norrisnick

Cop. Out.

I sincerely hope playing hockey doesn't cause brain damage as that is the biggest load of crap I've read in a while. The rink is enclosed so that's the reason there is fighting?? Seriously? That's just silly. 1. I'll keep debating this. 2. Or have neither? 3. Ever heard of cheerleaders? 4. So losers fight? Good job, you're still losers. 5. Lots and lots of things are historical. Very rarely is tradition for tradition's sake alone a good reason to continue doing ANYTHING let alone fighting in hockey. Now, I'm not against fighting as a whole. Just this contrived culture of fighting being anywhere NEAR as important as some make it out to be.

The quotes got messed up. There's an audio clip on the Detnews website in their interactive feature about Lidstrom and that's where the stick taping thing comes from.

You caught that during the Wings/Leafs game too, eh?

Victor Hedman. We need to figure out a way to draft this kid. 16yo defenseman, 6'6" 235lbs, great skater, physical, good offensive and defensive. He's playing for Modo in the SEL. EDIT - Hedman is in the draft that Tavares is supposed to be in, not the attempt to get into the '08 draft. My bad on that. Still, I'd take Hedman over the other two if at all possible!

Trivia of the truly trivial nature time!! Which Red Wings' prospect is dating Doug "Killer" Gilmour's daughter?

Apart from the PK? Chelios. I've read it several times from both parties that the two have never been able to click on the same pairing. Strange.

I would assume '03-'04, the first season after the return to the player's previous best stay. EDIT - I did some looking around to see who moved at the '03 deadline and the question is worded funny. The player got hurt in his first game back with the team with which he had the most (personal) success. Not the first game of the next season.

Maybe I'm mis-remembering but wasn't there a shove or two as they skated by each other before Igor turned around and took the poke at him? And I'm guessing he would have been more prepared had Muir gone with him. Hell, that's how a ton of fights get started. Some words, some shoves, someone gets his hand up high, and then they come off. At least the natural ones and not the contrived "So we're gonna go at the drop of the puck, right? Yeah, good luck." I guess I just don't see the need for Harrison to jump in and fight what should have been Muir's battle. If we had a Boogaard and it was him doing the jabbing with Muir, then I'd understand. But not a guy like Igor.

http://redwingscorner.blogspot.com/ Ericsson, Howard, and Ritola will start the season as Griffins. Meech is the #7.

What's odd is that Ritola played more tonight than Igor, Hartigan, and Ellis who are all still in the running for that 13th spot (not sure where Downey is but he hasn't been mentioned in a while for being in the running or as being cut). And I say odd in the sense that Ritola wasn't really in the running, but the guys that were all played less than 9 minutes.

I'm guessing one of those Game Misconducts is a typo as I'm fairly certain you can only get one of those per game. I think.

Muir is 6'4" 225lbs! Does someone need to jump in to protect Lilly if say Steen had taken a poke at him had they been jawing back and forth? People around here would have torn Lilly to shreds for having someone else fight his battles.

Igor took a poke (not a slug) face to face at a guy a full head taller than him. Igor isn't some feared fighter, so it's not like some goon picking on a smaller guy. If you're going to jump in and save your 6'4" 225lb teammate from a non-fighter at least spin him around and square off. Muir was in no danger from Grigorenko. Hell, Muir should have gone himself.

Not that it matters considering he was jumped from the side. He popped the guy in front of him then Harrison dropped 'em and engaged. All things considered it didn't end nearly as bad for Igor as it could have. Took him a couple shakes to get the mitts off though. Not something he's practiced I guess.

True, and I hope they gave him a plan to start slowly working on that during the course of this season. That way he won't have nearly as much of an adjustment period as those two did early last season. And if he can keep from losing weight during the season it'll be easier to put more on during the offseason. I believe he's not quite 200lbs and at 6'5" that's awful thin.

Ryno needs to go on Colby Armstrong's diet. Apparently when he was trying to crack the Pens' lineup their nutrionist told him to eat anything and everything he could (fast food, snacks, anything) to get his calorie intake up so he could put on weight rather than maintain or lose weight during the course of a hockey season. Ryno needs to pack on 20+ pounds and work on lower body strength to get his balance up.

This thread is really boggling my mind. This is Mathieu Dandenault, we're talking about here. He's an admittedly speedy converted winger playing defense. He wouldn't bring more size and/or grit to our blueline than if we would line Kirk Maltby up back there. And I doubt too many people would think that would be a better idea, though he'd be better defensively than Dandy... It's confusing, really. Especially considering he'd be about $1M overpaid for the role he could play for us.

How is Dandy a better defenseman than Lilly? He's a far better skater, but he doesn't do anything else better than ol' Andy. Sure he could line up as a forward, but we've got a number of guys that can fill out our bottom 6. If we're that desperate we can have Lebda skate up front. Right now it's last season's standings in reverse, so we'd be 2nd to last (or 3rd to last, not sure if the Cup winner gets bumped to the end automatically). Then after a certain point of the season it's whoever has accumulated the lowest percentage of possible standings points, then the next lowest, and so on.

On the cheap isn't possibly as he makes $1.75M (likely the reason he might be on the outs). That's as much as Lebda, Meech, and Ericsson make combined.

Well, take heart as we've got big kids on the way. Kindl, Quincey, and Ericsson are all 6'2" 210lb+ on the blueline and not shy physically. Ryno is huge and has massive potential if we get some meat on him. Abdelkader is decently sized and loves the physical game. Dick Axelsson is a goal scoring physical guy over in Sweden (probably a bit crazy though looking at some of his PIM totals...). And the guys we have now might not fight, but they aren't shrinking violets either. If you can list Dandy and Fedorov I can name Franzen and Lilly. I agree though that Fischer is a huge loss. He was finally coming around to show the potential we saw in '02. So sad.

It entirely depends on who is bringing the physicality. If you bring in physical players that can fully replace whatever the person they're replacing already brings, yeah I'll buy that the chances are increased. But otherwise, it's just changing around the strenghts. If you're a more physical team, but sloppier defensively and thus easier to score on, no ground has been gained. 7 game grind or not, because if you can't keep the puck out who says you can grind the other team out for 7 games as opposed to being beaten in 5 or 6. The Ducks don't win a Game 7 in Detroit. And who's to say they still would have won game 6 in Anaheim? Without the emotional charge of a huge last minute comeback to tie and then OT winner... you never know. Depends on which lineup you're looking at, but I guess in all of the three you've got a trio of HOF two-way franchise players in or near their prime. First two you've got three levels of power forwards (Shanny, Lapointe, and Mac). Third one you've got a stable full of 500 goal scorers and the top two defensemen in the league as well as a HOF goalie. I'd argue our current team is considerably harder to play against and more balanced than the '02 team. We just don't have 10 sure fire HOFers anymore. We're down to 3.

One of those Maltby's is probably Kopecky seeing as that's his line with Drake and Maltby (the note about Drake is probably because Ritola is taking his spot tonight because Dallas had Cleary's spot last night and Cleary is playing tonight in Z's spot because he couldn't go yesterday, I think...).

But the fact of the matter is that a winning team doesn't have to grind the opponents down or rough them up to win. They simply have to be able to withstand the grind and keep playing their game. The Wings can. They showed that last season and I have no reason to believe it won't continue to hold true. Someone wrote a great article either during the playoffs or just before that the current Wings are pretty much a larger scale version of Nick Lidstrom. Some may consider him a boring player, he does nothing flashy and he doesn't run guys through the boards. But the greatness (and IMO entertainment) lies in his subtle brilliance as a tactical master. But I guess it's not something for everyone. Which is why soccer isn't very popular around these parts...

But what's realistic here? We have no way of knowing just how well Franzen will take to a 1st line role in the NHL. Apparently he was an offensive phenom as a teenager, but had to play defense to make up for the shortcomings of his team (which he helped lift to the SEL). He has all the tools to be a solid scorer. He can skate, he can hang on to the puck down low, he can shoot. And as a solid defensive player he should be able to read the plays and just needs to put himself in the offensive role. 60+ points is probably a tad optimistic for his first crack at 1st line duty, but Homer almost managed that (30/59) his first crack at 1st line duty coming out of the lockout. Homer was a 30-40 point guy before that, and played far more on the PP than Franzen has to date. I see 20/50 being very reasonable numbers for Franzen. If he keeps clicking like he has during the preseason adding 10-15 points to that isn't unthinkable.