Yesterday afternoon, the Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan posted a Q and A session with Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill, and this morning, The Athletic’s Max Bultman offers a new Q and A session with the Red Wings’ bench boss. Among the highlights:
Bultman: When you think about planning a camp after an offseason like this, what goes into that? How normal will that be, whenever it does arrive?
Blashill: Yeah, obviously without knowing specifics of what that looks like, we’ve got to plan with a number of different models, depending on what gets thrown at us. Meaning, how many exhibition games, meaning how long is camp, how many players are at camp? Those are all unknowns.
So I think the most important thing for the Detroit Red Wings, with the fact we’ve been off as long as we’ve been off, is getting our hockey team as ready as possible to be ready to play as a unit when the season starts. And so sometimes during a normal training camp, you’re kind of serving two areas. One is getting your team ready, getting your players ready.
And two is looking at some of the really young players that you’ve drafted or that are potentially going to play for you down the road, and I would say — for a multitude of reasons — that won’t be a focus of this camp. Mainly, those guys won’t necessarily be here, and two we have to get as ready as possible, and we’ve never had a layoff this long. So I just think it helps narrow the focus of camp.
Continued (paywall)
