Dabura

If a surprise 2020 postseason berth isn't in the cards, I guess I'd hope for the kind of good fortune the Rangers have had lately. They had a pretty decent thing going with their rebuild/retool, but it wasn't anything special. Larkin and Zibanejad had nearly identical 2018-19 stat lines. If Brady Skjei is a future 1D, so is Hronek. The long-term outlook in net was and remains up in the air. What changed: They lucked into Kakko and overpaid a marquee UFA who'd been credibly linked to them for months. All of a sudden, they're relevant again. I guess the DRW equivalent would be lucking into [insert undisputed #2 kid in the 2020 draft, let's say Lucas Raymond] and signing Trouba -- on top of having shed some more veterans and having seen significant growth in key young players. I'd also like to see us land Gusev this summer.

His last four seasons (all with VAN): 2015-16 -- .915 (33 GP) 2016-17 -- .910 (26 GP) 2017-18 -- .912 (60 GP) 2018-19 -- .912 (60 GP) I'll take it.

Yeah, I've been playing around with some possible looks for our D and the recurring theme is "Hope the kids take quantum leaps forward, or else we're going to need to bring in some stabilizing veteran help." That, and "I have absolutely no idea what we have in Oliwer Kaski and it's both exciting and frustrating." The only concern I have with a 29-year-old guy like Krug is that the kids probably will be ready to drive the bus soon enough, just not within the next year. So, you could be signing a 29-year-old Krug for 5+ years and a lot of money just as the kids are starting to take over. Could be that two or three years into his deal it becomes clear that we didn't really need to sign a past-his-prime power play specialist to a big deal. Admittedly tho, that's nitpicking. You can never have too much depth, especially on D. ...Still, I'd prefer Trouba. He's young enough that he fits with our rebuild timeline -- and it's probably fair to say he's more of an Yzerman guy, i.e. a big-bodied mobile defenseman who can log big minutes. Trouba probably doesn't give us that elusive 1D, but I do think signing him would be a big step forward for the rebuild and organization. Krug, maybe not so much.

I view the whole "(un)attractive UFA destination" thing as sort of a chicken-or-the-egg black box. If an up-and-coming team goes on a deep playoff run and then they sign a couple of big-name UFAs in the summer, is that a sign that top players generally view that team as a very attractive destination...or is it simply the result of the GM aggressively pursuing big names because he believes he's opened up a Cup window? The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. That being said...I doubt the Wings are widely regarded as a very hot destination right now, but, at the same time, I think the biggest obstacle (if you want to call it that) to us signing big names is a simple lack of appetite on our end. Could we have signed Matt Duchene? Maybe. Would signing Matt Duchene have been a smart move? Probably not.

This offseason is soul-suckingly boring. I need rosterbation material or I'm gonna go stir-crazy. It has been foretold. Yeah, it's not an especially exciting UFA class. And Yzerman doesn't have a history of making big splashes in free agency. And we're probably going to end the season as a basement team. So...yeah. Maybe we'll have a lot of cap space, and maybe that leads to some big happenings. We'll see! I think it's safe to assume Daley and Ericsson will be gone. I wouldn't rule out Green just yet, though I'm leaning towards "Won't be back." I'm assuming Trouba re-signs with the Rangers, but it's entirely possible he continues his Sherman's March to Free Agency. I'm not keen on signing Krug to a long-term deal, but he's a hometown guy who likes the Wings so maybe we could get him on a hometown discount. (Not bloody likely, but ya never know.) Howard will sign a twelve-year extension, because he's already been with us for a decade so we might as well make it two decades.

Definitely. I think you can get a sense of the man from the body of work...but even then, we're a few years out from really knowing how we fared in roughly half of his drafts.

"It's a paycheck. I dunno."

That's some A1 bulletin board material for any team he snubbed. What a Dzingus.

I'm not saying we didn't get good players under Wright. I'm asking if [name pulled from a hat] likely would not have been able to match or outperform Wright's track record with the Wings. Larkin was a home run, though a lot of people had him going right around where we took him. Svechnikov is starting to feel like a mistake, though he's had s*** luck with injuries and that hasn't helped his cause one bit. Cholowski and Hronek are still question marks, though the early returns are very promising. Rasmussen is a big question mark. Zadina's probably going to be a very good NHLer, but there are thousands of hockey people who would've taken him where we took him. Veleno fell into our laps. I give Wright credit for not overthinking that pick (same with Zadina), but at the end of the day the jury's out on Veleno (same with Zadina). Berggren and McIsaac are question marks who went right around where they were projected to go. Lindstrom could be Mattias Ekholm or he could be Alexey Marchenko. Seider was an Yzerman pick. So, I dunno, you tell me: Are we looking at a big loss? And look at the lesser names we've picked. Does that track record scream "Very smart" or "Not very smart" or "About what you'd expect from your average director of amateur scouting"? I lean towards "About what you'd expect." I think the Wings drafted pretty well under Wright. There were two or three drafts that I was really pleased with at the time. I just don't feel like we're losing anything terribly special in Wright. I could be wrong.

I dunno that Wright is a big loss, tbh. Looking back on the drafts Wright ran (2014-2019), I think the best thing I can say about our amateur scouting under Wright is that it was pretty good at finding decent players; there aren't many clear mistakes and there aren't many clear home runs and there are a lot of Christoffer Ehns. In other words: what you'd expect from a competent director of amateur scouting. Of course, it's still too early to really reach any kind of authoritative verdict on two or three of those drafts. For example, we're still not sure what we have in Cholowski and Hronek and they were selected in 2016, which was only the third draft of the Wright era. So, I think it's fair to say the jury's out and won't return for at least a couple more years. Having said all that, Wright could be better suited for Edmonton's situation. The Oilers have two stars in McDavid & Draisaitl and Bouchard or Broberg could become a 1D at some point down the road. All they need, then, is a steady supply of serviceable NHLers with some overachievers sprinkled in. They don't need gamechangers the way we need them. I'm basically agnostic about Draper; I can't point to something and say, "This was(n't) a Draper decision" or "This has Draper's fingerprints all over it."

Not a prerequisite to greatness, I just think it's funny how Hughes-Seider is, in theory, That Dynamic Pairing We Have in Our Minds When We Complain That the Wings Don't Have "That Kind of Pairing." Having Hughes and Seider and Hronek and the others in the system would be pretty swell. Of course, I could flip that around and half-seriously lament the fact that we maybe could've been looking at, say, a future 1-2-3 of Larkin, Cozens, Veleno at center. At the end of the day, it's all coulda shoulda woulda. Sucks that Zadina didn't score 90 goals with the Griffins and sucks that we don't get to read tons of non-Detroit think pieces breathlessly praising Seider -- but I have zero complaints with those two picks. Regardless of anything the blogosphere intelligentsia set says to the contrary, no two or three or four picks are necessarily going to make or break this organization's rebuild. We're working with a rebuild timeline of something like five or six years and that's a lot of time to collect a lot of Pokemon. I hated the Rasmussen pick at the time, but I talked myself into seeing it as just one of many puzzle pieces. Even if all Rasmussen becomes is a uniquely effective power play specialist, one Rasmussen power play goal could be the difference between winning Game 7 of the SCF and losing Game 7 of the SCF. We won't know how all of these futures will/won't come together until, at the very earliest, we're waist-deep in those years. Could be that we get two franchise cornerstone players in the 2020 draft and by 2022 the whole "Larkin is our future" paradigm has been rendered totally obsolete.

I want real good everydayer human eraser good person players.

Meme magic is real.

Yeah, prob'ly something like this. I won't be surprised if all the kids we want on that opening night roster -- Zadina, Cholowski, Rasmussen, Veleno -- start in GR. Though, on the other hand, I believe Yzerman has said he'll look to move out some players if kids end up stealing jobs in training camp. FWIW, the thing I keep hearing about Yzerman is he wants ultra-competitive players. And that fact is always mentioned in the context of, like, "We're kinda surprised how adamant he is about this. Zero tolerance for Lazy and Sucks." I guess I'd like to think things had gotten stale under Holland and players generally weren't as motivated (internally and externally) as they should've been and that this accounts for some of our suckage over the past few years. (I vaguely remember Tatar publicly saying Vegas's practices were much faster paced and much more intense than ours and that this came as a big surprise to him...)

I just think it's sort of cosmically funny that Hughes-Seider is, in theory, a perfect D pairing. LH-RH. Hughes is your prototypical tiny rover guy and Seider is your prototypical big-bodied two-way workhorse.

Quinn Hughes / Moritz Seider

HYPE!

WTF I hate Zadina now.

The Metro's a bunch of thirsty virgins, but I can't say I blame Gorton or Shero for being super aggressive. You don't sit on top picks, especially if you're trying to convince Taylor Hall to stick around.

Oh, it was definitely a high price to pay. I guess I'm just in the minority in thinking they had a clear need for a proven top-six two-way pivot in that 2C role. That top line can role over people in the regular season, but they need some Ryan O'Reilly-esque defensive mettle behind them if they want to do some damage in the playoffs. I wonder if the Avs and Barrie had simply soured on each other. Feels like Barrie had been on the trade block for six years.

Too early to say, I think. I know I'm sounding like a broken record here but Kadri really is a pretty good shutdown 2C. I dunno that they have any immediate replacements for Barrie, but they do have at least a couple of guys who are roughly similar players (i.e. smallish, o-minded) and either of them could conceivably be as good as 2018-19 Barrie as early as 2019-2020.

It cost Colorado a lot to acquire Kadri. It wouldn't cost nearly as much to acquire Gusev. If we're talking a non-1st or taking on David Clarkson's contract, that's a low-risk, high-reward addition. I'm 100% down with adding a good young top-six scoring winger on a cheapish two-year deal. Contrary to what anyone says, we're not especially deep at the wing positions.

https://wingsnation.com/2019/07/02/red-wings-reportedly-showing-interest-in-nikita-gusev/