The Athletic’s Max Bultman issued a set of “Glass Half-Empty and Half-Full Outlooks” for this year’s Red Wings team earlier this morning, and if things go well…
Look, there’s nothing rosy about this season’s outlook, but not everything needs to be doom and gloom, either. Yes, it seems pretty inevitable the Red Wings are heading for an early-April locker clean-out again. Yes, the contract situation up front is more than a year from resolving itself. And no, it’s not going to be easy for many of this team’s prospects to start the season in Detroit.
But things do continue to move in the right direction. This is the final year of contracts for Green, Ericsson and Daley, and while two of those three may be cause for consternation throughout the year, there will soon be all kinds of space for Dennis Cholowski (who showed heaps of promise last year), Oliwer Kaski and more — and, recalling last season’s injury-riddled blueline, it may not even take a year to materialize.
As for the idea of Mantha, Larkin, Athanasiou and Bertuzzi improving in vain — or worse, not at all — much of that could depend on context. Last season, long drawn-out losing streaks plagued with bad mistakes and bad bounces seemed to have compound effects on morale. There seemed to be a tangible confidence benefit to that long winning streak down the stretch, but if those wins could be more evenly distributed throughout the year, the team wouldn’t necessarily have to go a week (or two) without winning. It might sound like semantics, but keeping those reward signals firing regularly in the players’ brains is one way to help curb the devastation of losing.
