Month: July 2024

The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler posted a list of his top 100 drafted prospects this morning, and the Red Wings are represented by Simon Edvinsson at #29, Axel Sandin Pellikka at #37, Michael Brandsegg-Nygard at #39, Nate Danielson at #49 and Marco Kasper at #62. Here’s what he has to say about Sandin Pellikka (one paragraph out of two, anyway):

Sandin Pellikka is an individually talented, competitive 5-foot-11 defenseman with natural scoring instincts and the tools to execute. He’s got really good edges and mobility and has shown improved speed in straight lines to pull away from chasers (with more room for growth there still). He walks the line to get shots through at a high level, wants the puck in the offensive zone and has the skill and shot to make things happen when teammates find him off the point or as the trailer off the rush (which he often activates into). He keeps his head up in the neutral and defensive zones and is a confident puck carrier on exits and entries. Though he’s not big, he’s athletic and he plays hard and physical and engages in battles in the defensive zone with some sneaky strength. He’s got a good stick. He does a good job maintaining gaps and matching opposing forwards step for step skating backward, and times his close-outs and pinches effectively. He can really shoot it with a pinpoint accurate shot, a wrister that comes off hard and an eagerness to put pucks on net from the point. There are times when he can wait too long to make his decisions and I wouldn’t call him super creative, but he makes good choices more often than he’s careless and he has progressed really rapidly. He’s got a chance to be an impactful, maybe even high-end offensive defenseman and defensively capable second-pairing one. When he’s on, he can control the game in all three zones.

Continued (paywall)

The Red Wings drafted White Lake Township’s Austin Baker, a 6,’ 190-pound left wing, 203rd overall during last month’s NHL Draft. Baker may be a 7th round pick, but he’s delighted to have been drafted by the Red Wings as one of three National Team Development Program picks in 2024 (see: Max Plante and John Whipple).

This morning, Detroit Hockey Now’s Tim Robinson profiles Baker via a subscriber-only article:

“[Development camp]’s super cool,” Baker said. “I got the chance to skate with [Pavel Datsyuk] when I was younger at one of his camps. Seeing him out there now, I’m a little older, he was trying to teach me something out there, so that was pretty cool.”

He worked at the camp, of course, but admits to a little rubbernecking.

“I’m just kind of taking everything in right now,” he said during camp earlier this month. “Just learning from the older guys. (Niklas) Kronwall’s out there, too. Some cool guys walking around. Just kind of taking everything in.”

Baker played for the U.S. Team Development Program the past two years, and is a Michigan State commit. But he’s going to spend another year in the USHL this winter, playing for the Sioux Falls Stampede.

“I think Michigan State’s got a really great organization,” Baker said.”They’re gonna have a really good team next year. I think I’ve still got a lot more to prove in the USHL.”

Continued (paywall) with comments from Sioux Falls Stampede coach Ryan Cruthers…

Yesterday morning, MLive’s Ansar Khan attempted to determine what the Red Wings’ forward lines might look like come opening night, and this morning, Khan examines his probable defensive pairs and goaltending hierarchy.

I think that Khan’s got the goaltending down pat, but that’s a little easier to say in mid-July than to watch shake out in September:

1. Cam Talbot

2. Alex Lyon

3. Ville Husso

Lyon didn’t play the first five weeks of the season as the No. 3 goalie and ended up appearing in more games (44) than any Detroit goalie due to Husso’s injuries. Uncertainty about whether Husso will be healthy and how effective he’ll be prompted the Red Wings to sign Talbot, who’s coming off a strong regular season and can handle a heavy workload at age 37. A lighter workload (25-30 games) should be good for Lyon. Having a No. 3 goalie – if that’s where Husso lands on the depth chart – at a $4.75 million cap hit is far from cost-effective, but the club’s hands could be tied. Husso probably isn’t tradeable and sending him to Grand Rapids would not provide much cap relief ($1.15 million).

Continued (paywall, sorry); at this point, it really does appear that the Wings will award Talbot the #1 job and utilize Lyon as the team’s back-up goaltender.

I don’t really know what will happen with Husso, because the Wings would have to eat a big portion of his salary to move him.

NHL.com’s Dave Hogg takes a look at the state of the Detroit Red Wings this evening, discussing the Wings’ offseason additions, player departures, and what the Red Wings still need to do to complete their offseason:

What they still need: With Tarasenko joining Patrick Kane, Alex DeBrincat and Lucas Raymond, the Red Wings have a lot of scoring potential on their top two lines, but these four players are not known as strong defensive forwards. That’s going to put a lot of pressure on Larkin and J.T. Compher to forecheck and retrieve pucks. Detroit also needs a strong defensive defenseman for its second pair. Moritz Seider faced the League’s toughest competition last season, which cost him on the offensive end. A stay-at-home veteran could take much of that pressure off him.

Continued; I don’t disagree that the Red Wings do need a second-pair, right-shooting defenseman pretty significantly, but I’m not sure that he exists on the free agent marketplace.

Once the Wings have signed restricted free agents Jonatan Berggren, Lucas Raymond, Moritz Seider and Joe Veleno to contract extensions, and the team’s salary cap situation sorts itself out, perhaps the Wings will swing a late-summer trade for the kind of player they need…

But I think that it’s increasingly likely that the Wings will have to wait until at least the start of the regular season, if not until the 2023-2024 trade deadline, to fully address that particular need.

Also of note from Hogg:

From WZZM 13, the Grand Rapids Griffins are holding their annual Youth Hockey Camp at Belknap Park this week, with Tyler Spezia, Justin Abdelkader and the Grandville High School Hockey Team coaching youngsters

Kudos to Detroit Hockey Now’s Kevin Allen for stirring things up on a hot and sticky July evening.

I’m a little hesitant to issue grades to Steve Yzerman’s most significant offseason moves as of yet, because I am hoping that the Wings’ offseason moves aren’t yet finished, but Allen offers some nuanced grades this evening, and it’s an interesting way to start a discussion of the Red Wings’ offseason–thus far–as a whole:

Trading Jake Walman/Re-Signing Patrick Kane—Grade:  A-

This feels more like landing a new player than re-signing an old one because many believed Kane would leave for a higher salary or more term that Yzerman could offer.

Yzerman didn’t really have the salary cap room to to support re-signing Kane. Projections had Kane able to get offers in the $5 to $6 million range. It seemed as if teams might give him term as well.

Give Yzerman credit being creative enough to keep Kane in a Detroit jersey. First, he traded Walman and his $3.4 million salary to the San Jose Sharks. Walman fell out of favor in Detroit last season, but the reason they traded him was to clear up the cap space.  The price for doing that was giving the Sharks a second-round pick. It was the pick they got for Gibson.

The second-round pick was going rate to move that much salary. The St. Louis Blues a second-round in 2025 to take center Kevin Hayes and his $3.4 million.

Yzerman had more work to do to land Kane. He used the over-35 bonus option to give himself more buying power. He offered Kane a $4 million base salary, plus $2.5 in bonus opportunities. Some of those bonuses are easily makeable, like $1.5 million for playing 10 games. Those bonuses will be paid out of next season’s camp.

Continued; Allen sticks with the cause-and-effect theory regarding all of the salary cap-shedding moves that the Red Wings’ management group made this offseason.

I cannot deny that sending Walman to San Jose opened up cap space, but the trade in itself still makes me cringe.

Anyway, give Allen’s article a read, and weigh in if you wish in the comments session.

The Red Wings released their 2024-2025 regular season schedule earlier this month, and today, the Hockey News’s Connor Eargood lists “five must-watch games,” including an up-tick in the Red Wings-Senators rivalry:

Tuesday, January 7 vs. Ottawa Senators: When David Perron spoke to reporters at his April exit interview, he spoke of his desire to remain a Red Wing for the foreseeable future. He loved living in Detroit, with its proximity to his Quebec home and the way his family was accepted by the Red Wings. He also had his fair share of heroics for the Winged Wheel, including the tying goal in Detroit’s April 16 game against the Montreal Canadiens that kept their playoff hopes alive for a few more minutes.

Instead, Detroit didn’t re-sign Perron, and he left to play for division rival Ottawa in free agency. Players tend to have good games against their former teams, and the battle-winning Perron is already a pain in the neck to play against. 

Detroit’s bouts with Ottawa have already been chock full of meaning in the past few seasons, some of the most defining of the past couple seasons. In 2023, a back-to-back drubbing by the Senators caused Red Wings general manager Steve Yzerman to sell at the deadline, trading off key pieces in Bertuzzi and defenseman Filip Hronek. Last season, a Dec. 9 game at Little Caesars Arena saw Detroit captain Dylan Larkin knocked out by a Mathieu Joseph hit, causing Perron to attack Senators defenseman Artem Zub as retaliation because he thought he was the perpetrator.

Continued; the one thing the Red Wings didn’t address during this offseason was…Well, okay, two things. As it applies to the Ottawa Senators, the Wings haven’t really added any “team toughness,” and it may take adding that much-needed right-shot defenseman to bring in a real gunner who can play toe-to-toe with the Perrons and Tkachuks of the Senators.

I was as surprised as anyone that Perron left Detroit, but he arguably received more money ($4 million a season!) and probably more term (2 years) than the Red Wings were willing to give him, and he’s headed off to Ottawa to kick-start the Senators’ rebuild.

He’s definitely slowed and he’s definitely taken more obstruction penalties as his tenure with the Red Wings progressed, but he’s still a vocal leader and a “sneaky dirty” sniper.

Anyway, Detroit plays Ottawa 4 times–on December 5th in Ottawa, on January 7th in Detroit, on March 10th in Ottawa, and on March 27th in Detroit. As such, the games are spread out in a way that will make the budding rivalry between the teams relevant all season long.

It’s apparently “Wings Week” on Defector.com, and long-time sportswriter and general curmudgeon Ray Ratto posted an article suggesting that the Red Wings’ “Winged Wheel” should be hailed.

This one requires a subscription to Defector to read, but it’s a free subscription:

It’s a wing, attached to a wheel, and needs no elaboration. It is evocative, simple elegance that does not task one’s patience the way this does, make you think the designer stopped for lunch and never returned, or annoy the entire concept of the sport.

It starts with the wing, which is celebrating three quarters of a century as the most perfect logo in all of logodom. Not because it represents the Detroit Red Wings, mind you. Nobody but Comrade Theisen cares about them one way or another, and she cares about them with an unsettling fervor.

No, it’s the logo—the idea, simply and perfectly delivered so well that it has held up with only subatomic modifications since 1948. It doesn’t need any words to explain what, where or why it is, like this. It doesn’t have an angry cartoon character, like this. It isn’t changing every three weeks from something terrible and lazy to something lazy and terrible, like this. It has no socially unsettling antecedents, like this.  It doesn’t even try to anthropomorphize itself, like this.

Mostly, though, the Red Wing is perfect because it stays constant. Most teams submit to a rebrand every few years because the owner’s cousin’s kid took a drawing class in junior college and wants to justify it. Some teams, most of the minor league baseball teams, change their entire name to fool folks into thinking they are wacky, fun-loving, out-of-the-box thinkers rather than the borderline plagiarists they often are.

And a few teams have tried to recreate/reinvent the wing with indifferent success.

But all those logo designs are falling out of fashion, and not just because repetition is the weakest form of flattery, or because of the silent scrutiny of the winged wheel.

Continued; we’ll see what else Defector.com cooks up for “Wings Week.”

The Red Wings signed 32-year-old defenseman Erik Gustafsson to a 2-year, $4 million contract on July 1st after Shayne Gostisbehere chose to leave the team to rejoin the Carolina Hurricanes. As DetroitRedWings.com’s Jonathan Mills notes, Gustafsson knows that he’s going to be expected to step up and attempt to fill Gostisbehere’s role, if not his point totals:

“I like to run [the power play] on the blue line, get the puck to the forwards, shoot the puck, create lanes,” Gustafsson said. “I’m just trying to get out there and score. I’m very confident on the power play.”

Gustafsson said he received interest from multiple teams when 2024 NHL free agency opened, but he’s pleased he chose the Red Wings.

“(Free agency) is a little nerve-wracking, but I knew which teams were interested in signing me,” Gustafsson said. “I’m very happy to be signed with Detroit, with all the history and Swedes going there.”

Gustafsson also said he’s eager to reunite with several familiar faces in Detroit, previously playing with Tyler Motte for the AHL’s Rockford IceHogs (2016-17), Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat in Chicago (2017-20, 2021-22), goalie Cam Talbot in Calgary (2019-20), Olli Maatta in Chicago (2019-20), netminder Alex Lyon in Philadelphia (2020-21), Ben Chiarot and Jeff Petry in Montreal (2020-21) Joe Snively in Washington (2022-23) and Justin Holl in Toronto (2022-23).

“With the skill and group we have, I think we can take another step this year,” Gustafsson said. “It’s going to be fun to see Kaner back here too and be on the same team as him again. I’m looking forward to this year.”

Continued; Gustafsson’s been a bit of a journeyman over the past half-decade, and he’ll be looking for a home in Detroit.

Per the Detroit Red Wings:

10-Game Plans On Sale NOW

10-Game Plans, presented by Coca-Cola Zero Sugar, are on sale now. Each plan features marquee matchups like when the Red Wings face off against the Toronto Maple Leafs, the ever-popular Thanksgiving Eve game or the New Year’s Eve game.

See below for the four different plan options, then pick the one that’s perfect for you. Act fast, these plans won’t be around for long!