Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff offers a list of 5 Takeaways from the Red Wings’ final preseason game, a 3-1 loss to the Buffalo Sabres, and I feel like just leaving this observation here and letting the firecrackers hit the wall:
Kids Aren’t All Right: If this was the final exam to determine if they’ll earn a spot on the team, those test papers are going to come back to rookie forwards Lucas Raymond and Joe Veleno with a lot of red marker all over them.
Neither player distinguished themselves. Did they extinguish their chances of sticking with the big club? That remains to be seen.
“It does show guys, our young guys, the relentless nature of the league,” Blashill said. “You got to show up every single night and you got to find a way to have a great ‘B’ game when you don’t quite have your best stuff. That’s good experience and it’s good for evaluation purposes.”
Continued; there’s no doubt that Raymond, Veleno and Moritz Seider didn’t play great games vs. Buffalo or Pittsburgh.
I would suggest that all three experienced the NHL preseason grind in a big way–both mentally and physically–over the course of playing 5 or 6 preseason games apiece, and I would also suggest that Veleno and Raymond are all but locks to start the season in Grand Rapids, but I’m not sure that they’ll be in the AHL to end the season.
I also hope that some of the expectations that Moritz Seider was going to step in and be an All-Star right off the bat were tempered by his ups and downs during the preseason. I know that he had hiccups, and that he has to be much more demonstrative in terms of making plays himself instead of deferring to his elders, but he learned fairly quickly over the course of the preseason, and while I’m not willing to compare him to Nicklas Lidstrom, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen a defenseman with so much raw potential on the Wings’ roster.
