Author: George Malik

My name is George Malik, and I'm the Malik Report's editor/blogger/poster. I have been blogging about the Red Wings since 2006, and have worked with MLive and Kukla's Korner. Thank you for reading!

Starting with Husso?

MLive’s Ansar Khan wonders aloud whether Ville Husso has re-earned the Red Wings’ starting goaltender’s job over the course of the team’s exhibition season:

Husso was the only Red Wings goaltender to play two full games. He posted a 2.28 goals-against average and .936 save percentage in eight periods overall.

“He had a little extra load and that was by design and he handled it very well,” coach Derek Lalonde said. “There were some question marks with Ville, physically, coming into the preseason and within his three games he answered those questions.”

Husso, 29, missed the majority of last season with two separate lower-body injuries. He hadn’t played a full game with the Red Wings since Dec. 14.

“It was a good summer doing stuff and I feel good to go,” Husso said. “I’m confident. It’s a nice thing to do, get a couple of full games, get back to the routine, game yesterday, practice today and feel the body again. It’s nice to get those games and get some reps.”

Husso appears to have earned the starting job, but Lalonde did not commit to a starter for Thursday’s season-opener against Pittsburgh at Little Caesars Arena (7 p.m., Bally Sports Detroit).

“A good problem,” Lalonde said. “We came into (camp), talked about a blank slate. We came in hoping someone could show us they could help us win on night one and the positive is all three did.”

Continued (paywall)

The Athletic posts 3 Red Wings-related stories this morning

The Athletic posted a trio of articles which discuss Red Wings-related topics this morning:

  1. Sean McIndoe offers “oddly specific predictions” for every NHL team…

Detroit Red Wings

It’s an annual oddly specific prediction tradition, so let’s make the Wings this year’s team that some people think will be a lot better, some people think will be a lot worse, but that actually finishes the year with exactly the same number of points they had in 2023-24 (91).

2. The Athletic’s James Mirtle and Harman Dayal rank every team’s defensive corps, and the Wings are ranked the “Below Average” tier (geez, The Athletic loves tiers)…

Detroit Red Wings

Ben Chiarot–Moritz Seider
Simon Edvinsson–Jeff Petry
Olli Maatta–Erik Gustafsson

Extra defense options: Albert Johansson, Justin Holl

On paper, this group looks like it will be the biggest impediment to the Red Wings finally returning to the postseason.

Jeff Petry is 37 in December and shouldn’t be playing higher than third-pair minutes at this point. Ben Chiarot doesn’t belong on a playoff team’s top pair. And there’s a reason Olli Maatta and Erik Gustafsson have bounced around as much as they have.

The big caveat to all of that is Moritz Seider is a stud and Simon Edvinsson has very high-end potential. Edvinsson, in particular, could level up into a top-pair defender as early as this season. If he’s ready, the Red Wings will climb this ranking quickly — and possibly even grab a wild-card spot.

3. And Sean Gentille ranks the “Hope-O-Meter” for the NHL’s 32 fan bases:

23. Detroit Red Wings — 70.2

Optimist Tim: It feels weird to be optimistic about a team that mostly overachieved last season, and I know “the model” says otherwise, but I really do think this Red Wings team got better. Edvinsson’s a top 4 upgrade over Walman. Tarasenko’s a slight upgrade over Perron. A full offseason of training for Kane. Continued growth for Raymond. Enough decent goalies to ride at least one of them at a time. The roster is still flawed, but this year I think we earn our playoff bubble slot instead of lucking into it.

Pessimist Kris: All I’ve heard for years is how great our prospect pool is, and yet we keep signing aged and overpaid vets that end up blocking them vs. just biting the bullet a little and letting the kids learn by doing.

Etc. etc. at this point.

Wyshynski picks the Wings to finish 6th in the Atlantic

ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski released a massive NHL preview article today, and he’s picking the Red Wings to finish 6th in the Atlantic Division. Here’s his rationale, per the Insider-only article:

The Red Wings have missed the playoffs in every year of Steve Yzerman’s tenure as general manager, since being hired in 2019. Their NHL roster skews older, and not just because Patrick Kane is back. The prospect pool has a collection of solid potential NHL contributors and a few standouts, but nothing resembling a franchise player, despite their time spent in the draft lottery. Is the plan to break the playoff drought, give the kids some seasoning and the use that sweet pizza money to lure big-name free agents to augment them? I don’t know. Right now, the plan seems like it’s produced a bubble team with little hope of upward mobility.

Stevie Y. must be thinking how much easier this was with Steven Stamkos, Victor Hedman, Nikita Kucherov and Andrei Vasilevskiy as your pillars …

Still, there are people who see Detroit, rather than Buffalo or Ottawa, as the breakthrough team in the Atlantic. A lot would have to break right for that to happen, from the instant impact of Simon Edvinsson, to giant leaps forward from big-contract earners Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider, to Cam Talbot helping to settle down a goaltending spot that had a cast of thousands auditioning in training camp. The NHL is a better place when the Red Wings are contending. I hope to visit that place again one day.

Continued (paywall); I would like to believe that the Red Wings will contend one day, and I would like to believe that they’ll do so under Steve Yzerman’s watch.

Steve Yzerman named one of the ’25 people who will define the NHL season’ to come

Sportsnet’s Luke Fox posted a list of “the 25 people who will define the NHL season,” and Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman is the last person on the list:

Steve Yzerman: How long would patience last in Detroit if the Red Wings were not being run by an on-ice icon and the architect of a championship in Tampa Bay? Yzerman enters his sixth year at the helm in Hockeytown as both the longest-tenured active GM yet to make the playoffs and overseer of the NHL’s second-longest active post-season drought — the longest in franchise history at eight seasons and counting. The Red Wings have a shiny new barn but attendance issues. They locked in two young stars in the nick of time (Lucas Raymond, Moritz Seider), and they’re banking on some fading ones (Patrick Kane, Vladimir Tarasenko). The man in charge can’t lace ’em up to save the day. Stevie Y needs a W.

Continued; the attendance is getting better as the team gets better, and that’s the truth.

Lalonde, DeBrincat believe the Wings will be ‘ready to go’ come Thursday evening

DetroitRedWings.com’s Jonathan Mills took note of comments made by coach Derek Lalonde and forward Alex DeBrincat after today’s practice at the BELFOR Training Center underneath Little Caesars Arena:

The Red Wings will have two more practice days before the Penguins come to town. Lalonde said now having a little more roster clarity will help the club prepare for Thursday’s season opener.

“Unique schedule in that we played six [preseason] games in six days, going two teams and we tried to ramp up practice by design,” Lalonde said. “We asked a lot of these guys throughout the exhibition [schedule], especially the games. We were tired in some of those games and unfortunately, it probably showed. But now, I wouldn’t call it a full reset because we’re building off camp, there’s a little time to refocus.”

Alex DeBrincat said he feels the team is in a good spot, but there’s still plenty of work to be done.

“We’ve been practicing really hard, competing out there,” DeBrincat said. “A couple of our preseason games weren’t up to par with our compete. Obviously it’s a lot of timing out there, stuff like that. I thought the last [exhibition] game was pretty good, and in practice we’ve been competing a lot. We should be ready for Game 1.”

DeBrincat also noted it will be important for the Red Wings to get back to what helped them be successful last season.

“When we’re working hard, we’re a good team,” DeBrincat said. “There’s stretches when we get away from that. I think we can learn from last year and really buckle in this year. Be focused every game, and you can’t afford to lose any points.”

Continued; Detroit plays 3 games in 5 nights to open the regular season, hosting the Penguins and Predators, and then the Wings head to New York to play the Rangers. After a two-day break, the Wings host the Rangers and head to Nashville to wrap up their season series with Nashville, so those first five games are going to be difficult, and they’re going to come in a hurry.

THN’s Eargood helps explain the Red Wings’ salary cap gymnastics

The Hockey News’s Connor Eargood did a very capable job of explaining some of the intricacies of the NHL’s salary cap as it applies to the Red Wings’ decisions to send Justin Holl down to the Grand Rapids Griffins (for now) and waive Austin Watson to send him to Grand Rapids tomorrow (for now).

Most of us are familiar with cap space as a year-long concept. If a player signs for $1 million, then a team is committing $1 million in cap space to them for the season. But cap hit is actually calculated by prorating the daily cap hit through however many days are left in the season. So long as a team doesn’t take advantage of long term injured reserve, whatever is left over to reach the salary cap is saved up as something called accrued cap space.

Accrued cap space is calculated with the formula: Projected Cap Space x (Total Days in the Season / Days Left in the Season). Accrued cap space is essentially saved up cap space that teams can use to afford bigger transactions later on. Let’s say a team comes in $2 million under the salary cap all season. By the 100th day of the 192-game season, they can spend $3.84 million and still be under the salary cap.

This accrued cap space is very useful. It allows teams to acquire players at the trade deadline when they would otherwise come in over the salary cap. Blogger Brett Lee broke this down well in a Substack post in 2023. I highly recommend you read his work.

So what does this have to do with Justin Holl? The Red Wings save $1.15 million in cap relief by sending him down to the AHL. On a daily basis, that is $5,989.58 in daily cap savings. This money, accumulated over however long he isn’t with the NHL team, can be used to pay the remaining cap hit later on a potential acquisition. Detroit already needed to send him down to clear the roster space to sign Watson without exceeding the 23-man roster limit. Now that he has cleared, there is no incentive to call him up early because Detroit is saving up cap space to use later each day he is on the AHL books.

Cap space is also accrued by not calling up a player to fill that 23rd roster spot that Watson’s AHL assignment opens up. And as Detroit already has the players for its opening night roster in place, there is no reason to fill that space with a player who won’t play. The open roster spot allows the Red Wings to make appropriate moves in the future — calling up Holl, Watson or even rookie Marco Kasper — while still accruing cap space.

These moves are all about flexibility — both for the usage of Holl, the usage of the final roster spot and the usage of accrued cap space later on.

Continued; good stuff here.