The Athletic’s power rankings involve a discussion of…Filip Zadina’s status as a healthy scratch

The Athletic’s Sean Gentille and Dom Luszczyszyn have posted their weekly set of power rankings, and they’re talking about Filip Zadina’s status as a healthy scratch:

21. Detroit Red Wings

Record: 16-15-3
Last Week: 23
Dom rank: 21
Sean rank: 22

Dom: Quinn Hughes was taken one pick after Filip Zadina. How much closer to the playoffs are the Red Wings if they make that pick instead? A top pair of Hughes and Moritz Seider would’ve dominated this league for a decade, it’s a real shame it never came to be and it’s a decision that may hinder this team’s full rebuild potential. Not getting the top pick means it’s a necessity to hit home runs on those top 10 choices and Zadina simply has not been that. He’s scoring 0.61 points-per-60 this year at five-on-five. To his credit, a lot of that seems to be bad luck, but it’s still discouraging to see for the 22-year-old. He should’ve taken a bigger step by now.

Sean: Yeah, that made me take a look at the 2018 draft — as in, check Pronman’s “re-draft” post from a couple of months back — and folks … it was not good. But yeah, it’s probably past time for people to start getting nervous about Zadina. Getting scratched is a bad break. Maybe Jeff Blashill should throw him on a line with Dylan Larkin and see what happens.

Continued (paywall); the Ken Holland regime wanted to draft Evan Bouchard if they didn’t pick Zadina, so they never even considered Hughes.

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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.