Author: George Malik

Per Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, the Red Wings have waived Filip Zadina.

The Red Wings would be on the hook for 1/3rd of his remaining salary paid over the next four years:

Zadina is in Year 2 of a 3 year $1.825M Cap Hit Deal.

3G 7P in 30 GP

Drafted #6 in 2018https://t.co/c5vV6moKlF

— PuckPedia (@PuckPedia) July 3, 2023

Update: Never mind:

As many of you have noted, the Rd Wings can't buy out Zadina, but I would imagine that if he clears waivers, the team would attempt to terminate his deal–or at least send him to Grand Rapids in the fall.

— George Malik (@georgemalik) July 3, 2023

Via the Detroit Red Wings comes this media availability from Sebastian Cossa, who is taking part in the Red Wings’ Summer Development Camp:

Per the Grand Rapids Griffins:

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. – The Detroit Red Wings on Monday announced the hiring of Roope Koistinen as the goaltending coach of the Grand Rapids Griffins.

Koistinen has been with Karpat’s youth programs in Finland since the 2014-15 campaign, serving in multiple roles for the club. In 2022-23, Karpat U20 allowed the third-fewest goals in the SM-sarja U20 league in Finland with 48 goals allowed in 23 outings (2.09 GAA) with Koistinen as its goaltending coach. The 30-year-old also garnered a 2023 U17 World Hockey Challenge bronze medal with Team Finland, serving as the team’s goaltending coach. As an assistant coach for Finland’s U17 team, he collected another bronze medal at the 2023 European Youth Olympic Winter Festival.

“We’re thrilled to add Roope to the coaching staff.  He brings a wealth of experience developing goaltenders with Karpat and we’re excited to have him here working with our goalies in Grand Rapids,” Griffins general manager Shawn Horcoff said.

Via Abel to Yzerman comes this list of “Winners and Losers” of the free agency period, per the Hockey News’s Adam Proteau:

The Wings also added talent on the weekend, signing four forwards, two defensemen, and two goaltenders to one-way contracts. But something felt off about many of the deals, mostly because they seemed to be given to players who must play better to justify their new contracts. 

At center, J.T. Compher is now earning $5.1 million through 2027-28, and he’s being paid like a second-liner when in equal likelihood, he’s a third-liner. Winger Christian Fischer got a $1.25-million contract for one year on Sunday, but he needs to rediscover his 33-point rookie season to prove he deserves a longer term and bigger salary next year. 

On defense, Justin Holl somehow got $3.4 million for the next three seasons, and anyone who watched Leafs hockey regularly this past season understands why eyebrows raised when Yzerman gave him that deal. In goal, Ville Husso’s new understudy is 35-year-old journeyman James Reimer, and they brought in Alex Lyon on a two-year, one-way deal as well. 

In a season where five teams from the highly competitive Metropolitan may limit the Atlantic Division to just three playoff sports, the Wings’ moves on the weekend didn’t feel like the final pieces of the championship puzzle. Not even close. Detroit will need all the stars to line up just right to secure a post-season berth, and you know how that usually ends. Not well.

Continued

Per the Red Wings, from Day 2 of the Summer Development Camp:

Hello from day 3. 👋#DRWDC pic.twitter.com/OjzzvWQz9t

— Detroit Red Wings (@DetroitRedWings) July 3, 2023

EP Rinkside’s Ryan Lambert has never been a fan of the Red Wings Way, and, after an underwhelming free agency performance, Lambert questions logic of the “Yzerplan” in a lengthy edition of “What We Learned”:

What this really reminds me of, quite a bit, is when the Florida Panthers in the early 2010s spent a bunch of money on veterans who fit this same profile: good but not great. Sign a bunch of good-but-not-great players and your results improve slightly. 

The Wings missed the playoffs by 12 points last year. They haven’t come close to adding six wins while the four teams that finished ahead of them for the last wild card spot lost that much. Maybe the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida regress a little, maybe Boston and Toronto do too. But the gaps between them and Buffalo is significant, as is the gap between Buffalo and Ottawa/Detroit.

It’s admittedly a tough situation. The Wings couldn’t not-spend money this summer, because they had a bunch of roster spots to fill. It feels like it wouldn’t be particularly helpful to go out and sign a bunch of veterans on something close to league-minimum deals. They still have plenty of cap space to make moves.

The good news is that the market the last two summers means they have plenty of players they can deal at this deadline; only seven Red Wings are currently signed beyond 2024-25.

But again, it’s just tire-spinning. Because all these players ensure they’re going to be nowhere near the bottom of the league, which would allow them to pick high, and probably not much closer to the playoffs.

Continued (paywall)

At the end of yesterday’s small-space game, Red Wings prospect Marco Kasper had to break a tie between the red team and the white team, so he participated in a best-of-five shootout competition vs. Sebastian Cossa.

He scored a hat trick on shots 3, 4 and 5:

.@SebastianCossa vs Marco Kasper!

Best of 3…. or 5?! pic.twitter.com/g0x41i6tfK

— Detroit Red Wings (@DetroitRedWings) July 3, 2023

Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff takes note of a comment made by new Red Wings goaltender James Reimer during his introductory press conference. It’s just a quick comment, but what the hey:

James Reimer became a Detroit Red Wings netminder on July 1, singing as a UFA with the club. which certainly was great news for his older sister Christy.

“My older sister, and not to embarass her in any way, was and probably is and now again it’s reborn,” Reimer explained. “She’s a diehard Red Wings fan.”

In the 1990s and 200os when Detroit was ruling over the NHL, the Red Wings were also filling the heart of at least one member of Reimer’s family with joy.

“She was big into that (Red Wings) era,” Reimer recalled.

Continued

The Free Press’s Helene St. James posted her usual early-morning column today, discussing the “fit” and hopes of one J.T. Comper as he joins the Red Wings for a playoff push:

“There are a lot of attractive parts about playing for the Red Wings,” Compher said Sunday. “I think that at the end of the day was my conversation with Steve and hearing about the direction of the Wings and what he was trying to build. He’s done it before. He has experience, not only as a player, but in management. I really believed in what he’s doing with the team and the sort of people they want to bring in. You want to have a great team on the ice and good guys in the locker room. I know what sort of room I’m getting myself into.”

It doesn’t hurt that the room includes two friends in fellow former Michigan teammates Dylan Larkin and Andrew Copp, both of whom Compher talked to in the week leading up to free agency.

“There’s a lot that attracted me to be a Red Wing,” Compher said. “First of all playing at Michigan and growing up in Chicago, both things things helped me see the great legacy and tradition the Detroit Red Wings have. I have a lot of respect for the organization. I had some really good talks with Steve and the coaching staff and what they are trying to build and how they are trying to build it. In terms of this year and the future, it sounds like a great place to play hockey. On the other side of it, I do have good friends on the team, and I’m excited to get on the ice with those guys as well. “But overall it was the direction of the team, the desire to win. I could hear it in their voice. That’s what you want as a player, a chance to build and try to win a championship.”

Continued; here’s hoping, Mr. Compher.

DetroitHockey.net’s Clark Rasmussen examines the jersey numbers assigned to the Red Wings’ 2023 Summer Development Camp participants this morning:

Jersey numbers in development camp are almost always meaningless but sometimes we see interesting patterns from them.  This year, the somewhat remarkable thing is that only six returning players (Marco Kasper, Carter Mazur, Redmond Savage, Sam Stange, Tnias Mathurin, and Sebastian Cossa) kept the same number as last year.  Of those, Mazur’s #43 had been reassigned to Mark Pysyk in the interim, while Savage’s #67 went to Joel L’Esperance in Detroit’s training camp last fall.

Another player, Amadeus Lombardi, is wearing a different number from last development camp but it’s the same number as he wore last fall in Detroit’s main camp, when he switched from #96 to #78 to accommodate Jake Walman’s switch to #96 last summer.

For the newest Detroit draftees, Nate Danielson was assigned the #29 that hasn’t been used since Thomas Greiss had it, Axel Sandin Pellikka got the #84 that was assigned to camp invitee Julien Anctil last year, Trey Augustine got the #80 worn in last year’s camp by invitee Pierce Charleson, Andrew Gibson got the #26 that was assigned to Pontus Andreasson in last fall’s training camp, Brady Cleveland took the departed Adam Erne’s #73, Noah Dower Nilsson got the #83 previously assigned to William Wallinder, Larry Keenan was given the #86 that had been worn by camp tryout Ivan Ivan, Jack Phelan got the #87 that was assigned to Jacob Mathieu in last fall’s training camp, Kevin Bicker got thew #89 that hasn’t been worn since Sam Gagner had it, Rudy Guimond was assigned the #68 worn in training camp by John Lethemon, and Emmitt Finnie got the #88 previously assigned to Liam Dower Nilsson, which will be worn this season by Daniel Sprong.

With Noah Dower Nilsson having taken his number, Wallinder switched to the #54 worn last year by Steven Kampfer.  Meanwhile, Noah’s brother Liam moved to the #62 worn in the 2022 development camp by Theodor Niederbach (and in last fall’s training camp by Drew Worrad) to accommodate Finnie getting #88, with Niederbach switching to the #70 worn last season by Oskar Sundqvist.

Continued