Defector.com’s Lauren Thiesen posted an NHL preview this morning, and…
Sigh. I am trying very hard to make sure that I share a broad spectrum of articles with you. I am trying very hard to take those authors seriously whether I agree with their points or not, because the whole point of sharing this stuff with you is giving you the widest range of perspectives possible while focusing on professional writers’ takes (while injecting a little of my own opinion into the mix).
But I’ve got to give some eye-roll to this NHL preview by Defector.com’s Lauren Thiesen, because the premise is getting to be old and tired:
Detroit Red Wings
What’s Old: Patience with the Yzerplan is running out. The former Red Wings captain, returning home after a job well done in the Tampa front office, entered with probably more goodwill than any GM hire in NHL history. That was in 2019, and the Wings still don’t feel like a playoff-caliber team. A bunch of signings last year went nowhere and led to a mini-tear-down where they bailed on key defenseman Filip Hronek and once-valuable scorer Tyler Bertuzzi for more draft picks. And as the Wings finished seventh in their division, with only six more points than the previous year, there were not many bright spots. The goaltending was bad. The scoring wasn’t there. And most worrying of all, the sophomore campaigns for winger Lucas Raymond and D-man Moritz Seider were fairly underwhelming. (I think Seider still has the juice when he’s got the right partner.) This was a team that once owned a luxury hotel in the playoffs, but if they can’t take a major step forward, this will be their eighth straight year in a bedbug-infested basement.
What’s New: Once again, the Wings were active in the offseason, but not necessarily productive enough to make up the four spots in the wild card race they’d need to jump. The most intriguing of their new guys is 25-year-old local boy Alex DeBrincat, who’s a year removed from a 40-goal season in Chicago as a favored son of Patrick Kane. In Kane’s role this year will be Dylan Larkin, another local boy, who just signed an extension to avoid leaving the only team (and state) he’s ever known. Larkin is charming and slick, as good a face as you can have for a franchise this woeful, but he’s also a bit miscast as the top center who’s supposed to carry the team. He’s more like the play-maker who’d make the best guy better, if there was one.
Continued; I will grant you that many Wings fans had hoped that the “Yzerplan” would be a quick fix, but Steve Yzerman was very blunt with fans from the start–stating that the rebuild would be a long, deliberate process, and that the process would involve painful years of rebuilding.
He was blunt about this. And no, we Wings partisans didn’t realize how much was left to tear down before Yzerman began to rebuild. But the Red Wings are not stuck in a “bedbug-infested basement” as they patiently and deliberately rebuild, last year’s regular season did not suck from stem to stern, and Dylan Larkin is a point-per-game player in the NHL, which is not your everyday occurrence.
Bashing the Wings and bashing Steve Yzerman are very much in vogue right now. But the characterizations are just getting to be more inaccurate.
I guess I just disagree vehemently with Ms. Thiesen here–don’t get me wrong, she poured a lot into her NHL preview, which is incredibly deep–but sometimes you just sort of snap, and this is my breaking point as far as these suggestions that what the Wings are doing is plain old dumb.
