draper's ice time was 1.5 - 2 minutes less (around 12-13 minutes a night) than Glendenings. Draper played limited minutes for 10 years in the NHL. Only in 2001 did his icetime go upto like 15 minutes a night (a bit more than what Glendening gets now which is 14.5 minutes a night). And when he got the higher ice time his scoring went upto 30, 35 points. It would likely be better to compare them when Glendening hits 32 years old and see if he could do what Draper did. Which until now, no other 4th liner in recent decades has. In his peak, Draper scored 24 goals, 40 points , had the best faceoff percent and won a Selke trophy. But I will say it's a risky argument to compare Glendening to Draper. One of them was a Selke trophy winning, top league faceoff guy who had 20 + short handed goals in his career. The other only matches the points due to higher ice time. As far as Kocur. He was a fighter. Not much else. My original point was Grind line vs our current 4th line rather than individual players. So line wise grind line still produced more and actually was successful in shutting down Eric Lindros's line. Wheras our current fourth line can't exactly do that. In fact our current 4th line had to be split up where Glendening was paired with Datsyuk to try and shutdown Johnson last year and this year we rolled with Sheahan - Glendening - Abdelkader. So it took Blashill one top 6 forward, one 3rd liner and one 4th liner to try to stop Kucherov/Drouin/Johnson. Which is my original point anyway. Take a look at the temporary 4th line of Sheahan - Glendening - Abdelkader that was used in the playoffs. That's not solely a shutdown line. That line has two scorers and a shutdown centerman. That's a scoring line on paper (probably a mid to low tier scoring line). The unfortunate issue was the philosophy still rode on eating up shots rather than creating some offense. But hey at least it's a start.

That works in hockey ---------------- Anyways, obviously we don't have the talent we did with Mike Babcock's prime years so it's tough for us to have good matchups like we used to. But you would think with the addition of Nielsen, they would use him for what he does. He's one of the centers in the leagues that attracts tough matchups. He's not known for scoring 80 points a year like Crosby. He's known to be a defensive shutdown center that scores around 50 points or so.

You wouldn't put that line against top line. You would put Nielsen against the top line because that's what Nielsen did when he played for the Islanders. That's what Zetterberg did in his prime. This whole 4th line against top line stuff only started like 3 years ago when Datsyuk and Zetterberg started aging. Otherwise Zetterberg's line was always the designated shutdown line. Nielsen is the new Zetterberg but not as elite. As far as grindline. You're comparing a 24-27 year old Glendening to a 20 year old Kris Draper who only played a total of 20 games in his entire first three years combined. If you compared the them at the same age range, Draper was the better producer with around 2 minutes less ice time per game. The other one was Kirk Maltby, who was also a better producer. But anyways, I don't know why Glendening is coming up lol. We're talking about an entire 4th line vs another 4th line. In 1998, the Grind line combined for a total of 72 points in the season, around 30 some goals. Maltby scored 14 goals and McCarty scored 14 the following year. All with 12-13 minutes per game of ice time. That's what made the grind line so good. That's what made them famous.

That ancient saying doesn't work in hockey anymore. Without Crosby, Kessel and to a lesser extent Malkin Pittsburgh would not have won the championship. Crosby was the number 1 reason they won the Stanley cup.

Even though the "Grind Line" was a shutdown line, they were still a possession heavy line. They weren't asked to sit and take block shots like our guys now do. They were asked to create havoc and shoot the puck and make sure opponent lines can't even get their stick on the puck. I remember watching that Grind line against the Flyers in the 97 playoffs. They just could never get their offense going against us. Grind line vs the Eric Lindros line. They couldn't even work with the puck that's how possession heavy our grind line was. Now we have our amazing shutdown 4th line making Tyler Johnson, Jonathan Drouin and Kucherov look like allstars. Cuz now the strategy is "well lets let them shoot and see if we can block it"

Tweaking his lines a bit with the same players - Vanek - Nielsen - Nyquist Abdelkader - Larkin - Tatar Helm - Athanasiou - Zetterberg Jurco - Sheahan - Mantha Glendening / Pulkkinen Every single has one if not more defensively responsible player. 1st line - Nielsen 2nd line - Abdelkader/Larkin 3rd line- Zetterberg/Helm 4th line - Sheahan Every line also has a net front guy - 1st line- Vanek 2nd line - Abdelkader 3rd line - Helm 4th line Mantha Every line also has a goal scorer 1st line - Vanek/Nyquist 2nd line - Tatar 3rd line - AA 4th line - Mantha Every line also has a playmaker 1st line - Nyquist 2nd line - Larkin 3rd line - Zetterberg 4rd - Sheahan/Jurco It's really not that hard to roll 4 defensively responsible scoring lines. Bowman did it. Babcock did it. Tons of coaches did it and were successful. They have the players, they just don't get as creative.

"Forgive but not forget" This is something that's never going to go away. And will always be on his Red Wings "report card". It's a matter of forgiving him because of his 14 other years of dedication.

2nd one lol. Not much of a competition. You just posted 4 scoring lines with the second one and the 4th line would probably be one of the best 4th lines in fhe league.

Truth. Although we're not s***. Just no where what we were.

Will be interesting to see how Ott is used if at all. He's definitely a better faceoff guy than Glendening is and more versatile (using that word very loosely) than Miller is. Glendog will be 4th line center regardless of Ott being better on faceoffs, but I think between Miller and Ott, I'd chose Ott.

He'll be a fan favorite.