Author: George Malik

Former Red Wings defenseman Kyle Quincey will be among the featured guests in a TSN special airing at 7 PM EDT on Tuesday (in Canada), The Problem of Pain. TSN’s Rick Westhead will discuss the issue of painkillers and pain management in a league where everybody is playing hurt at one point or another:

Take this for what you will: Via TSN 1260 Edmonton’s Jason Gregor and NHL.com/InGoal guru Kevin Woodley, and posted via my Twitter pals Mike “The Vyrus,” Ryan Hana and the excellent Winged Wheel Podcast…

This hit the wires while I was taking my pre-game nap:

"I'm hearing, if he goes to market, the Red Wings are looking to make a big pitch for Markstrom. I wonder if they give Markstrom his ask of $6m how it would impact others after Lehner signed for $5m in Vegas." Woodley.

— Jason Gregor (@JasonGregor) September 21, 2020

Markstrom is 30, and the 6’6,” 206-pound goaltender posted a 2.73 goals-against average and a .918 save percentage over the course of 44 games, going 23-16-and-4, all while earning $4 million on a $3.66 million cap hit. He went 8-5-and-1 in the bubble as well…

I’m not sure that the Red Wings need to spend $6 million on a goaltender when they have Bernier emerging as a starter, but having a platoon system of Markstrom and Bernier as 1A/1B is intriguing to me.

Woodley doesn’t screw around when it comes to rumors, and he’s Vancouver-based, so this is a reliable tip.

You’re just going to get some non-sequiturs as part of TMR 3.0. I’m a writer, and I have thoughts about hockey that extend beyond posting articles or writing my own (and I’m working on finding my voice in terms of the second point). So:

Today, in a normal world, this would be the last day of the Detroit Red Wings’ training camp in Traverse City.

I would be utterly exhausted from two weeks’ worth of covering the prospect tournament and main training camp, but I’d be happy with the work I’d produced.

I’d have a celebratory meal of Culver’s at the hotel and “empty the notebook” ahead of the autumn equinox tomorrow, and I’d head home on Wednesday to start covering the Red Wings’ condensed exhibition season (the team usually plays 8 games over the course of only 12 nights), preceding an early-October regular season start.

Here’s a slightly off-topic note from Winging It in Motown’s excellent Kyle McIlmurray on Twitter: former Red Wings forward Drew Miller has retired from hockey, and he’s embarking upon a new career as a property and casualty insurance agent:

Former Red Wing Drew Miller has a new gig as an insurance agent pic.twitter.com/OareQyUSnU— Kyle M. (@KyleWIIM) September 21, 2020

As McIlmurray’s Tweet notes, Miller is working for the Korotkin Insurance Group, and he has both a Facebook page and a LinkedIn page if you, well, want to get some insurance.

Not everybody ends up making millions and millions of dollars in their NHL careers, and grinders like Miller often end up working day jobs to get by.

Hell, even Ted Lindsay was working for an auto parts supplier into his 70’s thanks to the fact that player salaries were all but literal peanuts back in the day, and Nicklas Lidstrom, who made a mint during his playing career, is a business consultant and investor (Henrik Zetterberg probably has the cushiest job as he runs a sandwich shop [seriously!]).

This is the norm, in all honesty, not the exception for hockey players, so congrats to Drew for landing a solid post-hockey job.

The Athletic has produced a significant amount of 2020 NHL draft-related content today, issuing a staff mock draft, Scott Wheeler’s list of his 100 best prospects available, and now The Athletic’s Max Bultman has posted a list of his best 2nd round picks.

Detroit picks 32nd overall, 45th overall and 56th overall in the 2nd round, and they own the 63rd and 65th picks as well, so, in theory, anyway, the Wings will have multiple and significant opportunities to stack their roster with prospects who “fall out” of the first round.

Bultman has zeroed in on 6 potential 2nd round picks, and I’m going to afford you a glance at his take on the “local kid”:

The Detroit Red Wings will have ample cap space with which to work during the 2020 offseason, but there are a couple of players who’ve become a drag on the team’s salary structure in one Frans Nielsen (signed for 2 more years at a $5.25 million cap hit) and Justin Abdelkader (signed for 3 more years at a $4.25 million cap hit).

Per CapFriendly, the Red Wings would have to pay Nielsen 1/3rd of his salary over twice the length of his contract, which translates to a cap hit that ranges between $666K and $4.4 million for four years (per CapFriendly’s buyout calculator), while buying out Abdelkader would translate to a cap hit between $1.8 and 2.3 million for the next six years.

All of that being said, given that the salary cap will remain flat for the next two seasons (at least), Sportsnet’s Luke Fox believes that the Wings should swallow hard and buy out Abdelkader:

The Athletic’s guru for all things prospect-related, one Corey Pronman, reports that Team USA is going to hold an actual evaluation camp in Plymouth, Michigan this October. Regrettably, the event, which essentially replaces the COVID-19-cancelled World Junior Summer Showcase, won’t be open to the public:

Hearing that USA Hockey will have a world junior evaluation camp in October. It will be a closed event.

— Corey Pronman (@coreypronman) September 20, 2020

USA Hockey's world junior camp in Michigan will be from October 8 to 12, beginning the day following the 2020 NHL Draft.

— Corey Pronman (@coreypronman) September 21, 2020

Updated 2x with Kulfan and HSJ @ 12:37 PM: According to MLive’s Ansar Khan and DobberProspects’ Jokke

McIsaac was #RedWings fourth pick in 2018 (36th) and played 28 games last season in juniors after returning from shoulder surgery. https://t.co/yr9Trylk3y— Ansar Khan (@AnsarKhanMLive) September 21, 2020

LHD Jared McIsaac (DET) has been loaned to #Liiga team HPK for the entire 2020-2021 season.

RHD Oskari Laaksonen (BUF) and C Otto Somppi (TBL) have been loaned to Liiga team Pelicans until NHL training camps start.— Jokke Nevalainen (@JokkeNevalainen) September 21, 2020

HPK posted a press release regarding McIsaac’s loan, and it emphasizes the fact that this is a full-season loan for McIsaac, who rehabbed from major shoulder surgery this past season.

Update: Guess who got there first?

Yesterday afternoon, Red Wings forward Filip Zadina spoke with iDnes.cz’s Jan Danek and Anton Zelenko regarding the “upper-body injury” which may sideline Zadina for up to a month’s worth of Czech Extraliga action.

As it turns out, forward on loan to Ocelari Trinec gave iDnes.cz a much, much longer interview, but the damn thing is behind a Czech paywall.

Said Paywall for iDnes Premium looks like garble, but it really pisses me off that I can’t even try to make a rough translation of the lengthy missive, because it sounds fascinating.

How to shoot the sniper from the NHL. Zadina about Detroit, dad, Trinec and injuries

He wanted to show Czech hockey that he’s growing as an extraordinary scorer. In addition, he’s playing for the team where his father [is an assistant] coach. However, while Trinec played late in its game against Karlovy Vary, Filip Zadina watched at home like a marauder. No, he didn’t catch COVID. In fact, he feels pretty good.

It happened less than a week ago. He trained first on the ice, and then in the gym. But then he was hurried to the hospital due to a bad accident. “Upper-body injury,” he says in hockey jargon, saying, “I wouldn’t clarify it any more.”

The tags assigned to the article hint at its subject matter as HK Mountfield’s Filip Hronek and Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman are tagged, but I’m suspicious of the paywall’s promise that signing up costs all of 1 Czech Koruna (4 cents), with a monthly fee of $1.70 (which you can cancel at any time!).

If anybody speaks Czech and can help me navigate the paywall, I’d be happy to dig into this article, but in the interim…This is what we’ve got.

Update: MLive’s Ansar Khan reports that Filip Zadina has an injured finger.

Of 2020 draft-related note this morning: MLive’s Ansar Khan filed an article which rounds up several mock drafts, and Khan notes that there’s little consensus as to which player the Red Wings might pick with 4th overall in the first round:

Dobberprospects.com: Lucas Raymond Jokke Nevalainen writes: “Just a high-end offensive talent who can also play a pretty decent defensive game. The Red Wings can really build their roster around him.”

…

TheDraftAnalyst.com: Marco Rossi

Steve Kournianos writes: “It was unfortunate the Red Wings lost out on a top-three pick despite owning the league’s worst record by a significant margin. Nonetheless, they are far from settling by drafting Rossi – an Austrian-born scoring machine who finished as the OHL’s leading scorer and won the top player award. Rossi’s vision and IQ are off the charts, but he also owns a deadly shot and was one of the league’s better two-way centers. The size thing may seem like a turn off but watching him play and it becomes completely irrelevant.”

The Athletic also posted a staff mock draft this morning, and Wings beat writer Max Bultman’s going with the “local hero“…

4. Detroit: Cole Perfetti, C, Saginaw-OHL

Max Bultman: The Red Wings need everything, and at this spot in the draft they’ll have the ability to go in a number of directions. But Perfetti, with his widely praised hockey smarts and puck skills, would check a number of boxes for Detroit. He can run the Red Wings’ future power play. He can score. He can make plays. And if he ends up being able to do all of that from the center position, it’ll be all the better.

And in another behind-the-paywall article, The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler posted a list of his Top 100 Prospects, and he’s ranked Perfetti 4th. Here’s part of his scouting report: