Author: George Malik

Now it’s July 6th, and I’m coming out of a burnout-induced sickness haze, but I’m going to post this take on Patrick Kane’s value from Detroit Hockey Now’s Max Smith, and suggest that he may know something that we don’t:

The list of [free agent] names that remain unsigned includes forwards Patrick Kane, James van Riesmdyk, and David Perron alongside defenseman Travis Hamonic and goaltender Cam Talbot. For the Red Wings UFA class, it seems to be a case of trying to read if the winds will be able to carry them where they want to go.

Highlighting the top of the list, of course, is Kane. The mercurial winger is in his age 37 season, and came to Detroit after what could have been a career-ending hip resurfacing surgery hoping to cup chase.

Since then, Detroit has suffered three March collapses and missed the playoffs, while his hometown Buffalo Sabres have finally broken a 14 year playoff drought. Kane cares a lot about his family, and while he did express a desire to return to Detroit in his post season press conferences, that was before Dylan Larkin’s trade request went public.

Re-signing with Detroit could mean more playoff misses, and it’s not like Kane is getting younger, or healthier. Injuries limited 88 to just 67 games, though he still managed 57 points and crossed the 500 career goal mark. There’s certainly a market for Kane, but it seems for the moment that he’s more than willing to let the dust clear a bit more before he makes any decisions about where he plays next season.

Continued; there is a LOT of unofficial speculation that Kane is going to sign with Buffalo, but I’m contending that he may be waiting to see what happens with Dylan Larkin before making his decision. After all, the two players have the same agent in Pat Brisson…

But I guess what raises my eyebrow here is that I’m not sure we’d call Kane “mercurial,” nor would I suggest that he’s brittle. He suffered what was probably a broken wrist in a collision with the end boards and missed a bit chunk of time there.

No, he’s not quite as durable as he was prior to his hip resurfacing procedure, but he’s still 80% of what he used to be, and 80% of Patrick Kane is a hell of a lot better than most players in the NHL.

Earlier this morning, I posted the clip of Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas’ final “32 Thoughts” podcast of the 2025-2026 season, a massive 4-hour bonanza of coverage of each and every one of the NHL’s 32 teams.

At the 1:17 mark, Friedman and Bukauskas discuss the Red Wings, and the Hockey News’s Michael Whitaker reports that Friedman and Bukauskas discuss a logical target with which the Wings could pursue a trade for Dylan Larkin–the Carolina Hurricanes:

DetroitRedWings.com’s Jonathan Mills wraps up the team’s coverage of the Wings’ annual Summer Development Camp at Little Caesars Arena with a circumspect review this morning:

Getting a great look at the organization’s next wave of young talent, the Detroit Red Wings concluded their 2026 Development Camp at Little Caesars Arena’s BELFOR Training Center last Thursday.

“At the end of the day, it really is an educational camp where we try to give them everything we can and hopefully, they absorb as much as they can,” Red Wings Assistant Director of Player Development Dan Cleary said. “We have great people here. I just want to say how important it is to have the behind-the-scenes people that make this thing run very smoothly, and I can’t thank everybody enough.”

The Red Wings’ 2026 Development Camp roster consisted of 20 forwards, 11 defensemen and six goaltenders, including the seven new players the club took at the 2026 NHL Entry Draft at KeyBank Center last weekend. Additionally, all eight of the club’s picks from 2025, five from 2024, five from 2023 and two from 2022 were in attendance for the four-day event.

Sure, Development Camp has evolved over the years, but its purpose hasn’t changed: help these young skaters learn, grow and embrace what it means to be part of the organization.

“There’s a bunch of NHL and Detroit legends here that have way more experience than all of us,” Carter Bear said. “We got to listen to them, listen to what they say and what they want us to work on…I think it’s just unreal and pretty cool to have those people around the rink. Seeing what they did with the Detroit Red Wings back then and seeing them now is pretty special.”

This past weekend was not a good one in the TMR household. After a week and-a-half’s worth of 12-to-16 hour shifts behind the laptop, with caregiving added in, I ended up exhausted and sick.

I slept through the vast majority of the weekend, and was so very exhausted that I didn’t even do a decent job of taking care of my aunt, who had a rough weekend herself.

As you might have noticed, TMR went dark as a result, so I would like to get the blog back on track with a roundup of this past weekend’s news.

Let’s do so on a source-by-source basis:

1. We’ll defer to Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff as he offers a Nicklas Lidstrom conversation with Gunnar Nordstrom of Expressen. The two Swedish hockey legends discussed Viktor Arvidsson’s pluses after the free agent forward signed with Detroit on July 1st…

“Our coach [Todd McLellan] had Arvidsson in the LA Kings and knows that he has leadership qualities,” Red Wings vice president of hockey operations Nicklas Lidstrom told reporter Gunnar Nordstrom of Swedish website Expressen. “He will bring that.

“Then he is a player who will go hard on goal and be uncomfortable to face because he competes all the time. He will play among our top six forwards.”

And Lidstrom also spoke about a Red Wings depth signing in 26-year-old forward Wilmer Skoog:

Of Red Wings-related note from Detroit Hockey Now this morning:

1. First, DHN’s Bob Duff reports that former Red Wing Slava Kozlov (who makes his offseason home in Spain of all places) has been hired as an assistant coach for the “Shanghai Dragons” of the KHL

“I was told they were creating a new team, a completely different project,” Kozlov told Russian website Sport-Express. “That intrigued me. There definitely won’t be the chaos we had last year.”

Kozlov took over as coach of Moscow Dynamo when Alexei Kudashov was dismissed in midseason.

Another former Red Wings player, Gerard Gallant, began last season as head coach of the Shanghai Dragons. But the team waited until late in the summer to begin assembling a roster and floundered on the ice.

“What happened last offseason can’t happen again,” Kozlov said. “Both the botched preseason and the long, unsuccessful stretches all had an impact on the final result.

“The team looked poor physically and, after the New Year, stopped competing for a playoff spot.”

Continued, with Duff noting that Martin Frk and Givani Smith are just the latest Red Wings alums to join Chinese-based teams in the KHL recently…

If you can call Shanghai a Chinese-based team. They actually play their home games in St. Petersburg, in Western Europe instead of East Asia, sharing the rink with SKA St. Petersburg.

2. Second, Max Smith discusses the weekend that was in the NHL in “The Daily,” with Smith noting that Patrick Kane has NOT yet found a new home…

Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman and Kyle Bukauskas discuss the entire NHL’s 32 teams over the course of a 4-HOUR-LONG “32 Thoughts” podcast today. The gents discuss the Red Wings and the Dylan Larkin situation at 1 hour and 17 minutes, digging into the Dylan Larkin situation:

MLive’s Ansar Khan discusses whether Dylan Larkin or Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman has greater leverage as #71’s trade request drags out into the summer:

Yzerman is not going to be pressured into making a move in which he feels he’s not getting a good return for the face of the franchise. He’s clearly not getting that from any of the three teams on Larkin’s original list of clubs he agreed to waive his no-trade clause to join: Florida, Minnesota and Vegas.

The list has probably been expanded and will grow the longer this standoff goes. It might take a three-way trade for the Detroit captain to land in one of his approved destinations, with Minnesota being the most probable spot.

Larkin’s full no-trade clause at first seemed to give him the leverage.

That’s no longer the case if it ever was in the first place. Yzerman doesn’t seem the type to bluff when he says he’s willing to wait as long as it takes for the right deal. This is a tenure-defining move in a tenure that has fallen way short of expectations. He’s not going to simply take the best offer from a ridiculously short list of approved trade partners if the return doesn’t have the potential to immediately and significantly help this team.

I was doing some thinking overnight before I read Khan’s article, and I figured that this trade would indeed help define whether Yzerman succeeds as the Wings’ GM. I don’t think that’s just hyperbole here…

Per the Detroit Red Wings:

RED WINGS SIGN CHASE STILLMAN TO ONE-YEAR, TWO-WAY CONTRACT

  … 2021 First-Round Pick Spent 2025-26 Season with AHL’s Abbotsford Canucks …

DETROIT – The Detroit Red Wings today signed forward Chase Stillman to a one-year, two-way contract.

Stillman, 23, played the 2025-26 season with the American Hockey League’s Abbotsford Canucks, recording nine points (3-6-9) and 48 penalty minutes in 24 games. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound forward split the 2024-25 campaign between the AHL’s Utica Comets and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins, logging 12 points (4-8-12) and 54 penalty minutes in 65 games. Stillman also appeared in two Calder Cup Playoff games with the Penguins.

This entry comes with a disclaimer.

I am not a very religious person. I was raised Catholic, but 7 years of Catholic school did their magic on me, and now I’m non-affiliated. Aunt Annie still prays to the saints, etc. etc., but the only religious observance we have over the course of the year is to watch Midnight Mass from the Vatican on NBC each Christmas Eve.

Long story long, this is not a blog that is going to tell you whether to have a religious belief or to not have a religious belief, or to have a political belief other than to try to be civil in our discussions.

I have many strong opinions on both topics, but they are not shared in this space, and on the Fourth of July, that will remain the case. My Facebook friends are currently laughing about this.

So: it turns out that Red Wings prospect and University of Minnesota-Duluth forward Max Plante did a podcast with “Sports Spectrum: Where Sports and Faith Meet.” Max happens to talk about religion and his relationship with Jesus, going to Bible studies with his teammates, and working with Athletes in Action. Among other things.

Watch it if you wish, don’t watch it if you do not wish to do so. And try to be nice to other people, unless they are not nice to you.

The Red Wings hosted three Russian players at their Summer Development Camp this past week at the BELFOR Training Center underneath Little Caesars Arena. Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff took note of their presence, as well as Red Wings director of player development Dan Cleary’s take on the trio’s performance in a learning environment:

Detroit, a team known for rostering some of the best Russian hockey players in NHL history, hosted three young KHL players over the past week, including free agent invites Yegor Vinagradov and Yaroslav Busygin, alongside 2025 sixth-round pick Nikita Tyurin

“It was good to finally see him [Tyurin.] You know, three of them together are like thick as thieves, these guys. They had a great time. Got to watch and do some baseball, they got to go shopping… I hope they enjoyed it,” Director of prospect development Dan Cleary said.

The Red Wings probably have little to no shot of signing Vinagradov or Busygin, but the Wings afford all their development camp invitees with the same level of instruction.

As such, Duff reports that the Russian players did run into a language barrier from time to time, but the Wings’ skill development coaches made sure that everything worked out for the best: