BuckeyeWingsfan80

Better team won. Anaheim can roll 4 quality lines. Detroit has 1 quality line, one mediocre line and 2 absolutely s*** lines and they don't have ONE full NHL d-pairing. They have Kronwall. Dekeyser is too young, Ericcson is a wimp and Kindl/Smith/whoever just plain suck. If Howard isn't on his game tonight, this is a 6-1 blowout easy.

Of What? That they'd immediately lose a huge faceoff and let up an Empty Netter from 90+ feet?

It should say something about how pathetically short this team is that Jakub Kindl is out there in desperation time in the 3rd period with an empty net.

STUPID penalty Fil....

Well, when your tough guy is 5'7 (tootoo) and your 6'4 D-man makes Paul Kariya look like an enforcer....yeah...not a lot of toughness at all.

Ericcson had a chance to one-timer and instead of even a mediocre slapper, it was more of a limp wristed wrist-shot hybrid that was blocked....

This hot streak aside, I don't see the Wings getting past the first round either. Eventually the glaring holes on defense will be exploited by better teams....

Which is meaningless, since they'd be 4th in the West....

They wouldn't be 3rd....I doubt they would have caught Chicago....

Wow, I wish I could basically show up and go through the motions for 50% of the time while I'm at work and still get paid and not get fired. His efforts this year in at least 30 games has been unacceptable - don't let the stat lines fool you, at the beginning of this hot streak he was playing tissue paper soft defense and physicality - the physical play only picked up two weeks ago. If he would bring what he's brought this past two weeks or so, he's a top 5 forward in the league. But when he plays like he did for January/February and March, he's barely a top-6 forward. More than anything, Franzen is a shooter on a team that has guys who love to make pretty passes. If he doesn't play with an edge, the Wings look like crap (i.e. what they looked like in January, February and March).

With the large caveat that when Franzen plays with intensity he's one of the best forwards in the game - but the man floated for 35 or more games this year and played like a 9 year old girl at times. A hot streak doesn't mean he's a bargain all of a sudden. It means he needs to bring that same intensity over the full season instead of just when the Wings backs' are up against the wall.

There have been times tonight when this team has attacked and skated hard throughout the entire play where they looked like the Yzerman Red wings circa-2002. And there have been times where they look absolutely clueless. But tonight's game has been nearly as complete a game as they have played all year long. Too bad it took them being up against a wall to get it out of them.

And Stuart was probably a top 30 dman in the league during his years in Detroit and would be, depending on how much you rate Kronwall's presence, the best dman on this team right now.

Yeah - Congrats! You're the team MVP for a team that may or may not miss the playoffs for the first time since 1989/1990. Here's your trophy. I think Jimmy would pass.....

Not to mention there are only 2 legit NHL d-men on the entire roster, and one of them (Ericcson) is wildly inconsistent and that's being kind.

How would that be screwing themselves? Avoiding Chicago in the 1st round isn't a bad thing....

still playing site contrarian I see....

that's not what ESPN says: http://sports.espn.go.com/nhl/news/story?page=nhl/tiebreakers And if the Jackets are able to catch up in that regard in either case, it won't matter because the Wings will be going golfing instead of the playoffs anyway. Honestly, at this point, missing the playoffs might be what this franchise needs to shake up the paradigm and get the staleness of the roster and attitude out of the way. If you're not playing to win the Cup, you're doing it wrong. Just to make the playoffs for some silly streak is not enough.

Yep and right now the tie breakers are all going against Detroit as well. Detroit loses all tie-breakers to Columbus if the records are the same I think. Right now the only reason by Columbus is behind Detroit is because they've played one more game. It will probably come down to that last game against Dallas on the road, both teams have won once against each other and only play a total of 3 times - not exactly a situation I feel comfortable with....

Disagree.

Unfortunately, this completely ignores several things with THIS Wings team and what it does good and what it does very badly. compare those teams and how they played to this Wings team and how it plays (style-wise) and you'll see an enormous difference.

....barely

Columbus is basically one more good d-man and a decent forward away from being a very good team this year. They are going to make some noise in the East next year I think. I was at the Columbus game last night against San Jose and they kicked the dogpiss out of the Sharks from the first puck drop.

My mom's side of the family is from the Detroit area, so I was exposed to all of the Detroit sports teams at an early age - my first two sports shirts were a Detroit Lions shirt and a hand-made Red Wings jersey that I wish I still had that my grandmother made when I was a baby. For whatever reason, likely because I was surrounded by s***zburgh fans in Pennsylvania, being a Red Wings fan was both a way to get attention and a way to get under their skin. Same with being a Buckeye fan (for some reason even though both my mother and all of her brothers graduated from Michigan, they never really exposed me to the skunkbears), all of the kids around me where either Ped State/Ntre Ame or FSU fans, so being a Buckeye fan was a fun way to irk them.

If the team appears to be close to winning a cup at the end of next year, he'll likely stay for a bit longer. If they are still staring at the abyss of a rebuilding phase like they are now (and they will be I think), he's probably gone. So I'd say 25% for staying and 75% for leaving.