Dabura

http://mynhltraderumors.com/nhl-rumors-ny-islanders-john-tavares-toronto-maple-leafs-mike-green-red-wings/2017/12/26/ Maple Leafs Hot Stove: Pierre McGuire on TSN 1050 was asked if he thinks Red Wings defenseman Mike Green would be a good fit for the Maple Leafs. “I would. He is a puck transporter. He shoots the puck as well now as when he was a youngster. He has always been an offensive catalyst going back to when he played for Saskatoon in the WHL. I think the biggest thing is Mike (Babcock) would know how to manage him and that’s a really important part of it when you get a player like that. He’s obviously a high-octane player. I would be encouraged but you’ve got to think the price point for that player would be pretty high as far as what Detroit would potentially want. And I think Detroit sees themselves as in the mix as a potential playoff team, so I don’t think they’re in a rush to do something that might break up what is an important part of their team.” It's Pierre and TSN, so, y'know, grain of salt. But there's nothing else out there on the Red Wings Trade Rumors front, so I'll take what I can get.

Mickey Redmond is 70 today. Happy birthday, Mickey!

CHOO CHOO MOTHEREFFERS

Sounds like the US team is pretty stacked. Don't know if they're The Favorites, but expectations are definitely high. http://mynhltraderumors.com/world-junior-championships-top-prospect-brady-tkachuk-and-the-us-forward-group/2017/12/24/

*hiss*

http://mynhltraderumors.com/nhl-rumors-detroit-red-wings-mike-green-mrazek-nyquist-new-york-islanders/2017/12/23/ Ansar Khan of MLive: (mailbag) If the Red Wings fall over ten points out of the playoff race, it would be hard for them to make up, and they’ll be open for business. They’d start listening to trade offers, but likely won’t start selling right away. Defenseman Mike Green will be their biggest trade chip at the deadline. thinks that they could get a low first round pick (from a playoff team) for Green. If they can’t get first, maybe two second-round picks. They got a second and third round picks for Brendan Smith last year. It’s doubtful that they’d trade Tomas Tatar after signing him to a four-year extension. Could see them trying to trade Gustav Nyquist, but he has a no-trade clause. Nyquist will be a free agent after next season. The Red Wings will look to trade goaltender Petr Mrazek if they are out of the playoff race. They likely wouldn’t get more than a third- or fourth-round pick. The Wings won’t qualify Mrazek at $4 million, so they will look to get a pick for him if they can. Moving Mrazek would be easier than Jimmy Howard who has a year left on his deal at $5.3 million.

I posted these links in yesterday's GDT: http://nhllotterysimulator.com/ http://www.tankathon.com/nhl http://www.mynhldraft.com/NHL-Mock-Draft/ http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/sportsnets-2018-nhl-draft-prospect-rankings-november/ https://www.fanragsports.com/2018-nhl-draft-another-year-of-the-defenseman/

Fair point.

I mean, they overachieved last season and I was expecting them to be a middle-of-the-pack team this season. I definitely wasn't expecting them to be a bottom-three team at the end of December. Is it Boucher fatigue?

Hear, hear!

Glendening is out for at least four weeks. Tyler Bertuzzi's back. Looks like he could be taking Glendening's place on the third line. We shall see. HYPE! LGRW

Man, what is up with the Sens???

There are few things in the world that I want more than to see the Wings get one of the top three picks in this upcoming draft. Maybe that makes me a bad person. Maybe I need to re-evaluate my priorities in life. I don't care. I want Dahlin/Svechnikov/Boqvist. (Take note, Santa.)

That's fair. Like I've said, I like Carlson and I'm not totally opposed to signing him. A good friend of mine is a Caps fan, so I've seen a lot of Caps games over the years. My informal assessment of Carlson is that he's a good 1D who's greatly benefited from playing on some really good teams. A big reason why I rate Ekman-Larsson higher is that he's done great things on weaker teams. We're a weak team now and we're probably destined to be a weak team for the next few years, and I'm not convinced playing on such a team wouldn't hurt Carlson's game. I'm assuming Larkin and Mantha get big deals this summer and that those deals will eat up most of the space freed up by Green and Mrazek leaving (assuming we part with Green, which isn't a given). Dunno what happens with Athanasiou, but if he stays, it won't be for peanuts. Maybe the cap rising gives us the room we need to comfortably sign Carlson. If we can make it work on paper and it looks like a no-brainer fit, I'm down, I guess. I'm pretty firmly down if we get Dahlin or Svechnikov or Boqvist, as I think any one of those would be a gamechanger for the Wings and any one of those players + Carlson could immediately make us a significantly better team. I guess I've just reached a point where I'm ready for the suck and I'm kind of done with pining for marquee UFAs. I've embraced the dark side; I'm ready for us to finally be really bad for a few years and finally get some of that sweet, sweet top-of-the-draft action. Getting Carlson does improve our team, but I'm not high enough on him that I'm really excited about the idea of signing him. Maybe two or three years ago, when we still had an outside shot at a Cup run and were arguably a piece or two away from being a legit Cup contender. But now? Eh. *shrug* I agree that the Caps probably don't let him go in the first place. This is all probably moot.

(P.P.S. Cole and de Haan are meh.)

For the first time in 25 years the Wings are a basement team. We finally have an opportunity to draft in the top ten for a few years (and pick near the top of all the other rounds), but now people who routinely bash Holland for assembling mediocre teams are saying we should try to brute force our way out of this hole we're in and "throw all the money at all the UFAs," which would probably just lead to more mediocrity (assuming we'd actually manage to sign anyone of note). I, for one, appreciate the irony. I want the Wings to build something truly great, truly sustainable. In this day and age, the way you do that is by drafting well and building up a small army of really good young players. Larkin, Mantha, Athanasiou, Svechnikov, Rasmussen, Cholowski, Saarijarvi, Hronek is a nice start, but it's not nearly enough. We need more than that. If we decide we don't need more than that, if we decide all we really need is a couple UFAs, then we're almost certainly setting ourselves up for failure. I want the Wings to do this right. I want us to get Dahlin/Svechnikov/Boqvist/Hughes/Zadina/Tkachuk/Kupari/Wahlstrom, and then I want us to get another top-tier kid in 2019, and then I want us to get another top-tier kid in 2020, and I want a couple of our non-first-round picks to be homeruns. And if we can sign OEL in 2019, then hell yeah let's do it, because he's a proven top-tier defenseman. We don't really know what the Wings could do with three or four consecutive years of picking in the top ten of the entry draft, but I'm willing to bet the results would be good. I don't think signing Carlson now would be wise. I think it's an immediate-gratification temptation, one we'd be wise to resist. I think the priority has to be drafting the young elite talent that damn near every team not named the Red Wings seems to have. I want us to slowly but surely reach the point where we have a core of young elite talent and a comfortable cap situation. That, to me, is The Dream. Spending the next few years as a basement team is probably the surest way to make that dream a reality in under five years. (P.S. DeKeyser does not have great speed.)

Dabura's Thoughts - 12/23 Edition I know our biggest area of need is defense. I know after every loss, the big takeaway is "Our defense blows." I won't deny it. We need help on defense. We need that help in the worst way. But I'm going to re-assert a point I've made every now and then over the past few years. Which is that we need gamebreaking high-percentage shooters almost as badly as we need that legit top pairing on the back end. To me, the story of our past few seasons is, arguably, "We played 'em real close, but they converted their chances and we didn't. If we get one more goal tonight, it's a totally different game/series." To me, the story of our season thus far is the same. We get chances. We get lots and lots of chances. We get lots and lots of chances every night, even against top teams. You could say that it's the other teams' superior defense groups that keep us from converting, and there's probably a lot of truth to that. But, even so, the fact that we're generating the chances we're generating suggests maybe this idea that every team not named the Red Wings has a solid defense group is overstating things a bit.

http://nhllotterysimulator.com/ http://www.tankathon.com/nhl http://www.mynhldraft.com/NHL-Mock-Draft/ http://www.sportsnet.ca/hockey/nhl/sportsnets-2018-nhl-draft-prospect-rankings-november/ https://www.fanragsports.com/2018-nhl-draft-another-year-of-the-defenseman/

This loss drops the Wings to 27th in the league. https://www.nhl.com/standings 2nd Wild Card team -- NYI -- has 42 points. That's 9 more points than we have. 3rd place in the Atlantic -- TOR -- has 43 points. That's 10 more points than we have. 28th in the league -- OTT -- has 30 points. That's 3 fewer than our 33 -- and they have two games in hand. And their team is better than our team, at least on paper. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

I'm starting to think we're not going to win the Cup this season.

Green was and is a solid second-pairing defenseman. Trotz worships the likes of Brooks Orpik, because "Big, mean, shutdown, shutdown, shutdown." Trotz does not trust the Mike Greens of the world. Green's underlying numbers as a Capital were actually very impressive. His shortcomings on the defensive side of the puck have always been used to knock him, same way Erik Karlsson's been knocked for much of his career. I'm not saying Green is on Karlsson's level, but it's the same kind of thing. Green wasn't a third-pairing defenseman then and he isn't one now. He can be a liability in the d-zone, but he can also help power your offense in ways most defensemen can't. For a stopgap guy, he's been worth the money. Look, it's not like I don't get where you're coming from. We need a 1D, Carlson is a 1D, therefore we should sign Carlson. If we sign him in the summer, we get a 1D and all it costs is money. That makes our team better. That could be a major shot in the arm for our "rebuild-on-the-fly" effort. Thing is, I'm not sure Carlson really helps us all that much over the next several seasons, unless perhaps we get lucky in the draft. And if he does help us, I feel it would only be enough to put us back on the playoff bubble, maybe enough to just barely get us into the playoffs. That would hurt our draft positioning and would probably slow the rebuild effort. I wasn't high on Niskanen. I don't feel we missed out on a great player there. I like Shattenkirk more than I like Niskanen, but I don't feel we missed out on a great player there. Shattenkirk, like Green, is a second-pairing guy who really earns his pay on the power play. They're offense-minded defensemen of the non-elite variety. I like Carlson, but I don't think he makes much sense for us right now or in the near future, unless we're going to aggressively retool and Chuck Fletcher our way back into Cup contention. Get a really good player with our first-round pick in the summer. Then get another really good player with our first-round pick in the next draft. Then do that again. Then do that again. Maybe sign a truly outstanding UFA like OEL along the way. This is pretty much our only realistic path back to relevance, assuming we don't get a Rasmus Dahlin type. (Though, even if we get Dahlin, we'd still have a big hill to climb.) Signing OEL and Carlson and de Haan isn't a plan, it's a pipe dream. Wings fans have been clamoring for a clean slate. While we are indeed in cap hell, we also kind of have that clean slate. We're a bad team with next-to-nothing in the way of young building block players. We're a bottom-five team in the league. If we suck for the next three years, the next three drafts could give us what we need to re-establish ourselves as a really good team, or at least a team that's on the rise. I don't see a desperate need for a John Carlson at this time (assuming we don't get Dahlin or Svechnikov). I think it'd be too little too late for an organization that needs to build up a small army of young ELC impact players.

Bergeron scores. 2-1. We just need to go on a run here.