Author: George Malik

I had to do a significant amount of “real life” chores today to prepare Traverse City trip, from getting my dry cleaning in to Parkside Cleaners to calling Norm’s Total Automotive to find out when I may bring my 17-year-old Chrysler Pacifica in for oil change, steering and brake problems (oh joy!), to buying extra chewing gum at Walgreens and setting up an Amazon cart so that I have essential office supplies and hotel room stuff…

And we squeezed in a 45-minute telehealth appointment for Aunt Annie, whose ulcerative colitis is acting up. After a rambling meeting with her nurse practitioner, we decided to tweak her supplements and cross our fingers regarding a couple of medications that she’s already taking as she’s really in an uncomfortable place right now.

The Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan filed a profile of Red Wings free agent signing J.T. Compher, who the Red Wings brought in to stabilize their center depth:

Compher, [GM Steve] Yzerman believes, will help the Wings in a variety of ways, and those types of players are valuable.

“I like his versatility as a hockey player,” Yzerman said after the announcement of the signing. “He’s a natural centerman, he’s a right-shot centerman, which we don’t have at this time. We just drafted one in Nate (Danielson), but we’ll give him time to develop into an NHLer. We’ve got a right-shot centerman (Compher) who has played all three forward positions, who has played on the power play, does kill penalties. He’s a very versatile player for us and that ability to move around, to me, makes him very valuable.”

Compher, 28, signed a five-year contract worth $25.5 million ($5.1 annual average value) to join the Wings and reunite with former Michigan teammates Dylan Larkin and Andrew Copp. Compher (6-foot, 190 pounds) is coming off a career-best 52-point season in Colorado, with 17 goals and 35 assists.

The ability to play all three forward positions, being on both the power play and penalty kill, and coming from a Colorado organization that won a Stanley Cup recently but also went through an extensive and painful rebuild — which Compher was there for — should benefit the Wings.

“We had some success in Colorado but it took a lot of building,” Compher said upon joining the Wings. “My first year (in Colorado, 2016-17) we were the worst team in the league. I’ve seen both sides of it and I know what it takes. I’m excited to be with this group and build toward the ultimate goal of winning a championship. It starts with making the playoffs.

Continued

The Hockey News’s Sam Stockton looks back at the Red Wings’ horrible set of back-to-back losses vs. the Ottawa Senators last February as they apply to how the Wings chose to alter their rebuild this summer:

The Red Wings’ biggest role of the unrestricted free agent dice is meant to address just that [lack of structure].  J.T. Compher—whom Detroit signed to a five-year, $25 million deal—wasn’t a splashy signing.  He’s coming off the most productive season of his career, and even that amounted to just 52 points.  However, Compher’s 200-foot acumen (it’s not just defense but an ability to control the entire ice surface) will help make the 2023-24 Red Wings a more stable operation than their predecessors.

Acquisitions on the back end like Jeff Petry, Shayne Gostisbehere, and Justin Holl are meant to serve a similar purpose.  You can quibble with the individual contract (or in Petry’s case acquisition cost), and you might not like that it makes it harder for a player like Simon Edvinsson to break into the regular lineup.  However, the vision here is to instill a baseline level of competence on defense that Detroit lacked in ’22-23, when you couldn’t in good faith say that the Wings had six NHL-caliber D at their disposal night in and night out.

Of course, the marquee acquisition of the summer, Alex DeBrincat, reflects a different story, but the fact that he comes from Ottawa cannot be ignored in this conversation.

Imposing greater structure couldn’t be the Red Wings only response to last season’s short-comings; Detroit had to bridge the gap in offensive firepower to a team like Ottawa, and it did so via a direct tact—poaching DeBrincat in exchange for Kubalik, a B-list prospect, and a pair of draft picks.

With Compher, Detroit looks to make itself a stabler team.  With DeBrincat, the Wings become more explosive.  They still won’t want to live in shootouts night in and night out, but they have a shiny new toy on the occasions when they do.  DeBrincat represents a goal-scoring threat opponents will have to game-plan around; there hasn’t been one of those in Detroit for a while.  Meanwhile, getting the ball rolling on Dylan Larkin’s wing figures to get DeBrincat rolling in a way he never hit in his lone season in Ottawa.

Continued

Sportsnet’s staff posted an article in which they discuss players from the NHL’s 16 Atlantic Division who are under pressure to perform this upcoming season, and they spotlight Red Wings trade acquisition Alex DeBrincat:

As Steve Yzerman keeps adding veteran players to his roster, the Red Wings are taking an almost expansion-like approach to their build, accumulating other teams’ cast-offs to (hopefully) put together a unit of motivated individuals determined to prove people wrong. That’s sometimes what this plan feels like, anyway.

This past summer Yzerman added Alex DeBrincat, who was a different sort of acquisition in that he wasn’t some other team’s cast-off. DeBrincat was acquired by Ottawa last season to be a difference-making goal scorer, but he didn’t really deliver on those expectations and then had no real desire to stay put. Rather than slow walk to free agency, the Senators had to trade him out.

Now with his hometown Red Wings, DeBrincat has a new four-year contract and the same expectations the Senators had for him. Can he get back up to 40 goals? The Red Wings have a lot of “pieces” but, so far, not enough difference makers. They need DeBrincat to have a significant presence right away if they’re to rise above the other rebuilders in the Atlantic.

Continued

MLive’s Ansar Khan posted a profile of Red Wings 2023 2nd-round pick Trey Augustine, who’s an incoming freshman at Michigan State University. The goaltender fills a need in terms of providing depth at the position for a Wings team that’s sold on his long-term potential:

“He’s a goaltender who’s had an unbelievable two-year run at the development program,” Kris Draper, Red Wings assistant general manager and director of amateur scouting, said. “He’s won everywhere he’s been. We had a lot of conversation about the goalies in this year’s draft. Phil (Osaer, the team’s head of goaltending scouting and development) kept coming back to Trey.”

They were particularly impressed by his performance for the U.S. at the World Under-18 Championship, especially in the 3-2 overtime victory over Sweden in the gold medal game.

“The last 15 seconds was pure entertainment and chaos and he came up with about three huge saves,” Draper said. “The demeanor that he came out with in a gold medal game facing a four-on-three penalty kill, you’re just kind of sitting there watching the way he handled himself. We loved the poise. We loved the control.”

Said Augustine: “It was just about making the next save and giving the team an opportunity to end the game. We killed the penalty and scored a couple minutes later. Winning a gold medal means a lot to me and for my country as well.”

Continued

DetroitRedWings.com’s Art Regner has posted a profile of Red Wings prospect Dylan James, who was drafted 40th overall in the 2022 NHL Draft. James had an up-and-down freshman season with the University of North Dakota, but that was to be expected:

And after compiling 16 points (8-8-16) in 36 games his freshman year at the University of North Dakota, the 19-year-old is focused on the process of improving his overall game as the competition increases.

“I thought I did pretty well from the start to the end (of last season),” Detroit’s 40th overall pick in the 2022 NHL Entry Draft said on July 4. “I wish I started a little bit better, but I feel like it was just getting comfortable with the coaches and understanding what they wanted. I feel like my adaptation to the level of play got better throughout the year.”

Navigating his first college hockey season was difficult at times, but James said he appreciated when Red Wings director of player development Dan Cleary offered advice throughout the year.

“He would get in touch with me every couple months,” James said. “Tell me something I would need to work on and how I’ve been playing. It’s good to hear what he has to say. He had a good career in the NHL, so I’ll take what he says to heart.”

Cleary said he felt James “had a good season” as a freshman with the Fighting Hawks.

“He came in and had to find his way,” Cleary said on July 5. “Some weekends, he made freshman mistakes and would sit. But that’s all part of it. At the end of the day, I always look at it as where are you at the end of the season? At the end of the season, he was trending upward.”

Continued

The Athletic’s Max Bultman discusses the Jeff Petry trade this morning as it applies to the Petry family.

Jeff’s father, Detroit Tigers analyst and alumnus Dan Petry, was aware that his son wanted to be flipped to the Red Wings after Montreal re-acquired Jeff for assets in the Erik Karlsson-to-Pittsburgh deal last month, but Dan had to keep the trade-in-the-works a secret for a week:

“As much as I would have liked to have said something to them like, ‘Hey, be on the lookout, this is in the works’ and everything,” Dan Petry said, “I couldn’t say anything.”

Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long. Nine days after Petry was dealt back to Montreal on Aug. 6, he got the call he and his family had been waiting for: The Canadiens were sending him home to Detroit in exchange for defenseman Gustav Lindström and a conditional fourth-round draft pick in 2025.

Jeff Petry had allowed himself to think about this idea over the course of his career. He had grown up watching the Red Wings, with a Red Wings-themed bedroom, playing out in his mind the idea of one day wearing their jersey. Then he reached the NHL, and the possibility became even more real.

“You keep thinking in your head, ‘OK, when is that opportunity going to come? Can it come?’” he said. “And for me, I always thought about, OK, wanting to play one year here maybe at the end of my career, or whenever the opportunity came.”

Continued (paywall) with discussion of Jeff’s hockey-playing youth and upbringing…

Former Red Wings defenseman Filip Hronek spoke with iSport.cz’s Pavel Rysany for a behind-the-paywall article, and Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff posted the text available to readers from all over the world this morning.

As Duff notes, Hronek tells Rysany that the trade which sent him to the Vancouver Canucks for a 1st round and 4th round pick was a shock:

Looking back, the defenseman can readily admit that the news he was going to the Vancouver Canucks just prior to last season’s NHL trade deadline caught Hronek completely by surprise.

The call came out of the blue, from Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman.

“He said they changed me,” Hronek explained to Czech website isport.blesk.cz. “You don’t even know that business is baking. I had absolutely no signs that anything was going on. It all happened very quickly.

“I was surprised, but these things belong to hockey. It happened, it was meant to be. I thought there was no point in thinking about it again.”

Duff continues, and there’s nothing said by Hronek that’s controversial, but the Czech is certainly difficult to translate. Kudos to Duff for giving it a go.

Red Wings executive vice president Nicklas Lidstrom spoke with Expressen’s Gunnar Nordstrom recently, and here’s a rough translation of Nordstrom’s blog entry regarding said discussion:

That’s why Lidas believes in the playoffs for Detroit

Los Angeles. During Nicklas Lidstrom’s time with the Detroit Red Wings, a playoff spot was a given.

Yes, there were also four Stanley Cup titles during the Swedish star defenseman’s time with the team.

Detroit has now missed the playoffs for seven years in a row.

The idea is that there will be a change to that in the 2023-2024 season.

The management, where Lidstrom is a part as the vice president of hockey operations, has strengthened the team with nine new players.

“We’ve strengthened the whole team, and I think we should be a playoff team in the spring,” says Nicklas Lidstrom to Expressen, who tells us that he and his family are not affected by the floods after the rainy weather in Vasteras.

“Our house is located by the water, but it’s high enough up that we haven’t been affected by the floods,” he says.

It’s Labor Day, and a week from today, if all goes well, Aunt Annie and I will be packing for our never-before-tried trip to Traverse City with an elder care twist.

In all honestly, aside from a couple of tremendous donations from benefactors both mysterious and not-so-mysterious, fundraising has been really difficult.

That’s okay; it’s usually particularly hard to raise money in the “late summer,” and I know that many of you are kind of GoFundMe’d out at this point…