gcom007

I wanted to bring Alfie back, but I'd feel bad doing so at this point. He doesn't owe us anything and we have nothing to really offer him in terms of giving him a chance to win a Cup. The guy can still contribute and lead and he deserves a shot to win. I honestly hope he's able to find an option that gives him a better chance to win, for his sake. It sucks, I'd love to have him on our team, but I just think a player like him deserves one last chance to really go for it.

Do we even know if Weiss will be ready? I mean, he seriously had so many setbacks that you have to wonder and worry about how that's all going to go down.

Especially at the positions we end up drafting at. Too many people are aware of the European players now and while we still manage to bring in good talent, we're not drafting in the position to bring in the kind of talent you can bet on being able to build a team around. Even Nyquist and Tatar haven't proven they'll be those guys in the long term, and Mantha hasn't even seen an AHL game yet. You hope for the best from all of them, but you can't just assume they'll automatically be star players just because you hope it comes true. If we're going to have a successful team that's mostly built from the draft, we're going to need to tank, and that's only going to happen in the near term if we get a new GM that unsuccessfully blows up the team to change the makeup and hopefully shake up the image. Such a process could end well too, but if Holland stays on and runs things as he has been, we'll continue to be out of contention for the spots that get a chance at drafting franchise players. Is Holland senile too? I mean, seriously, show a little passion. You're either out of your damn mind or you're lying through your teeth making bulls*** statements like that.

Brutal, but pretty dead on across the board. I hate to admit it, but this is literally the first time in all my years of being a Red Wings fan that I feel like our team is a joke in the sight of the league. I know people have disliked us for years, and I know that many are just jealous while many others it was just competitiveness, and they still clearly had respect for us. But right now, I feel like this team has become the butt of a league-wide joke, and there's enough people with long memories that are no doubt relishing in our fate. It's really sad. It doesn't make me feel any less love for this team, and if anything, it affirms how much I do love this team, because I hate what's happening right now, and yet I still feel as passionately as I ever have about them as a fan. All I can hope for at this point is that someone in the Illitch family steps in to make the call to reassign or fire Holland and we get someone in the GM position that's willing to make some serious changes to shake things up. As I said in another post, it may turn out good though it might turn out horribly, but we've got to try something to turn it around. Worst case scenario, we end up getting in a position to draft the talent we'll need for a real rebuild. Either way, the days of the Holland descent into mediocrity need to end, as soon as they possibly can. He's failed for too long to do what everyone including himself says they need to do, and he's gone on to sign too many players to bad deals. Enough is enough.

I think a lot of people realize how terrible this Quincey signing is, but I don't think as many have a grasp of how much it means in the big picture. It's just utterly horrendous. Even if the guy wasn't as bad as he is, it's just such a terrible thing to go and do when our image already in the toilet. You do nothing and you can at least go on trying to minimize what happened today, but signing Quincey to that deal was a grand acknowledgement of the fact that this off-season is already an epic disaster for the Detroit Red Wings.

The really s***ty part of this is it's going to be hard to find a way out of this slide without blowing up some part of this team. This team is bleeding credibility, and even with a strong group of young players coming up, too many people in the league are no longer taking us seriously as an option. You can't change the ******* name, so you need to do something to send a message. That's what's going to sting about a new GM coming in. We'll lose prospects, you can bet on it. We'll have to overpay. But it's what's going to be necessary when someone new comes in. And realistically, when you make big moves that shake things up, there's no guarantee that it won't blow up in your face. It might not, but you've got to be prepared for the possibility, and you've got to do something to shake the image of this team up. Worst case scenario, you go into a legitimate rebuild mode and get yourself in a position to draft more impact players that will eventually help the team. Best case scenario, you've got a strong enough stable and enough decent years left in Dats, Z and Kronwall to get the ship going in the right direction without having to nosedive first. People get a little bit more excited about a new look team and maybe you get yourself in a position to sign the players you want to sign again. Either is a better option than letting this team continue to rot and lose credibility. If anyone thinks that the league isn't looking at us and laughing heartily about the Quincey deal, they're kidding themselves.

There were more FA options this year than there's been in awhile. Even Holland had the gall to say that when he was feeling pretty confident yesterday. It wasn't rich with superstars, but there were a lot of options that could've helped our defense improve a lot. And we just gave Quincey a big raise. And if Holland planned on making a trade, if he had any real confidence in that, why is he overpaying for Quincey now? We're not going to trade other defensemen to acquire a defenseman because we don't have anyone we could trade that would improve the situation. It doesn't make much sense, and even if a trade happens, it doesn't minimize how utterly horrific of a deal this is. Kyle Quincey is going to make over $4 million from the Red Wings for the next two years. Say that out loud. I will be a hardcore Red Wings fan until the day I die. I'm not abandoning the ship. But this is nothing short of a ******* joke. I lost faith in Holland awhile ago, but if he's not replaced soon, I'm going to be losing hope in the ownership, which I haven't wanted to do, especially in light of Mr. I's current state of health. It's a hard and unfortunate situation, but someone in that family needs to step up and do something now. He's had far too many chances to do something, anything, to prove he still has a handle on getting this team going in the right direction, and he continues to come up empty when it comes to addressing the needs we have, and he continues to sign terrible players to terrible deals after the fact. It's not even worth arguing about at this point: the Red Wings absolutely need a new GM, as soon as possible.

Is there anyone that still believes that Ken Holland should continue on as the GM of this team? Do we have to really hit rock bottom for people to wake up? Isn't this bad enough?

If there was a year to sign someone who could really help the defense, this was it, so maybe finally it'll go more like this: "We like our...eh, f*** it. I quit."

Maybe we'll get lucky and it'll be to announce a reorganization of management which involves him stepping aside from the GM position.

And sometimes, those moves that don't get done year after year after year add up along with the really bad moves that do get done year after year and then we can't even overpay to sign the guys we want...

It must be really easy to live life with such low expectations. I'm truly envious. And I'm only being half-sarcastic, which is what's really sad.

What would be really classic at this point is if even Cleary signs somewhere else. The writing is pretty much on the wall for how next season will go.

Better idea: just don't make the post or a thread to suggest something so absurd and almost certainly wrong. The topic was beat to death months ago, and again, it's pretty cut and dry what went down. To try to flagrantly spin another point out of it just to criticize or question Yzerman's ability is bound to not go over well anywhere on these forums.

But he did say "I want to be closer to my family" and getting left of the Olympic squad "definitely had something to do with it." That was a situation that was a lot more cut and dry, and Yzerman handled it about as well as could reasonably be expected. He was the one who came out of that situation looking like the good guy, and he did the best he could in trade given that his hands were tied.

Seriously? You're going to be the guy that's willing to get even close to defending St. Louis and his pathetic tantrum? I'm not saying he's perfect either, but for the love, none of my reasons for thinking so has anything to do with the St. Louis situation.

A tad extreme of a theory, but I will say that Holland is dealing with a generation of players that weren't in the league when the Wings were most dominant, and he likely does have a reputation for being cheap. Younger players with less admiration for a Wings team that has been slipping for awhile now very well might be less willing to work with Holland. Nothing about Holland seems flexible these days. Yzerman and Nill are new and they're taking chances and they're clearly not sticklers on the financials like Holland. While there may be more truth to some of the other stuff, we'll never really know, and you don't have to overanalyze his past success to see how Holland might have just grown stale as the GM of this team in this era.

Wow. I don't have much faith in Holland these days, but I honestly thought it was a given that he'd get at least one of the many halfway descent mid-level options out there. There were several descent options and we had the cap room to even pay a bit more than we'd like for some of the mid-level guys. But it's looking like we're going to come up totally empty again. We need a new GM, plain and simple. Keep Kenny in the organization if you can, but there have just been too many consecutive years now where he's not finding a way to get the things done that he needs to get done, and that's not even considering all of the terrible signings he has managed to get done.

I'm just nervous about the idea of 7 years at $7 million, which is looking like what it's going to take to land him. That's a lot of coin and term to hand to a guy who hasn't proven too much yet.

Who knows, but I don't think we're getting NIskanen. At this point, someone, Tampa or otherwise, is going to give him a huge offer, and it's next to impossible to imagine Holland matching let alone beating. And again, should we be upset about that specifically? I'm not so sure, because again, we're talking one big year on a great team. He hasn't proven that much, and that's a lot of money and years to throw at a guy who might not keep it up. The bigger concern is whether we let lower-priced targets go because we were chasing Niskanen. I don't like the way this day is shaping up right now at all.

I hate how appealing that is starting to sound...pure depression.

Was Alfie highly sought after? Not trying to take anything away from him, but didn't that come out of nowhere and happen behind the scenes? Not arguing so much, just curious. That seemed like a pretty unique situation from my memory, and many suspected that it had to do with playing with a lot of Swedes before the Olympics. The point I'm really concerned with was the final one about the tough sell ultimately, and I think that has much to do with the original comment. Like I said, there's exceptions, and it's not a hard and fast rule, but it's clear that we're on the outside looking in on a lot of deals these days. Hell, in many if not most of the cases it might be for the better, but it is what it is.

I love Alfie and supported the signing and want him back next year, but he's not a long term solution by any stretch and fits right in line with a lot of the older stars in their later years that come here. It's not bad having those guys now and again, but attracting them says nothing about our ability to attract talent that you can build a team around long term. Dekeyser was a hometown move. Weiss stands up to it on some level, but it's not a point I'd be screaming about, because thus far, it's been a bust for us. I hate to say it, because it's pure speculation, but given that he wasn't out of the woods with injuries and what we've gone on to see in the last year, what if other teams simply knew better than to gamble on him? I think the point being made is true to some extent, though obviously it's not 100% conclusive and there will always be exceptions. Any way you look at it though, we are a much tougher sell to UFAs and players on the trade block with NTCs/NMCs than we were five years ago.

With Ehroff gone quick and so much buzz on Niskanen, I've got a feeling this poll will be irrelevant in the next couple of hours.

I'm all for getting the kids in the NHL a bit sooner than we have in the past, but give him a year in GR. I wouldn't even go out of my way to call him up unless we got desperate. If he's actually good enough to make the team next year, I'd rather see him make the team out of camp and transition to the NHL out of camp, especially considering that making the team next year is still pretty fast by our standards. Let him take it slow out of camp with no pre-conceived idea of what his NHL role could look like and give him a chance to ease into said role without having to hear people comparing his play to little call up stints which can be hit or miss, though almost never a good indication of what a player will look like on a consistent basis.