Enjoying the idea of a #Columbus Blue Jackets vs #Toronto Maple Leafs series then I remember their will be no fans and am less enthused
TIL I learned on twitter that the Red Wings didn't tank this year. They were one of the worst teams in NHL history due because of bad luck and injuries not because they wanted to be as bad as possible to get the #1 lotto odds.
You fucks are lucky as hell Danny DeKeyser and Jonathon Ericsson and Frans Nielsen were hurt much of this year. If not, who knows what would have happened.
I mean this team clearly tanked, but Yzerman didn't have much options to do anything else given the amount of large contract awful veterans he inherited.
Also, if the Wings season is done, Abdelkader will officially have 0 goals 3 assists in 49 games making $4.25 mil. Has any forward who has played at least a half season (41+ games) gone scoreless who made as much or more than Abdelkader does in NHL history?
In the first round and if you are gambling, my picks would be Arizona, Florida and ny rangers but I don’t know the odds. These teams seem dangerous to me , young and ready to go. Also the blues are not winning a series this year. They are going to get upset no matter who they face
Not at all. He did exactly what he had to do. But to say the Wings didn't tank this year is a complete joke.
And a stupid nugget about the French podcast that I talked about earlier, Perron was on and he was against this proposal. I am not getting into this but it was pretty funny when Latendresse told him that he might feel different if he did not just win the cup and that the bruins players or other top teams players might feel about the playoffs and missing on an opportunity « or the st-louis blues who are first in the west right now and going for back to back « was perron’s answer and he was dead serious at that point.. The guy is a real competitor but this situation is so shitty
I just wonder what depths of Twitter you found such ridiculous takes. A rational fan's take would have been pissed if we didn't tank.
I've seen so many people complain wings fans deny they tanked but have not seen a single person in our fan base who actually thinks this. It's baffling. Hell we tried to tank last year too but Larkin, Mantha and Bertuzzi got too hot at the end of the season and the lottery always seems to fuck us
I never understood the problem with tanking. Blame how the system is set-up, not the teams operating within it.
Blues were hot when all this started and run a pretty simplistic system. I do believe they'll either make a long run or have a very fast exit.
BJs were enfuego when they were at full strength then like 10 guys had season ending injuries, all those guys should be back. If Korpy gets hot in goal they are going to be a bitch to score on with Torts system
Exactly. If you’re not gonna be a contender you shouldn’t have a problem with the best solution to make your team better: draft as high as possible. Are the wings the only team in recent history to win a cup without a top 5 or 10 pick on the roster?
The 2011 Bruins had Horton but he wasn’t picked by the team, and in general the team was built on non first rounders.
A very quick glance - 07 Anaheim (eat shit) and 11 bruins seem to be the ones without a super high pick being a key player. The ducks had a couple, but they were early 90s picks and seguin wasn't a big driver that year for the bruins
this bruins team will have a weird place in history. They need to win another cup, they have had such a great run of always being elite but not quite winning it all. the draft when they had like 3 back to back first round pics and Passed on Barzal and kyle connors really hurt them. They picked two ahl player and debrusk I think.
I don’t blame the organization too much for those two picks considering we got Carlo in the second round, Pastrnak at #25 the year before and McAvoy at #14 the year after.
The bruins usually draft incredibly well but that year was the perfect opportunity to take a chance on a guy like barzal when he dropped because of injuries, the bruins had 3 first round picks. Perfect situation to gamble on a high end skill guy. Obviously easy to say right now but I felt the same way back then.
If you go back and read that Twitter thread, it started by some random guy who doesn't even appear to be a wings fan saying they should change lottery system because its clear who sucked and there was no accusations of tanking. I really don't get why this is a topic of conversation or an issue that keeps getting brought up. The wings had awful veterans signed to big contracts and accepted they wouldn't compete this year and made no real splashes in offseason and traded away older assets or pending FA at the deadline, just like every other team does in a rebuild.
I think it's all how you see the definition of "tanking" Did the players try hard to win, yeah Did the coaches try hard to win, usually Did they set up the team to compete, no
Yeah, the NHL’s FA structure kind of makes tanking the only viable way to rebuild. Players aren’t UFA’s until the end of their second contract when they’re close to 30 in the case of most stars. Star players at that age don’t want to be part of a rebuild, they want to win now. And they often aren’t a smart option for rebuilding teams anyway, as they’ve only got a couple years of prime left and the team will be right back in the same situation.
The entire debate is semantics. Did Yzerman purposely ice a team that would be one of the worst in modern NHL history? Probably not. Did he try to stop the team from bottoming out? No. And if he had, he would be an idiot. This is the cycle of life in the game today. Not sure why any Wings fan cares if people call it tanking. It can be tanking, but it is also very smart.
I’m guessing the Wings fans getting defensive about this spent a lot of time bashing other teams for doing the same thing while things were going great for two decades in Detroit.
I am sure that is part of the issue. It also doesn’t help that in three cracks at the lottery, the Wings have fallen three spots each time. It’s just the luck of the draw but it makes people salty for sure. I mean you have to admit that watching shit organizations like the Devils get (and squander) top picks gets old after a while.