Dabura

I'm listening with headphones and there's this annoying buzzing and I keep yelling at the screen hoping one of these two will hear me and fix the buzzing.

So, uh, we just not calling tripping tonight?

Shut up and don't take my money!

Well. This should be interesting.

Stuck with the Chicago feed. Booooo.

Always nice to get a well-informed outsider's take on the state of the Wings... https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-home/the-dobotomy/dobbers-offseason-fantasy-grades-2019-detroit-red-wings/ (I guess I'm spamming Dobber links today.)

Prospect Deep Dive: Anton Lundell [Dobber Prospects]

I vaguely remember hearing McIsaac would be spending another year in the Q. Even so, that's pretty crowded. And, personally, I'm expecting both Cholowski and Seider to start in GR. I don't have a solid grasp on the Griffins' forward situation, but it sure feels like that group is also going to be crowded as hell, assuming the top prospects all start in GR.

So, uh, is it just me or is it looking like the Griffins are going to be absolutely stacked? Like, so much so that I'm wondering if there isn't going to be a bit of a crunch going on there.

Bernier and Larsson tonight. That's a pretty solid lineup for the 'hawks. Should be a good test for the Wings n00bz, especially Seider. I guess the Wings aren't revealing the lineup.

And his Respek For Da System is off the charts.

Give Veleno the C already.

I kinda suspect Blashill is going out of his way to hold out the big guns (Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou) for these first few games because their place in the lineup is already set and he wants to get as good a look at the borderline cases as possible.

Reading this was an emotional roller coaster. THE ROLLER COASTER CONTINUES

saaaaaaaaame

TBH, I don't truly hate any teams atm. I mean, I hate the Leafs on principle (insufferable fans and media), but it ain't the real thing. That might actually be the worst part of the Wings' slide into irrelevance. There's a whole bunch of hockey fan feels that I don't get to feel anymore because my team is a doormat that isn't good enough to be able to develop legit, reciprocal beef with another other team.

Right. I'm using "intellectual" as a pejorative here. The longer our rebuild drags on without that immediate and glorious payoff that everyone secretly hopes the rebuild gods will bestow upon their team, the more I dislike the "There's nothing worse than being a team stuck in no man's land" line. I dunno, but for the first time in forever I find myself not actively hating them. Which is weird because Frenchies are super-hatable. The frustrating thing about those end-of-an-era years is that we were arguably just a couple of home run draft selections away from things going very differently and this rebuild never happening. While it's not really fair to say our drafting failed us, we really didn't give the aging core much to work with. Well, stud in the sense that he's highly touted and thus far he's more than delivered on the HYPE! But, yeah, time will tell. Flyers fans will jump off bridges if they get bait-and-switched with a goalie who looked like everything they'd been praying for but ended up being a nobody.

My hope has always been that he becomes something like Martin Hanzal and Sean Couturier, i.e. a really solid two-way top-six centerman. It's very possible the powerhouse 1-2-3 center punch we're hoping this rebuild produces never actually materializes, in which case I guess I'd hope our top three centermen are excellent two-way players, any one of whom can be hard matched against top talent in a shutdown role. It's early days and this is nothing more than blue-skying, but, *in theory*, Larkin-Veleno-Rasmussen could be that kind of group for us. And maybe Pearson at 4C rounds out that group. *In theory*, that group could be a pain in the ass to play against. Low-scoring, tight-checking hockey. Throw in one of the high-end two-way centermen from the 2020 draft class (Byfield, Lundell, Lapierre) and that probably gives Yzerman a workable foundation for a new Red Wings identity and he can then start molding the team accordingly.

You, an intellectual: "I'd rather see my team suck ass for a few years than see them make the playoffs every other year and get bounced in the first round. What's the point of being a bubble team?" Flyers: [Giroux, Voracek, Couturier, van Riemsdyk, Konecny, Patrick, Farabee, Provorov, Gostisbehere, Sanheim, York, Hart.] Flyers culture is the same as Habs culture in that there's no tolerance for prolonged sucking. The fans are intense as f***. (I live in Flyers territory.) As for Carter Hart, he's a stud. Goaltending has been Philly's downfall for decades and now they have a highly touted homegrown guy who put up a .917 save percentage through 31 games as a 20-year-old NHL rookie.

YUUUGE news:

Bob McKenzie's first 2020 rankings: https://www.tsn.ca/lafreniere-leads-loaded-class-in-tsn-hockey-s-pre-season-draft-ranking-1.1364438

Yup. Which might not bode well for Seider's push to make the team. I figure the top four is pretty much set. Nemeth may be vulnerable, but I think they want to have a couple of big-bodied shutdown guys in the top four (DeKeyser being the other one). Blashill's been saying for a while now that the team needs to improve defensively and drastically cut down on goals against. So, if Seider isn't playing big minutes, do we even want him on the team right now? Feels like it's top four or bust, in which case he'll need to have a hell of a preseason if he wants to be on the opening night roster.

The season needs to hurry up and start already. I know that much.