The Malik Report

Detroit Hockey Now’s Kevin Allen posted a subscriber-only article discussing several changes which Allen believes that Steve Yzerman’s successor must incorporate into the next building/rebuilding plan. Among Allen’s points are the following:

2. A Different Plan to Infuse Prospects

Defenseman William Wallinder is no longer waiver exempt and he’s coming to training camp with no NHL experience. Antti Tourmisto signed with Las Vegas without getting an NHL shot from Detroit. Eduards Tralmaks didn’t get an NHL game and he signed with Edmonton. You hear other general managers talk about opening roster spots for their younger players. But the Red Wings have been conservative when it comes to development of young players. They want to know their youngsters are ready before promoting them. But that’s no longer the way it’s done in the NHL.

The Red Wings cannot utilize the Grand Rapids Griffins as an impermeable membrane by which Detroit’s top prospects cannot graduate from until they’re out of waiver options any more. It’s fair and right to afford Detroit’s prospects the opportunities to “steal jobs” and earn short call-ups simply to see what the organization has in terms of self-developed depth players.

3. A Goaltending Ascension Plan

The Red Wings have done a quality job of building a strong stable of young goalies, but haven’t done a good job of making their goalies NHL-ready. Sebastian Cossa had 45 minutes of NHL experience when the Red Wings traded him to Utah this summer.

If the Red Wings send Michal Postava to Grand Rapids at the start of the season, it would make sense for the team to schedule some NHL games early for him to see if he is ready to be the team’s next goalie up.

Maybe more importantly, The Yzerman replacement should have a plan in place for Trey Augustine to experience NHL time even as early as this season. If he is now the goalie of the future, it makes sense for him to have NHL experience before he gets a spot on the roster. They can’t treat him the same way they treated Cossa.

Continued (paywall); agreed regarding Postava and Augustine (and Michal Pradel, Michal Orsulak, Rudy Guimond, etc. etc.). The Wings’ crease isn’t going to be best-served by forcing Postava and Augustine to watch John Gibson and Daniil Tarasov split the next 82 starts.

None of Allen’s other plans are exactly jaw-droppingly shocking, but witnessing the Red Wings more aggressively engage players at market-value salaries instead of incorporating a roster player salary cap, and actually trading draft picks from time to time make sense…

And offering more internal competition for roster spots, instead of, for example, ensuring that grinding players like, say, Michael Rasmussen, J.T. Compher, etc. become “too important to fail” seems logical as well.

All of that being said, the whole point of why Allen’s saying what he’s saying is not to stir up revolutionary roster-building changes, but instead, to encourage the organization to re-engage the rest of the league’s best practices.

There are more than a couple of Red Wings bloggers and blogs who are at their, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” moment this morning.

That’s understandable. And it’s okay.

It’s July 21st, and the Red Wings do not have a general manager, their captain was last seen going “tarps off” at the FIFA World Cup final, and it’s getting to be painful receiving those marketing emails from the Red Wings that try to not show pictures of Patrick Kane or Dylan Larkin celebrating with Moritz Seider or Lucas Raymond.

To their credit, the Red Wings did score some goals in which Emmitt Finnnie or other players were celebrating with Seider and Raymond, so we see some decent crop-outs, but I hear ya. It feels like the S.S. Detroit Red Wings has run aground and sits rudderless on a shoal, and that’s an all-too-familiar feeling for those of us battling our way through the long, painful rebuild.

This is that kind of morning here in the hospital. Aunt Annie is in tremendous pain this morning, not because of anything in particular, but just because it is a high pain day, and I believe that, as a caregiver, there is nothing worse than watching someone you love go through pain when you are unable to help them alleviate said discomfort, even after she’s taken her pain medications and has received assistance from her nurses.

She’s just in so much pain that she’s nauseous, and I would rather be in pain myself than watch her suffer like this.*

We’re having a “high pain day” kind of summer right now, folks. And I don’t know many Red Wings fans who aren’t feeling more than a bit nauseous at present, with the team’s future dangling at the end of a rope like a dead yo-yo, dangling lifelessly.

It’s a bitch to go through, and we’re experiencing this on a collective as well as individual bases.

Continue reading Now is the summer of our discontent (don’t forget to breathe)

It’s hard to get a positive word from The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn when it comes to the intersection of things statistically-inclined and Red Wings-related.

This morning, however, Luszczyszyn sings the praises of Moritz Seider’s “team-friendly” contract:

5. Moritz Seider

Contract: $8.6M x five years
Surplus Value: $41M
Positive Value Probability: 100 percent

Another new franchise defenseman on the scene courtesy of a seismic breakout, another deal in the neighbourhood of $8 million that’s aging beautifully.

When the Red Wings signed Mortiz Seider to this contract, his impacts in brutally tough minutes weren’t yet lining up with his reputation. Account for that and he was good, but not truly great. Not yet. All of that changed two seasons ago, and last year he took his game to new heights with a two-way season for the ages. While he didn’t ultimately end up with a plus-10 Offensive and Defensive Rating thanks to a tough final game, Seider came the closest any defenseman ever has.

His two-way ability is monstrous, and that’s what powers this valuation. Seider would be worth his deal if he were only a little bit above average offensively or defensively. That he’s this elite at both makes him worth nearly double his AAV.

Continued (paywall); I’m not even going to quibble with the “seismic breakout” part. Sometimes you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

You don’t expect to post these kinds of blog posts, but here we are.

The goal was to avoid taking Aunt Annie to the hospital entirely, but she’s been unable to stave off repeated UTI’s, which are not good to struggle with when one is 84, so we shifted the goalposts and decided that it made the most sense–per our primary care physician’s advice–to take AA to the hospital for some intravenous courses of treatment…

And when we tried to get her out to the hospital via car today, she tore up her right arm and left ankle because her skin is just so incredibly, incredibly fragile, so we ended up having to call 911 and have AA transported to hospital via ambulance.

Continue reading Holding our own at Providence Hospital…

Gang,

Aunt Annie has been admitted to the hospital due to a UTI, diverticulitis and some injuries accumulated while attempting to go to the hospital via car. We had to call an ambulance and we’re at Novi Providence. TMR will resume activities when her test orders accumulate and we get a free minute.

Red Wings prospects and Team USA members JP Hurlbert, Victor Plante and Brent Solomon will take part in next week’s World Junior Summer Showcase as they represent the U.S. in a week-long tournament to be held at Windsor’s WFCU Centre.

Detroit Hockey Now’s Max Smith reports that the trio of American World Junior Championship hopefuls will engage in something of a pre-camp at Little Caesars Arena’s BELFOR Training Center beginning on Wednesday:

JP Hurlbert leads the Red Wings contingent in draft pedigree as their first round pick from the latest Entry Draft. The University of Michigan commit has been spent most of his summer here already as he gears up for a spot in Ann Arbor with the Wolverines forward corps.

Victor Plante, drafted 47th overall this year by the Red Wings just as his brother Max Plante was two years ago, will be attending as well. Plante has committed to the same college as his two brothers, Zam and the aforementioned Max, University of Minnesota Duluth. Whether the three play on the same line is still yet to be seen.

Finally, Brent Solomon, who the Red Wings drafted in the fourth round in 2025 joins the team after a stellar campaign in the USHL. Solomon had 53 points (24 goals, 29 assists) in 54 regular season games with the Sioux Falls Stampede.

Continued

The Hockey News’s Adam Proteau’s working his way through ranking the NHL’s top 32 coaches, and today, Proteau suggests that Red Wings coach Todd McLellan is “on the hot seat” because the Red Wings have underachieved over the course of McLellan’s 1.5 year tenure behind Detroit’s bench:

17 – Todd McLellan, Detroit Red Wings

McLellan has more NHL experience than virtually anyone, and he’s ranked this high in part because he has 1,274 regular-season games of experience under his belt. He’s returned to the Red Wings organization he won a Stanley Cup with as an assistant in 2007-08, and McLellan would be rated higher on this list if it weren’t for Detroit’s struggles since he took over the reins in December of 2024.

The Red Wings finished sixth in the Atlantic Division in both of the past two seasons, but this year’s abysmal late-season collapse really hurts McLellan’s stock on this list. McLellan has coached four different teams – the Wings, Kings, Edmonton Oilers and San Jose Sharks – and he’s under the gun to turn things around in Detroit, especially now that Detroit GM Steve Yzerman has been fired.

McLellan is a name-brand coach, but that won’t save him if the Wings don’t get into the playoffs next season.

Continued; I would suggest that coach McLellan does not exist in a vacuum, and that the Red Wings’ consecutive late-season flops are not simply “on the coach.” The Red Wings’ players did not deliver, nor did management sufficiently address the organization’s shortcomings through mid-season moves.

Everybody pulls their rope, so to speak, but over-assessing blame on a coach who’s worked his ass off to turn the Red Wings’ ship around feels a little “on the nose.”

DetroitRedWings.com’s Jonathan Mills posted an article regarding Red Wings trade acquisition Keegan Kolesar, a 29-year-old checking forward who hopes to institute something of a culture change after being acquired from the Vegas Golden Knights:

“Really excited to join a group that, playing against them for years now, they have a tremendous amount of skill and talent in their lineup,” Kolesar said in his introductory Zoom call with the media on July 2. “Just talking to guys now, they felt that there was a missing piece, maybe an identity of just having that — not the fighting aspect, but more of the toughness and being hard to play against, being a veteran presence on the front end, bringing guys into the fight. I think that’s something I can provide.”

Kolesar was acquired in a trade with the Vegas Golden Knights on July 1 for Detroit’s third-round pick in the 2029 NHL Entry Draft and seventh-round selection in the 2027 NHL Entry Draft. He appeared in all 82 regular-season games for Vegas in 2025-26, recording 17 points (six goals, 11 assists) before tallying one goal in 21 Stanley Cup Playoff matchups.

“You can call me an old-school type of player,” he said. “Forecheck, backcheck, paycheck. I just want to help the team win. I’ve always felt the team comes first in every scenario. If there is any way I can help the team win, that’s what I’ll do.”

Few players have imposed themselves physically more consistently over the past few seasons than Kolesar, who piled up 270 hits in 2025-26 — the seventh-most in the NHL.

“It can be a pretty big toll on the body,” Kolesar said. “I’ve been fortunate enough to be pretty healthy throughout my career. I mean, knock on wood, nothing too bad…That’s an aspect that I try to bring. I think when you have that in your lineup, it makes everyone play a little bit tougher. You can play a little bit more confident when you have someone that is going to go into the trenches and do all the dirty work like that.”

Continued; Kolesar told Mills that some adjustment period will be necessary after playing for one organization during his playing career:

“You play your entire career in one spot, it’s very rare,” said Kolesar, who was originally selected by the Columbus Blue Jackets in the third round (No. 69 overall) of the 2015 NHL Entry Draft. “It’ll take some time to get over it because I’ve made so many great relationships in [Las Vegas]. It’ll take some time to turn the page, but that’s just the human side of it.”

It’s been almost a week since I revealed that Aunt Annie and I are trying to raise funds to defray the cost of paying our property taxes for this upcoming year.

I’ve tried to not whack y’all over the head with this one, but we’re in a tricky situation right now.

Aunt Annie and I make “subsistence wages”–i.e. we make just enough money to pay our bills, but every dollar that comes in the door goes out the door despite our relatively spartan lifestyle.

That’s what happens when we have to live on AA’s Social Security and my very meager wages as a State of Michigan-employed caregiver, and that’s okay, but the property taxes make our situation particularly complicated.

Continue reading Summertime fundraising for property taxes

Bleacher Report’s Hannah Stuart “checks in” on every NHL team’s 2025 1st round pick some 13 months after the 2025 NHL Draft, and, in the Red Wings’ case, Everett Silvertips graduate and 13th overall pick Carter Bear has recovered well from a partially torn Achilles tendon suffered toward the end of the 2024-2025 campaign.

Bear’s turning pro this upcoming season with a WHL title in tow, preparing for his first full campaign with the Grand Rapids Griffins:

13. Detroit Red Wings: Carter Bear, LW

How He Performed During 2025-26 Season:

At first glance, it would be easy to assume that Carter Bear had a worse season with the Everett Silvertips than his draft year. This is why we don’t judge at first glance, and instead look further for context. Bear’s point totals this season were lower, with 77 points in 53 games compared to 82 points in 56 the year before, and he got off to a slow start. 

But his point-per-game pace wasn’t really different; last year’s was 1.46 points-per-game, where this year’s was 1.45. He also tallied 22 points in 18 postseason games with the Silvertips. Add to that the fact that Bear was in the middle of overhauling certain aspects of his game, and you have a different viewpoint from which to judge. He really focused on improving the physical side of his game this year, clearly working with an eye toward his professional hockey future as he became more of a net-front presence while also developing other physical aspects of his game.

Future Outlook:

He probably needs more seasoning, so don’t take this as a 100 percent pronouncement, but it would not be surprising to see Carter Bear make the Red Wings next season. The organization is undergoing changes at the top, and captain Dylan Larkin’s trade request has been all over the news, so it’s hard to project anything firmly right now. 

But Bear would benefit from the challenge of professional hockey, and the Red Wings would benefit from his intensity and never-quit motor. It’s not really something they have in large amounts right now.

Continued; Bear is not overly big at 6′ and 187 pounds, but he’s stocky, he’s plucky, and he’s got a lot of take-no-shit grit to his game.

I don’t expect him to make the Red Wings out of training camp, but he does have a bright future, not only due to his skill set, but also because he’s got a hell of a work ethic and “compete level.”