Custance on Ken Holland and the young Mr. I

The Athletic’s Craig Custance penned an article discussing Ken Holland’s future, as well as the Ilitch-sized elephant in the room:

As hard as it is to win a Stanley Cup, Holland may be facing his biggest challenge yet. The Detroit fan base wants change. There’s a mess to clean up that is the result of his attempts to optimize the team’s Stanley Cup chances in the final stages of the Nicklas Lidstrom, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg era. There are bad contracts to burn off and high-end prospects who need to be drafted. Whether or not Holland will be the one tasked with doing that is all going to come to a head in the next few weeks.

“I think that probably between now and sometime at the end of the year, I would expect there would be some kind of decision made,” Holland told The Athletic this week.

Yzerman, a man whose opinion still carries much weight in Detroit, offers his support.

“I believe [with] everything he’s done, he deserves the time to rebuild it now,” Yzerman said. “He deserves the time and the respect of everyone to rebuild it.”

That may hinge on one person.

Continued (paywall)

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George Malik

My name is George Malik, and I'm the Malik Report's editor/blogger/poster. I have been blogging about the Red Wings since 2006, when MLive hired me to work their SlapShots blog, and I joined Kukla's Korner in 2011 as The Malik Report. I'm starting The Malik Report as a stand-alone site, hoping that having my readers fund the website is indeed the way to go to build a better community and create better content.

3 thoughts on “Custance on Ken Holland and the young Mr. I”

  1. Yzerman and every other GM in the league wants Holland to keep his gig with the wings. More bad contracts please. More inability to fix the D. After Jimmy D, Bryan Murray and Scotty built what would become the core Holland dropped us from the brink of excitement in his annual pursuit of 8th place. Nobody expected to challenge for the cup every year, but they did expect him to begin improving the D we do expect him to stop with the bad contracts. Just go away Holland and please take Martin and draper with you.

  2. The longer this goes without a management change, the less likely it is to happen. Re-staffing couple months before the biggest draft in a generation for the wings…. is a dangerous decision.

    I would like to see a change in philosophy and method, I am becoming progressively more sceptical that Young Mr. I can delay a reset without hiring an extremely experienced manager and supporting cast. Is there experience waiting to be hired??? No. We would have to troll another team and cherry pick staff. Bad business in a small world of having to still work together.

  3. I see other teams have put it in neutral, no firings? Strange season, for sure. After the playoffs are finished something better happen.

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