The Free Press’s Helene St. James spoke with Red Wings GM Ken Holland regarding his trade deadline outlook:
While players and coaches concern themselves with making a playoff push, general manager Ken Holland is among 10 Wings personnel scouting the Five Nations tournament in Plymouth. The tourney features top players under the age of 18 from the Czech Republic, Finland, Russia, Sweden and the United States, and the majority of them are eligible for the 2018 NHL Entry Draft.
Holland also is juggling phone calls as the Feb. 26 trade deadline inches closer.
“I’m working the phones, I’m trying to see what the other teams in the league are thinking,” Holland said. “We are obviously not a buyer, we are not spending future assets to try to get in. We’ll see here over the next week what direction we are going, but I am aware we are eight points out and games are running out.”
The next four games — Tampa Bay, Nashville (Saturday on the road and next week at home) and Toronto — come against three of the best teams in the NHL. Even if the Wings build on their 2-0-1 streak, it is unlikely to sway Holland to not be a seller. There’s interest in defenseman Mike Green — including from the Lightning — and in forward Gustav Nyquist; both would have to approve a trade. There also has been interest in goaltender Jimmy Howard, but backup Petr Mrazek has not sparked much interest.
“I’ve talked to lots of teams over the last week and 10 days, and I’m doubling back with a number of them,” Holland said. “We’d like to get assets, open up spots for a kid or two for next season.”
Hope Kenny treats the trades at the deadline like his job depends on it…I think if he holds back its because he knows his next contract is approved already.
I agree, I think that he knows he can write his own ticket (or so it appears).
KH doesn’t realize what trades need to be made to write his ticket.
Does anyone know what he is going to do or should do?
Although he has graduated from kicking tires to Phones not connected to telephone polls, I hope. Baby steps, really old Baby but no limits on age with KH
George—as implied above, do you have indicators KH may return?
As I view, he all too often awards contracts with excessive term, as well as excessive AAV in many of the same cases, plus some awards appear based not on past performance, but future potential.
In addition, there’ll be a cap hit of about $1.5M from the Weiss miscalculation ’til 2021!
His sum total cap-era performance does not justify an extension.
[Hoping Seattle disagrees and offers him a new challenge! 🙂 ]
My gut feeling is that despite his weary-ness, Ken Holland wants to see the “rebuild on the fly” through, and certainly with the Canucks re-upping their GM, it doesn’t look like KH will be moving on. If he retires, I won’t be too surprised, but he’s been dogged in his statements about seeing things through.
It’s really up to Chris Ilitch at this point. If Ilitch wants to allow Holland to continue, he’ll stick around. If not, yeah, I could see hi going to Seattle, but I think it’s more likely that he’d retire.
Seeing that Mike Green was injured in the 3rd of last nights Bolts Wings game, I hope he’s alright and was just taken out due to precautionary measures. Can’t afford for our best trade chip to miss prolong periods of time.
We can’t seem to figure out why Green exited at the 10-minute mark. Here’s hoping that it was a precautionary measure.