Dabura

I will say this tho: Peeps seem to mostly agree that this is shaping up to be an unusually deep draft. (These same peeps seem to mostly agree that 2021 is shaping up to be a weak draft, FWIW.) So we'd have that going for us, assuming we don't get Lafreniere.

I can't bring myself to contemplate potential options in the 10-15 range when it's only mid-August. I don't want to become an alcoholic. I need HYPE! to keep me going.

https://dobberhockey.com/hockey-rambling/ramblings-josi-hronek-hlinka-and-the-finnish-wave-august-7/

Note: I'm only half-joking. I said it about the last two drafts and I'll say it again about 2020: If we pick 1st or 2nd overall, I'd expect Holland Yzerman to shift from rebuild mode to playoffs mode and make a couple of shot-in-the-arm moves like the Devils and Rangers did this summer. Because why not? We'd have our cornerstone centerman in Larkin. We'd have our cornerstone winger in Lafreniere. We'd have good depth at forward, assuming Veleno is a good 2C and Zadina is at least as good as Mantha. Throw the defense a bone (TJ Brodie?) and we may have the makings of a half-decent back end that could surprise all the teams that have gotten so used to building their game plans around "Detroit's old, slow, fumbling defense." Sign Jacob Markstrom, because I'd trust a cheapish low-key-good goalie as much as if not more than I'd trust a Billionaire Bobrovsky type.

>No Taylor Hall bish plz

I just looked him up and apparently he's 29. I'd thought he's 27. Pietrangelo sucks. nvm. Do not want.

Just that I'd be ok with throwing All The Money at Pietrangelo if that's what it takes to get him.

WINGS https://www.capfriendly.com/teams/redwings FREE AGENTS https://www.spotrac.com/nhl/free-agents/2020/ufa/ https://www.spotrac.com/nhl/free-agents/2020/rfa/ --- What do?

Pretty much this. Put Lafreniere on Larkin's wing and Larkin probably becomes a monster. He'd be potting so many points that he'd feel guilty about it and donate some to charity. Which is to say, Lafreniere would be doing Lafreniere things (presumably). You could put DeKeyser on Larkin's other wing and DeKeyser would magically become a 30-goal scorer. Put Zadina there and maybe he actually does become Kucherov 2.0. (That's the nice thing about Lafreniere having "centerman-like" qualities: He's good enough that he doesn't need to be playing center to impact the game like a centerman.)

OK, I've gone back and read through the whole debate. Basically, you fell into a Jonas trap and some side arguments sprang up and now we're debating lots of little stuff that doesn't really matter and we're all basically on the same page except for Jonas who kinda lives on his own island and does his own thing and no one's ever really sure if he's trolling or playing it straight. I agree with you: It's rare that a natural winger converts to center at the NHL level and it's even rarer -- bordering on unheard of, at least in today's league -- that the conversion produces an "elite, elite" centerman. And there's a very good reason for that, as you noted. I do think it's fair to say Lafreniere has qualities that suggest he could have a future at center. That's not an especially controversial idea. But I think it's also fair to doubt there's anything to that notion and to say it's all moot because you're getting a superstar winger and there's no point in trying to fix something that is the exact opposite of broken. At the end of the day, I just want a Lafreniere-caliber player. He could be a winger or a centerman or a defenseman or a goalie -- I don't care. I just want a gamechanger. If we get Lafreniere and Yzerman and Blashill (?) are like, "We feel he belongs in the middle," I'll go along with it. I'd expect them to drop it the second it starts to look like a bad idea, because I agree that there's no reason to run that experiment unless you feel the guy just flat-out screams "stud pivot."

I dunno that anyone here is saying the team that drafts him should try to force him into the middle. I think the point is that he probably has it in him to become a hybrid winger-centerman at the NHL level. Which is fair enough. Personally, if I'm rosterbating to the idea of Lafreniere in a Wings sweater, I'm picturing him on Larkin's wing. But we're all HYPE!-starved here and so I can't fault anyone for thinking about a center group of Lafreniere, Larkin, Veleno.

Admittedly, I'm not *quite* as familiar with Lafreniere as I was with Jack Hughes at this time last year. Like, I've seen him play and I've heard dozens of opinions and assessments and I have a rough sense of the player in my head, but I don't feel I'm currently capable of adding anything substantive to a discussion about the finer points of his game and such. I've gotta do me some more reconnaissance. I guess what I will say is that looking like a centerman when you're playing on the wing doesn't necessarily mean anything beyond the fact that you're an unusually rounded winger. Could be you were born to play center, but it could just as easily be the case that you're a much better player when you're playing wing because center simply doesn't bring out the best in you. In any case, if I'm drafting him, I'd certainly hope he's a Zetterbergian LW/C...but if he ends up being a Tarasenko, I'd be A-OK with that.

Lafreniere may be a centerman, but he's probably a winger. He's a good enough player that it doesn't matter.

NHL.com's take on the worst kept secret in hockey, if you're interested: https://www.nhl.com/news/dylan-larkin-feels-ready-to-be-detroit-red-wings-captain/c-308458164 The Score blurb is just shamelessly piggybacking off this piece. Sad!

Larkin, Pietrangelo, Veleno. Future Red Wings letter group. You heard it here first, nerds.

Worst kept secret in hockey.

I disagree with all of this. Fight me.

Naw, that's fair. I basically agree with you. I guess what I'm saying is that supplementing a core of "Larkin, et al." probably isn't quite the approach Yzerman has in mind at this time. I don't actually know the mind of Steve Yzerman, but my rough impression is that he wants to wait just a bit longer before he makes any big moves. That he wants to get a better sense of what we have in the system. Next summer could be the true start of the Yzerman era, with Mantha and Bertuzzi and Athanasiou all needing new deals and with Yzerman possibly having a s***-ton of cap space to work with. It's still sort of early days tho. Larkin turned 23 a week ago. Mantha (turns 25 in Sep), Bertuzzi (turns 25 in Feb), and Athanasiou (turned 25 yesterday) are several years younger than Tomas Tatar, who's doing quite well for himself as a Canadien. Hronek (turns 21 in Nov), Cholowski (turns 22 in Feb), Rasmussen (turns 21 in Apr), Zadina (turns 20 in Nov), and Veleno (turns 20 in Jan) are very young. Hronek is going to make the team out of camp and the other four are right there on the bubble. In Hronek, we may have a 21/22-year-old top-pairing NHL defenseman. In Seider (turns 19 in Apr), we may have an 18/19-year-old top-four NHL defenseman. All of which is to say...Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou isn't much of a core, *BUT* internal reinforcements are coming and the team as we know it could look radically different by the end of the 2019-20 season, even without bringing in any really good players from outside the organization. So, I'm down with Yzerman looking to make some shot-in-the-arm moves, but I don't feel like there needs to be a serious sense of urgency on that front. Not until next summer, at the earliest. Or perhaps the 2020 trade deadline... Not sure I follow the logic here. Why not just say we're planning on being done with the rebuild within the next couple of years? We don't have to commit to or renounce Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou as our core right now. Personally, I want to see what a team featuring Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou, Hronek, Cholowski, Rasmussen, Zadina, Veleno, and Seider looks like. I want to see if we'll be adding Lafreniere/Byfield/Raymond/Holtz/Lundell to the mix. I want to see what trade opportunities present themselves. We've gotta give the rebuild at least another season. We've gotta let some things unfold.

I believe we have one bona fide cornerstone player in Larkin and everything else is up in the air, because we've only been rebuilding for a couple of years and we haven't struck gold yet (that we know of). I think Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou are solid players and I'm hoping we'll soon get to a point where there will be less of a focus on them as other young players start to become NHLers and we get an actual roster. Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou, And Maybe Hronek (Question Mark) isn't a roster. We're in a holding pattern for at least one more season. Just the nature of the rebuild beast.

There's a lot of bloat on this team and our current core -- Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Athanasiou -- is basically a placeholder as we wait to see what we have in the ELC kids we're drafting in these rebuild years. So, we're running out the clock on a number of veteran contracts and we're waiting to see if these draft hauls pay off in the form of a roster full of really good young players, a roster that deserves and demands to be supplemented by big moves. The hope is that we're only a year or two away from having that roster. If, say, Hronek performs like a top-pairing defenseman in 2019-20 and Seider performs really well through a couple dozen NHL games like Hronek did this past season, that's a quantum leap forward for this rebuild -- if not the end of it altogether. I'm not sure which side this puts me on in this back-and-forth you're having with CRL (I've kinda skimmed over it), but, yeah, that's how I see it. We're waiting for things to unfold naturally and we're hoping the result is a good one.

I think Rasmussen is going to be a board-battling, crease-crashing monster at some point soon, but he looked like a very tall boy among men this past season and I'm guessing he's still got some adjusting to do. He was pushed around all over the ice. I wasn't thrilled with his skating or his two-way game. He's never been an especially good playmaker. Veleno's an outstanding skater, decent size, good two-way game, grittier than people give him credit for, solid playmaker. Zadina's gotta tighten up his play in the defensive zone, but the goal-scoring ability and playmaking ability are undeniable. I honestly don't know that there's much (any?) separation between these three right now, but I'm just not feeling Rasmussen in a heavy-lifting top-six role right now. We can point to Bertuzzi, but it took him a while to become 2018-19 Bertuzzi.

In theory, Zadina or Veleno would probably be a better fit on a scoring line, given their strengths. Rasmussen projects as a power play specialist and he isn't even that at this point in time. Got caved in this past season, though he did score some clutch goals. I'm open to any possibility tho. I'd be thrilled if all three of these mofos steal some jobs straight out of training camp.

Honestly, I'm expecting all three of Rasmussen, Zadina, Veleno to start in Grand Rapids; I can't point to any one of them and say the AHL is definitely not the place for him. Maybe training camp results will say otherwise, but I'm not counting on it. I'd say the one thing these kids have working in their favor is the fact that we only have three or four proven scorers in our forward group: Larkin, Mantha, Bertuzzi (?), Athanasiou. Beyond them, it's a wasteland. It looks so bad on paper that I almost start to miss Vanek. So, to me, it's looking like the non-AA second-line wing spot should be up for grabs. Rasmussen's not a fit there, but Zadina or Veleno may be able to win that job. And all of this is assuming everyone's healthy at the end of training camp, which probably won't be the case. In any case, the main consideration has to be "What's best for this player's development"?

(USA would go on to win 5-3.)

I'd have to go back and rewatch the video, but, working from memory, I feel like his Zadina take was basically "He had an ok season, slightly disappointing given all the HYPE! He may make the team out of camp and he may play his way into a top-six role. We'll see." Which, I mean, yeah. I don't think there are many Wings fans who'd disagree with any of that. (I certainly don't.) What I found especially interesting is that he seems to believe Yzerman would try to move out a firmly entrenched veteran like Nielsen if Veleno looks like he's ready to rock and roll as an NHL centerman. (Which, funnily enough, addresses a question @LeftWinger posed here a couple of days ago.) To me, a Wings fan, the idea that a Wings GM would make that kind of a move to accomodate a kid with zero pro experience seems silly, especially when you consider the fact that Veleno is very comfortable playing on the wing. But, to Hockey Guy's credit, he follows every team closely and he probably has a better sense of what Yzerman would do in that situation.