dobbles

you know the best thing about that fight? that it did NOTHING to make lidstrom heal faster. just like the game against the penguins the other night, it doesn't matter if you have a worthless goon on the bench, players will still be aggressive and people will get hurt.

i am all for fighting in hockey. i really am. but what is the point of a goon? they aren't a deterrent to dirty play. the only people goons fight are other goons. maltby has spent years being a ****** and never fights; because players can just skate away. guys like avery can go out there and be asshats all they want. because 55 minutes a game, the other teams goon is on the bench. and for the 5 minutes they happen to be out there, its against the other teams line of goons.

Your boy Ritola had a whopping 0 goals as well.  Was he our savior then?  Was his contribution any more or less than Downey's?  In fact, why was Downey called up over him if Ritola's so awesome?  Please impart this keen knowledge you seem to posses that the rest of the hockey world does not.

esteef

you know whats awesome though? ritola averaged more TOI in his games than downey did! so obviously mike babcock thought ritola was a better player by giving him more time out there. i guess his hockey knowledge trumps yours.

also, why the f*** do you have to put your name in all your posts? the forum shows who posts everything. why waste your time typing it? and before anyone asks why i care, its because i find it annoying. it causes extra line breaks which makes scrolling take longer. especially on a mobile device.

Just logged on and checked the recap.  Saw this "With a sellout crowd of 18,087 and both teams using much of their "A" lineups, the $321 million arena opened with an almost regular-season intensity."  Ummm, on what planet is a Wings team that doesn't dress Lidstrom, Z-bug, Dats, Rafalski, Maltby, Hudler, Draper and Holmstrom "much of their 'A' lineup?  Dude, pass that crack pipe over here.

Looks like I need to peruse about 350 posts to figure out how bad the Franzen injury is/was.  

WELCOME BACK WINGS!

while i see your point and agree with it, i giggled a bit when i read that maltby is part of our 'A' lineup. dude will be in grand rapids soon; he's not helping you prove your point!

Reading some of these responses makes me glad Kenny is the GM and not the members of this forum.
Malts in GR = a great mentor for our PROSPECTS
Malts on the Detroit bench during the playoffs = added depth, experienced leadership, and another PKer.
so to those of you complaining about the deal, please understand Kenny is better than you. That is all.

oh its the classic can't disagree with anything holland does defense! such a great counter point!

how dare anyone think that its time to let a player go that has not had more than 11 points in a season since the lockout and is a combined -34 since the lockout?!?!?! i respect what maltby did, but there comes a point where you need to say goodbye to players. there are other ways for an organization to be loyal and supportive of their long time players aside from giving them contracts several years after they hit their expiration dates.

maybe maltby can be a good mentor in grand rapids by teaching our prospects how to play dirty and then not stand up for themselves and hide behind linesmen??? thats a good skill for any young player!

and maltby in the playoffs? thats just scary! if he is on our bench, then we might as well be ready for a long summer because it will be due to about 10 significant injuries. leadership? how many hundreds of playoff games does our roster have without him? PK? how many forwards are ahead of him on the pk depth chart at this point?

regardless of opinion on this signing, even holland acknowledges that the odds of maltby playing in detroit are slim. why not just do the right thing and retire?

improving your players is 2 fold: getting cards from experience, and using the boost slots and attribute boosts.

as far as player cards, you need a combination of games played and good grades. your games and grades online are totally seperate from offline. you can play BAP till your hearts content. it wont effect your eashl stats. each card you get gives you more XP to upgrade attributes.

in addition to this, there is upgrades attached to equipment. last year, it was the equipment itself that help boost slots. this year they are independent. but you still need to unlock each slot associated with each piece of equipment. at the bottom of this link is the various tasks needs to unlock each slot:

http://www.operation...115&postcount=1

once you have slots open, you need to put boosts there. there are 3 boosts for every attribute: +1, +3, and +5. for each of the boosts there is another task associated with unlocking it. here is a post that tells how to unlock all the +3 and +5 boosts:

http://www.operation...116&postcount=2

in addition to the various tasks, each boost slot and boost can be purchased from the psn store. lots of people just spend the money to get what they need. you can also do a combination both. buy some and earn some.

in addition, there are boost packs. they are player type specific. if you equip a boost pack, then you cannot use XP and individual boosts. it is an either/or situation. however, the boost packs can be a good step early on before you have earned cards and unlocked the multitude of individual boosts.


my advice? if you are new to online play it might be worth it to buy a boost pack. then you can be ahead of the game for a while. then you can work on earning your cards and earning boosts. then you can switch over after a month or so and be better off. if you want to earn the boosts, the best way to earn a ton of them is start an offline BAP career. many of the boosts require BAP success. they also require you play 40 games of the season to prevent simming the whole thing. the best way to do it is to put it way down on rookie and boost all the settings of human skills. then sim individual games and play only the 3rd period or last 5 minutes and get several points. i just finished the first regular season BAP and have 4 slots, 7 +5's, and 11 +3's unlocked so far. in my season i ended up with like 120 goals and 180 points. thats what i mean by super easy difficulty!

i know this has been long, but it seems like several of you are totally new to this, so i started at the most basic level.

to me what is most needed is a switch up of pairings. its not so much about who gets the most minutes, but switching pairings up so players can compliment each others skill sets and also so that younger players can play with and learn from the older players.

And the prevailing argument has also become "do you know more than Holland?"  Of course none of us know more about running a franchise than Holland.  But it's about being a fan of the team.  Analyzing and overanalyzing every move and throwing our two cents in. That's why this forum exists.

the funny part for me about this whole angle is we have no idea how Holland even feels on the issue. its been stated that Asham apparently wanted to stay in PA. so Holland could have thought Asham was the X factor, but it didn't matter because Asham didn't want to play here. there seems to be an automatic assumption that every player in the nhl wants to sign here first and if he doesn't, its because the wings passed on the player; not the other way around.

How is pointing out previous success and ability in any way guaranteeing it to be a good signing? I was simply saying that before his injuries he was an effective third line player, and despite what the past few years have shown, it's not really out of the realm of possibility for him to return to part of his previous form. If the Wing's had had that mindset on players like Larry Murphy, Patrick Eaves or Dan Cleary, none would have become Wings. Seeing as the Hawks are essentially giving him AHL money, I fail to see how this is a bad signing in any way, as the rewards far outweigh the risks. No one said that they expected him to score 14 goals in 24 games like he did in the playoffs.

If he can get his disease in check, he could very well be a good bottom 6 forward far more capable of any of the other AHL scrubs. Despite his horrific 5 on 5 stats, he WAS Edmonton's best forward PKer last year.

holy back-peddle batman!

on the first page you were gushing about how much of a steal it was and how you would prefer him to eaves or miller. yet then when people call you out on the absurdity of the statement, you try to play semantics and pretend you never said things. worst of all you basically admit you haven't watched the guy in several years, yet you then go on to pretend you know all about his career. make up your mind!



IMO, this signing may be a slight upgrade over some random AHL guy, but certainly not anything noteworthy. and definitely not the type of great signing multiple posters on the first page claimed. the guy has put up maltby like numbers the last couple years and we all know how popular he is around here...

We've been one and done in the cap era too so far.  Come on bro, you call that guy out for living in 2004 and then try to bring up our old championships from before the lockout but then go on to call them one and done?

We like to take pride in the hockey IQ Wings fans have over other fanbases but I read biased stuff like this all the time on here and it makes me wonder.

the wings have played in 81 playoff games since the lockout. the next closest is the penguins with 62. that means the wings have played in almost 25% more games than any other team. i think that makes them pretty much top dog when talking about playoff success recently. sure we would all love to have more than 1 cup. but implying that chicago is one and done is really not that absurd. i do think a more accurate statement would be 2 and done since they did have a pretty nice run last year as well. but many fans feel that they won't be capable of getting back to the conference finals. so if their window of getting into the 3rd or 4th round is already closed, then its an applicable statement. sure we may all disagree if it is true, but its certainly debatable and not as absurd as you seem to think.

way too much for bertuzzi. the only reason he was a positive last year was because of his lower cap hit. he gets roughly a 30% raise even though he said he would only play for detroit or retire. also he said in the past that he would play for less money. so much for all of that.

It's truly sad that so many people who claim to be big hockey fans are using points and +/- to evaluate a player's performance.

If you think Jonathan Toews wasn't good in the Finals, you either didn'nt watch the game, don't understand the game, or are biased and bitter.

Toews is the type of player that doesn't need to score points to be the most dominant player on the ice.

Toews won more faceoffs than he lost in every Final game.

Toews won 60.2% of his faceoffs in the playoffs, tops among forwards who had at least 225 faceoffs.

Toews took 460 faceoffs, tops in the league. He took 33.7% of the Blackhawks' faceoffs.

Toews was 7th in the playoffs in shorthanded time on ice.

Toews led all forwards in the playoffs with 32 takeaways. He had just 9 giveaways, for a +23 differential that tied with Dave Bolland for best in the playoffs.

He had just 4 penalty minutes in 22 playoff games.


But yeah, let's give it to Byfuglien, who was minus 4 in the postseason. Or Keith, who turns the puck over in his own zone 3 times a period.

All I could do was shake my head and laugh when I saw a poster in this thread earlier call Hossa a "fraud" who "is just along for the ride.

Hossa is exactly the same as Toews, in that these guys don't need to get the points to be dominant on the ice. Throughout the postseason, Hossa was the second best forward on the Blackhawks.... and I don't think it was really close at all.

Hossa only played 57 games in the regular season, yet ended the season with the highest plus/minus of any player on the Hawks (+24).

No, he didn't score the goals in the playoffs, but this guy generated something every single time he touched the puck in the offensive zone, and was all over the ice at all times.

It's just sad that people still don't understand that point totals don't tell the story when it comes to players like Toews and Hossa. If anything, look at his plus/minus, which was +7 in the postseason.

seeing these 2 posts back to back made me laugh... i could really care less arguing about hossa, but the irony was too much for me to pass up...

I don't know what your missing besides a lack of hockey snobbery. This why I hate the people on these boards. Nice job trying to sound important  on the internet. I hope your staying nice and cool in moms basement.

was this in response to my post? wtf? i just responded that i didn't think we would see many young players. and all of a sudden i am living in my moms basement? wtf?

i started off saying i didn't think the thread would go well. i didn't say that because i thought your OP was bad; i said that because i assumed the arguing would get really ugly about the team. it actually has been pretty good though.

there's a couple things in this thread that keep making me think... just thought i would add in my 2 cents...

Lidstrom's character: this got brought into play, and I actually think its at least a valid thing to discuss. The reason people expect a lot from Lidstrom is he has always shown great character throughout his career. So many fans expected this contract signing to be a continuation of that. Because Nick has set our expectations high, many fans thought he would take a nice discount to give the team a better chance at winning. So to me, its not that Nick all of a sudden lacks character, but he just isn't living up to the level of character that we have come to expect. It's not as if he totally betrayed fans and signed a 8 million dollar deal with the Panthers or something crazy, he just didn't live up to the lofty standards that he has built in many fans minds. That's my interpretation of many fans problem with the contract.

'I should take a pay cut too': How does this always get brought up? Lidstrom just agreed to a deal for more money than I will make in my entire life! Lets factor in he has been making a similar amount of money for the last decade and has been making a more than comfortable salary for more than 20 years now. I especially loved it when someone said after hockey he has no skills for other jobs. By reputation alone I am sure he could get pretty much any job in coaching, announcing, or management that he wanted. Players retire all the time and don't instantly become homeless because of it. The comparison between working folks and super rich athletes makes no sense. With leagues having salary caps these days, it is necessary to have players that outperform contracts. Many times this happens with young guys that are on entry level deals or are still RFA's. However, getting veterans to take discounts to help the team is a very common thing these days. So why in order for a fan to want that to happen do they need to emulate the pay decrease?

I think some people still think of him as a superstar power forward like he was in his Vancouver days and not a 36-37 year old with a bad back.  Others have never forgiven him for the Moore incident.  But 1.5M for an 18 goal winger ain't too bad in my book.  He was healthy all season, carried the team in December, and if he could just cut out the bad penalties (and the refs quit with the reputation calls) there'd be little to complain about IMO

i don't think thats it at all. i think most people that are down on bertuzzi just get frustrated by the penalties, the lack of hustle, the of consistency, the lack of defense, etc...

with that said, i think most people ended up satisfied with the season he put in. personally i was worried as i think he was pretty bad for calgary the year before despite the point total he ended up with. i think this year he was looking very similar to that player through the first few months.

like i said though, i think people realize he isn't going to get 90-100 points each season like he once did; i think many folks just think his negatives outweigh his positives. hopefully if they bring him back he can have another year like this one as i think overall it was pretty good.

even though it seemed primarily focused on comedy, it is a really good break down of what did happen and what should have happened.