Of Red Wings-related note from The Athletic this morning:
- The Athletic’s Harman Dayal uses advanced statistics to rank every NHL team’s first line. Given that the Red Wings have a goal differential of zero, the Wings rank fairly low. Dayal explains that the team’s struggles to score at even strength are why Lucas Raymond, Dylan Larkin and Marco Kasper are seen as pretty average until recently–and I should note that the Columbus Blue Jackets’ first line of Kirill Marchenko, Adam Fantilli and Dmitri Voronkov is the NHL’s best:
Detroit Red Wings
Despite their elite, No. 2 ranked power-play, the Red Wings’ top line has had trouble scoring even-strength goals for most of the season. However, it appears it has unlocked a new gear recently and could be on the cusp of a monster breakout.
Todd McLellan has put Dylan Larkin, Lucas Raymond and rookie Marco Kasper (who has 16 points in his last 18 games) together for the last several weeks, and they’ve annihilated opponents from a territorial standpoint. This new-look first line has controlled nearly 58 percent of expected goals and is scoring goals at a much higher rate than the first line managed earlier in the season.
2. The Athletic’s Corey Pronman ranks the best prospects drafted with traded draft picks acquired at the trade deadline from 2020 to 2023. That’s a lot of words to say, “Be careful what you wish for when you send a top pick to another team in a deadline deal.”
As you know by now, the Red Wings drafted Axel Sandin Pellikka with their first-round pick from the Filip Hronek trade, and Pronman issues what I would deem as a very mild compliment to ASP:
3. Axel Sandin-Pellikka, RHD (Filip Hronek to Vancouver)
Detroit moved out an average-sized puck-moving defenseman in Hronek and hoped it would replace him long-term with ASP. He is a very intelligent and hardworking defender with a cannon of a shot, though his size will be an issue defending NHL forwards.
ASP is listed at 5’11” and 185 pounds, which isn’t big by today’s NHL standards, but something tells me that he’s going to be okay in terms of learning to defend at the NHL level, even if it takes him a year of apprenticeship in Grand Rapids to learn the ropes.
