The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn previews the Detroit Red Wings’ 2019-2020 team this morning, and his prediction for the Wings’ season outcome is gloomy:
Last season the Red Wings finished with 74 points. The year before it was 73 points. The most likely landing spot for next season is right in the same ballpark with a 45 percent chance of landing somewhere between 70 and 80 points and an average projection right in between at 73.7 points.
It’s an extremely bleak projection, one exacerbated by the fact the team arguably plays in the league’s toughest division, one where three playoff spots are basically spoken for already. It would take everything going right for Detroit and everything going wrong for plenty of teams in front of them for the team to have a winning season. The Red Wings were one of the league’s weakest clubs last year and only got worse after dealing Gustav Nyquist and Nick Jensen. Prior to the deadline, the Red Wings had an expected goals percentage of 46, but that already bad number dropped significantly afterwards, all the way to dead last in the league at 39 percent.
There should be no surprises about how dire this projection is, especially after they didn’t do much to improve their underlying talent (unless you count adding two fourth-line calibre players) in the offseason, all while many other teams made tangible improvements.
Continued (paywall)
Wow. Pretty negative article. He’s calling Filppula and Nemeth 4th line calibre players. I know other posters have said this too. Not me. I keep defending them. Like I said, I call it the way I see it despite being labelled as negative.
Good grief man/woman/person get over yourself. Not everything is about you.
Fil is a fine stopgap though and Nemeth should be a solid defensive defenseman to hopefully stabilize the defense a little. Unfortunately, he’ll be slotted to high like the rest of the D-core. Hopefully, this bottom feeding won’t last much longer.