Dabura

This is what I'm thinking.

That's according to Darrren Dreger, who's basically a glorified troll.

Sneakily?

The Kings have been terrible of late.

This is our first real losing streak of the season. You don't go through a season without ever losing three or four in a row. Look at the Bolts - they'd lost, what, four of their last five going into tonight? Are we gonna say they're pretenders? We'll be ok.

lol

Supposedly they've put, like, countless hours of work into fixing it. A fat lot of good it's doing. We were bad all night, though.

Time to bring in a sports psychologist? This obviously goes way deep.

You have the game on your stick and that's your move? You really think a half-hearted fake slapper - in the slot - is going to freeze Sergei Bobrovsky? What is this team smoking during their shootout "meetings" and "practices"?

I don't really disagree. I guess I just feel that with a guy like him, you should maximize his value, get him playing to his strengths, put him in a position to not just succeed but thrive. He could probably do fairly well as a first-pairing guy, but then he's going to put up fewer points than he would on the second pairing. He'd be playing those hard minutes so that we could free up...Kronwall? Wouldn't it make more sense to keep running Kronwall in his normal role and let Yandle play easier minutes on the second pairing? Kronwall is, in a perfect world (i.e. on a stacked team), a second-pairing defenseman. Why? So he can focus more on the offensive side of his game and give us 50 points. Maybe Yandle has what it takes to become what Kronwall has become (I think he does), but, for now, I'd want both versions of Kronwall at our disposal: the #1 guy (2014 Kronwall), and the second-pairing guy (2014 Yandle channeling 2008 Kronwall). Does that make sense? My mind's kinda foggy today.

They don't need to move him, but if they hold on to him, I think it's very likely they lose him for nothing in the summer. Dude could make a killing in free agency. And, really, isn't the writing kind of on the wall? Niskanen and Orpik get those massive deals (and I'd say Green's a bigger name than either of them)...he's playing on the third pairing (while carrying a $6M cap hit)...the Caps have a good group of defensemen (Carlson, Niskanen, Alzner, Orpik, Schmidt, Orlov, Madison Bowey)...he's probably going to want to get as many dollars and years as he possibly can on this next contract because he'll be 30 soon and, well, look at his injury history..... I agree about the playoffs, though. If they're pretty firmly in the playoff picture in late February, I don't think they trade him. If they're not? They probably trade him, and not for a whole lot (i.e. a few futures).

Based on what? Does Tippett see him as his team's undisputed #1 defenseman? Does Tippett count on him to shut down the opposition's top guns every night? Is Yandle Tippett's top option for any and every conceivable situation and assignment? Has Yandle shown he's more than capable of being a solid #1 on a perennial contender? I'm all about the Yandle love - but Kronwall is better. He's a complete defenseman, a legit #1. He's one of the best in the business. I think he'll cost more than that, but not much more. (Certainly nowhere near what Yandle would cost.) The problem is, his cap hit's $6M and we only have about half that in cap space. Moving Kindl would get us just about there, but no one wants a #6 defenseman with a $2.4M cap hit who's under contract until 2017.

I'd be including one or two of our bottom three regulars - Quincey, Smith, Kindl - in the package. We'd still have a need for a righty, but we wouldn't necessarily need that righty to be a real stud. Again, though, Green is probably preferable.

I didn't say he is. Yandle wouldn't be our #1. I wouldn't want him facing the opposition's best. I wouldn't play him regularly on the PK. I'd give him relatively easy assignments and expect him to take full advantage. Sort of an exploitation role, not unlike how the kid line was used last season. I'd even consider going all the way with that and putting him on the third pairing.

Ericsson jumped Nolan when he hit Helm from behind.

I don't mind trusting in Holland, but isn't that kind of a stretch? Yzerman's put together a ludicrously deep team (for a cap era team) that's going to be competitive for a long time. He got Bishop for nothing. He got Garrison for nothing. He flipped Quincey for a first-round pick. He turned the impossible MSL situation into Callahan, a first-round pick, and a second-round pick. He found Johnson. He has Palat and Kucherov, and Drouin, and Hedman, and crazy organizational depth at the goalie position (though, Nabokov was definitely a "You serious, bro?" signing) (though, he's an upgrade over Lindback). Stralman and Boyle were great signings. Flip's been huge for them. Stamkos is a pretty good hockey player. John Cooper - perfect fit. Cutting ties with Salo was the right call, one Holland probably wouldn't have made, because loyalty and veteran leadership and right-handed shot and depth and all that. Losing Panik hasn't hurt them one bit. Yzerman knows what he's doing.

Truth. Case in point: last season, we didn't win our twelfth home game until March. This is a funk. It happens. The Isles just snapped a three-game losing streak. The Bolts have lost to the Sabres, Jackets, and Caps (twice) in the past week and a half or so. The Canucks have lost three in a row, I think. The Kings flat-out suck right now. The Ducks are doing really well, but they had a pretty ugly stretch not long ago. The Flames (I'm not a believer) have lost four straight. The Sharks are surging after a really rough start. You're always going to have your good stretches and your bad stretches, you've just got to minimize the frequency and duration of the latter. Not saying this wasn't a terrible performance. It was. But we were gods in the second half of November, so you knew a crash was coming. Actually, I honestly wonder if all the scoring we were doing isn't sort of backfiring. I remember the best coach I ever played for once said that getting a ton of goals from a ton of different guys every night can be a double-edged sword. Everyone thinks, "Well, we're scoring six goals every night, and everyone's contributing, so I don't really need to be a big factor this week," and so what you get is everyone's effort drops off, all at the same time. Suddenly, that scoring depth, that balanced attack - poof, gone. And once you're in that rut, it can be really hard to get out of it.

Hoo boy, that was ugly. Pretty much everything was terrible, except for Mrazek, who deserved a better fate.

1 = The last one I'd want to trade 5 = The first one I'd want to trade Sproul Ouellet Backman Marchenko Jensen

Zetterberg is lazy and he sucks. Glendening for captain.

I'm inclined to think this is part of it. He paces himself, saving up for what he hopes will be a long playoff run. Combine that with the fact that he's pretty clearly not 100%, and that he's 34, and that he's a volume shooter (puts a ton of pucks on net, the vast majority of which won't be goals), and you have what we're now seeing. My only real concern is that he might be playing through something fairly serious. And if that something fairly serious is back pain...not good. Kind of a weird question: Is he a father? I vaguely remember him dropping a hint that he is. If so, might that have something to do with it? Being a dad can be exhausting, right?

I don't know why you'd keep sending out Datsyuk-Nyquist-Tatar. If you've lost five of these things with pretty much that same trio in that same order every time (I know Helm made an appearance), maybe you think about, y'know, changing that? At the very least, maybe have Nyquist or Tatar go first?

I didn't think we played a bad game. The Panthers' forecheck caused all kinds of problems for us in the first and second, but I thought we pretty much owned the third. I think we're really missing Abby; we're not making life hard enough for these goalies, and we're missing his heavy forechecking (not a lot of sustained pressure from the top two lines). But the biggest issue, I think, remains our transition game. It's flat-out not where it needs to be. It was miraculous a couple nights ago, but that's not gonna happen every night (i.e. the Leafs suck). Tonight we iced the puck about a thousand times on stupid "Well, maybe this'll work, maybe it won't - let's find out" stretch passes to no one. A better faceoff team would've made us pay. The shootout...no words. Bottom line is we're leaving a ton of points on the table (five and counting) and that has to stop being a thing, and it's on Howard and the shooters and the coaching staff to figure it out. I don't get the impression they're taking it as seriously as they should.

I definitely don't see us trading for Yandle, but there seems to be a sense that this might really be the year the Wings miss the playoffs he gets moved. Maloney and Tippett are both kind of exasperated, as the Coyotes are really, really, really bad this season - defensively, offensively, and in net. And they're not going to attract top free agents. And they don't have an especially good prospect pool. And, as valuable as Yandle is, he can only do so much for that team and franchise. But yeah, it's very unlikely we'd be the ones to get him (unless maybe a serious division rival were to show considerable interest in him). I've gotta think they'd want Nyquist or Tatar or Mantha, and, while I tend to play devil's advocate with these things (see: me trying to justify Tatar and a 1st for Tyler Myers), I wouldn't be ok with that. We all know Franzen isn't going anywhere, which is sort of an issue because we're going to have to clear cap space if we want to take on a big-name player. We can pretend Holland would move Quincey or Ericsson, but that's probably a fantasy, same as moving Franzen. IMHO, the only way we have a real shot at Yandle is if the Coyotes want to aggressively tank and, to that end, are willing to part with Yandle for, well, not much. We'd still have to dump salary, though. Green might only cost a pick, so that's kind of a no-brainer. But we'd still have to clear cap space. I guess moving Quincey and Kindl somewhere would make the most sense. If not WDC, maybe Colorado? Dallas? Edmonton? Philly? ...Arizona?

Realistically, Mike Green (who's basically a right-handed, injury-prone Yandle) is probably our guy.