The Malik Report

Red Wings forward Marco Kasper spoke with Krone.at’s Albert Kurka regarding last Friday’s draft in Montreal, and being picked 8th overall by the Red Wings.

What follows is roughly translated from German, and it’s the gist of the interview, which indicates that Kasper will be playing for Rogle of the SHL this upcoming season:

Klagenfurt’s Marco Kasper now has Red Wings!

Super! Karnter’s Marco Kasper was drafted 8th overall by Detroit in the NHL Draft! Then it was off for a marathon of interviews.

The dream came true! Ice hockey prospect Marco Kasper was drafted 8th overall in the first round of the NHL Draft in Montreal–out of 224 players from around the world. The 18-year-old from Klagenfurt is only the fourth Austrian to be drafted this high, and second only to Thomas Vanek, who was picked 5th.

He’s experiencing a lot of joy–because the Detroit Red Wings are not just any team. With 11 Stanley Cup victories, the Red Wings are the 3rd-most successful team after the Montreal Canadiens (24) and Toronto Maple Leafs (13).

Interview Marathon and dinner

“It’s insane! It’s a dream that I ended up with a team that’s got such a great tradition,” says Marco, happily. Also, because Detroit is being totally rebuilt by general manager and team legend Steve Yzerman after the last couple of years, which haven’t been so good.

“There is so much talent there. Detroit will definitely be a team to be reckoned with in the future,” explains Kasper, who had to endure a veritable marathon of interviews after the draft.

“It must have taken two-and-a-half hours. A lot of newspapers and TV stations interviewed me.” But the evening was far from over after the interviews. “We were invited to dinner by Mr. Yzerman and the team. I’m totally impressed with the way we were looked after.”

Back to Rogle

The forward should continue to play in Sweden’s top league with Rogle next year.

“It’s 99% determined, we’ve spoken to Detroit about it briefly as well. He still has a contract there,” explains dad and ex-national team player Peter Kasper.

Saturday Marco could enjoy a day off, but on Sunday he’ll be off for the first development camp in Detroit.

“It’s specifically for the young players and lasts five days.”

Fellow Austrian Vinzenz Rohrer was also happy! The native of Rankweiler was picked by Montreal in the 3rd round, 75th overall.

The Detroit Red Wings’ first summer development camp since 2019 begins later this morning, and two articles related to said camp’s goals and attendees, respectively, hit the wires this morning.

1. First, Detroit Hockey Now’s Nate Brown took note of Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman’s comments regarding the importance of being able to assess the vast majority of the team’s prospects in person:

“For a few reasons we really like it,” Yzerman said. “It’s an opportunity. The European kids and the college kids, that’s our only time we have really to spend with them throughout the year.”

Yzerman and his staff get the opportunity to see the prospects front and center, which noted in the team’s press release, that 13 of the current Red Wings on the roster played in the camp.

For Detroit’s general manager, it’s a great time to get to know his players better.

“For some of them, it will be the first time I get to see them and to meet them,” Yzerman said. “I’m excited about it.  I can talk about (2022 first round pick) Marco (Kasper) a little bit. Obviously I’m more familiar with that pick. I’ll get a chance to see some of these other kids and meet them in person and get to know them. It’s another step in the process. I’m excited about seeing the kids.”

2. Conveniently, the Free Press’s Helene St. James breaks down the Wings’ 2022 draft class via a set of capsule profiles as well…

Continue reading Two things: Yzerman on the importance of development camp, and 2022 draft pick profiles

This is an interesting note from the Boston Globe’s Matt Porter, who filed his weekly NHL Notebook earlier today. The link comes from Paul Kukla of Kukla’s Korner:

Highest recommendation for the new ESPN documentary “Unrivaled,” which recalls the Avalanche-Red Wings battles of the mid-to-late 1990s. Compelling tales of a fantastic rivalry. The footage of Vladimir Konstantinov, both of his all-world playing days and compromised present day, is alone worth the view.

Those of us who grew up with newspaper and TV accounts, rather than the information overload of the Internet age, may not have realized just how nasty Claude Lemieux’s hit on Kris Draper was.

The reveal at the end — spoiler alert — that Draper still has not forgiven Lemieux was no surprise to former Red Wings GM Ken Holland.

“The emotions were real. They were very real,” said Holland, now the Oilers’ GM. “Drapes is really intense. It wasn’t like it was one year, it was six or seven years of that rivalry. His face was rearranged. I don’t blame him.”

Holland hasn’t seen the doc itself. “I’ll watch it someday,” he said. “It was pretty epic when we lived it.”

Continued; put bluntly, you can still see the difference between Kris Draper’s “regular” cheekbone and the cheekbone that is held together with titanium plates. I’ve never seen any reason for him to settle grievances with Claude.

Claude Lemieux is no monster–he’s a successful agent and an NHL parent–but he did a really shitty thing, and it’s not incumbent upon the person to whom he did the shitty thing to make amends…

And it’s also worth noting that yes, in today’s game, the Lemieux hit would never have been given a 2-game Stanley Cup Final suspension, because there would be multiple camera angles instantaneously uploaded to the internet and commented upon via social media. There’s no way that it would have been dismissed as a pure “hockey hit” that was accidental and nothing more.

The Detroit Red Wings are holding a summer development camp at Little Caesars Arena between July 10th and July 14th, and I’ve received the good news that I will be afforded the opportunity of attending the 5-day camp in person.

As I’m returning from a seven-month lay-off due to severe depression, attending five days of a camp taking place 40 miles from my home in South Lyon means that I need to raise funds to afford to get down to and back from LCA.

There is no AFLAC for bloggers, and as I don’t have advertisements on this website, we’ve had a particularly difficult time over the past couple of months, but Aunt Annie and I have attempted to scrape by.

We’ll talk about that in more depth soon, but for now, I rather desperately need to raise funds to buy gas and groceries for the purpose of posting daily assessments of as many prospects as possible, as well as audio interviews.

If you’re able to lend a hand, I would be incredibly grateful for your assistance, especially as I try to get back to work.

If you’re willing to lend a hand, you can use PayPal at https://paypal.me/TheMalikReport, Venmo at https://venmo.com/george-malik-2, Giftly by using my email, rtxg@yahoo.com, at https://www.giftly.com. And you can contact me via email if you want to send me a paper check.

The Hockey News’s Adam Proteau posted an article discussing the Red Wings’ outlook as free agency approaches, and while Proteau doesn’t believe that the Red Wings are a playoff team yet, he sees reasons for hope in Detroit:

What Detroit Has: A well-respected GM in Steve Yzerman, and a new head coach in Derek Lalonde; the reigning rookie-of-the-year in blueliner Moritz Seider; highly-skilled young forwards in captain Dylan Larkin, Lucas Raymond, Robby Fabri, Tyler Bertuzzi and Pius Suter; a new starting goalie in Ville Husso

What Detroit Needs: A vastly-improved defensive attack; depth and NHL experience all-around, but particularly, on the back end; a bounce-back year from (now) No. 2 netminder Alex Nedeljkovic; a breakout season from D-man Olli Juolevi; good health for winger Jakub Vrana

What’s Realistic For Detroit Next Season: The Red Wings were an unspeakably awful defensive team this past season, as evidenced by the 312 goals-against they allowed in 82 games; only the abysmal Arizona Coyotes (313) and Montreal Canadiens (319) surrendered more. And that was with Calder Trophy-winner Moritz Seider playing more than 23 minutes a night.

Continue reading The Hockey News’s Proteau offers an ‘off-season outlook’ for the Red Wings

The Detroit Red Wings are holding their first development camp since the summer of 2019 starting tomorrow at Little Caesars Arena’s BELFOR Training Center. It appears that the camp is closed to the public as of this evening, but the Red Wings’ posted a press release stating that the team will be streaming events from said development camp.

The Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan took note of Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman and director of amateur scouting Kris Draper’s comments regarding the camp, which takes place between Sunday, July 10 and Thursday, July 14:

“We really like it,” general manager Steve Yzerman said of the opportunity to hold a camp. “The European kids and U.S. college kids, that’s the only time we really have to spend with them throughout the year. The European kids go home and play in their leagues and the NCAA kids go to college and you’re limited to your access to them. Mostly it’s a great chance to spend four or five days with them and they get to know us and vice versa.”

The camp will be split into two teams, Team Howe and Team Lindsay, and will feature daily on-ice instruction and skill development from the organization’s player development staff.

Players will take part in NHL-level off-ice workouts and attend presentations designed to help players transition to professional hockey.

“We get four or five days to spend with them, get to know them and, more so for the younger kids that maybe haven’t been a college program or a European pro league, they get a chance to come in and get a chance to spend time with and work with our skating people, our skills people and our fitness people and really make sure they’re on a good program, if they’re not already, for the offseason. We talk about strengths and weaknesses and things we really want them to focus on, and kind of set them for the rest of the summer. We may not see some of them in Detroit until the following development camp.”

Continued; because the Red Wings’ European prospects play regular season hockey starting in September, and their NCAA-playing prospects attend college in the fall, the summer development camp is the only time that Detroit’s able to make in-person, in-house evaluations of said players.

The camp also serves as something of a selection process for free agent players who might take part in the fall prospect tournament, but the main point is to bring the prospects into Detroit’s facilities (which can be a recruiting tool in itself), and to build a profile of their on-ice and off-ice strengths and weaknesses.

From there, the Wings essentially give every prospect a “prescription” as to what they feel is most useful for the prospect to work on in terms of on-ice skills and off-ice development.

This is an educational camp as much as anything–the players will be given tips on nutrition, sleep, social media and how to work out safely and properly, so the Wings invest tens of thousands of dollars in every attendee, regardless of whether they’re the next Moritz Seider or the next great accountant. That’s what’s prospect development entails, and it’s good to know that the camp is back.

I believe that a player’s personal life is, for lack of a better term, personal, and regardless of the gravity of the milestone, I try to keep player gossip to a minimum unless somebody’s doing something that might hurt themselves or others.

But the Wings’ press corps is posting this, so I’m gonna confirm: Dylan Larkin, the Red Wings’ captain, posted an Instagram post this morning stating that he proposed to his girlfriend:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Dylan Larkin (@dylanlarkin71)

I obviously wish Dylan and Kenzy all the best, and the fact that Dylan’s dog, Ellie, seems rather unimpressed by the proceedings is adorable.

But let’s give the boy some space, eh?

A Saturday morning tidbit: I believe that it bears noting that Daily Faceoff’s Frank Seravalli has consistently included Red Wings forward Filip Zadina on his “Trade Targets Board” every day for the last month.

I’m not sure whether Zadina is in play, but it’s a thought given his struggles to break through offensively as a 21-year-old with the Wings last season:

23. Filip Zadina
Right Wing, Detroit Red Wings
Age: 22
Stats: 75 GP, 10 G, 14 A, 24 Pts
Contract: Pending RFA, not eligible for arbitration
Scoop: There was no shortage of excitement around Zadina when the Red Wings selected him at No. 6 overall in 2018. GM Steve Yzerman doesn’t tip his hand, but the sense league-wide is a change of scenery is in order for Zadina. He is a gifted shooter, but the knock on him is that he’s become more of a perimeter player – and only a select few players (Alex Ovechkin and Steven Stamkos) can consistently score in today’s NHL from the outside.

The Red Wings are the Vatican of sports organizations: You might see some white smoke or black smoke when they elect a new Pope, but that’s about it leak-wise. I was surprised when Kevin Weekes nailed the Derek Lalonde hiring a day early, but he’s Kevin Weekes. He knows.

Long story long, would you trade Zadina, or do you feel that he’s worth one more season’s worth of auditioning for a top-six role? And if you were to trade Zadina, for whom would you try to trade him?

The Free Press’s Helene St. James wrote her early morning-published missive for the day, and in today’s column, she discusses the Red Wings’ rationale for acquiring goaltender Ville Husso from the St. Louis Blues:

“There’s a not a lot of goalies out there, and we need depth at that position,” [Red Wings GM Steve] Yzerman said Friday. “We thought it a worthwhile decision to make. We elected to use a draft pick to try and improve. We certainly liked the season that Ville had.”

Husso appeared in 40 games with the St. Louis Blues last season, posting a 25-7-6 record with a 2.56 goals-against average, a 0.916 save percentage and two shutouts.

Immediately after trading for Husso, 27, the Wings signed him for three years, $14.25 million. Alex Nedeljkovic, 26, who was acquired last summer, is under contract through 2022-23 for $3 million. Essentially Yzerman created a situation where the Wings have two goaltenders of similar age with a combined salary cap hit below $8 million. 

“It doesn’t prevent us signing at some point extending Ned’s contract at all,” Yzerman said. “We’re in a position to do that. We’ve got two guys we feel can play in the league and based on albeit somewhat of a limited action in the NHL, both guys have shown they can win games.” 

Continued (paywall); one former St. Louis Blue is particularly excited that Husso’s coming to Detroit:

Continue reading HSJ in the morning: Why the Wings snagged Ville Husso

Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman spoke with the media after the conclusion of day 2 of the 2022 NHL Draft on Friday…

And, as Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff notes, Yzerman made an intriguing comment regarding his attempts to make more changes happen at the draft:

“We’re chipping away at things,” Yzerman acknowledged. “Without elaborating, there was one or two more things I was hoping to accomplish that we weren’t able to do but overall, we’re all excited. We just finished the draft and hopefully some of these kids turn into players.”

Turning his lament into hopefulness, Yzerman was maintaining a belief that the book isn’t closed on those other moves he was seeking out.

“No,” he said. “We’ll just keep working at things.”

The Athletic’s Max Bultman pondered Yzerman’s remarks:

Continue reading Yzerman, Lalonde hint at roster and coaching moves yet to come