Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill sat down with WXYZ’s Brad Galli for a quick two-minute interview at training camp, discussing Steve Yzerman’s influence, the Red Wings’ desire to turn their record around, and the “A” issue.
Jeff Blashill enters his fifth season as the Red Wings head coach.
We talked in Traverse City about working with Steve Yzerman, his young team’s hunger, and the decision to hold off naming a captain. pic.twitter.com/BdYoEtvxgu— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) September 16, 2019
The Athletic’s Scott Wheeler published a list of 20 Calder Trophy candidates this morning, viewed from a fantasy hockey perspective, and he lists Filip Zadina among them:
10. Filip Zadina, LW/RW, 19 (Detroit Red Wings — 6th overall, 2018)
Zadina didn’t wow me in Traverse City and there’s no denying his rookie season in the AHL was a little disappointing but there’s so much opportunity in Detroit for young players that a kid with his talent level is going to get an extended chance to stick around this season — and to do so while playing on the power play and in a scoring role offensively. If your league counts goals heavily, he’s also a better finisher than players like Batherson and Texier.
Continued (paywall)
As MLive’s Ansar Khan notes, Red Wings coach Jeff Blashill made it clear on Sunday that Wings forward Michael Rasmussen will have to beat out several players to make the Wings’ NHL roster because the Wings believe that Rasmussen is best-suited to play center:
Rasmussen, 20, now can be assigned to Grand Rapids. That appears where he will be headed unless he excels in preseason and the Red Wings have a couple of injuries at center or decide to move him back to wing.
“If you looked at Ras’ long-term outlook, he’s a (6-6) center — those guys can be really, really hard to play against because they’re so good defensively, so if he’s a guy who can really shut down other teams’ best players, that’s a real positive,” Blashill said. “I think his ability to score net-front is a real positive. He’s got to score, but ultimately, he’s going to have to beat out (Dylan) Larkin, Fil (Valtteri Filppula), (Frans) Nielsen, Glenny (Luke Glendening), Ehner (Christoffer Ehn), (Jacob) de la Rose.
“Just got to beat guys out. That’s the NHL. You got to grab spots. I’d like to see him — Steve (general manager Yzerman) would like to see him — long-term at center, so those are the spots. You got to win one of those spots.”
The Free Press’s Helene St. James discusses what Filip Zadina needs to focus on to crack the Red Wings’ lineup:
The Wings’ nine-game exhibition slate begins Tuesday. Zadina is one of several prospects vying for a job. Asked how confident he feels, Zadina smiled.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll show you on the ice.”
Confidence matters for every player, but it’s also precarious for a high draft pick like Zadina. He wants to be a sniper like Tampa Bay’s Nikita Kucherov. He wants to live up to what he said on draft night, when he spoke of filling the nets of the teams that passed on him.
The Wings want him to get there.
“The secret is learning how to earn your own confidence through the work you put in, and being mentally tough enough when your place slips a little bit that you know it’s going to come back,” Wings coach Jeff Blashill said. “But that comes back to putting the work in and having that true self confidence where you know you have the skill set to succeed and you know you’ve put the work in to succeed.”
The Traverse City Record-Eagle’s James Cook wrote a perfect recap of today’s Red vs. White Game at Centre ICE Arena, and he also added to the story regarding one Adam Erne, something of a mystery to Red Wings fans as a summertime addition from the Tampa Bay Lightning. Erne, a 24-year-old winger, felt a little stagnant with the Bolts:
“There’s there’s not much room to move up there,” Erne said. “They have such a deep top six that no matter how well you do, there’s only so high you can move yourself up. So it’s an opportunity that I see available here and it’s exciting.”
So when Yzerman left the Lightning to return to Detroit, he traded a fourth-round pick for the 24-year-old left wing.
“I was with him in Tampa so he knows what I can bring to the table,” Erne said. “I’m just trying to play my game and work my way in the lineup.”
The 6-foot-1, 214-pound Erne is a two-way forward who can play physically and also help with scoring. He had seven goals and 20 points in 65 games with Tampa last season.
“I think he can bring a pretty good combination of physicality and skill,” Blashill said. “That’s a rare combination in the league. Not very many guys in the league are super physical and then still have the skills to play in the top nine. And I think he’s got that ability.”
DetroitRedWings.com’s Arthur J. Regner spoke with Red Wings assistant to the general manager Niklas Kronwall, speaking with Kronwall for a full hour on the latest episode of “The Red and White Authority”:
Former Red Wing defenseman Niklas Kronwall appears on Episode 129 of The Red and White Authority to discuss his career and his life after hockey.
Listen/Rate/Subscribe: https://t.co/8jWdMpBbqI
Spotify: https://t.co/gHVbxiVKZM
SoundCloud: https://t.co/r7z0kdfKtT pic.twitter.com/KLW65up01u— Detroit Red Wings (@DetroitRedWings) September 16, 2019
The Red Wings’ annual “Red vs. White Game” on Sunday afternoon was actually the end of what was a busy day for the Red Wings’ training camp participants, and the 2-period, 50-minute-long game was entertaining, if not uneventful:
The White Team beat the Red Team 2-1 in a shootout, with Frans Nielsen and Anthony Mantha’s shootout goals accompanying a regulation goal from Oliwer Kaski; Andreas Athanasiou scored for the Red Team, but left with an unspecified minor injury halfway through the game.
The day actually started with an hour-long practice for the non-Red/White players, who engaged in complicated situational drills under coach Jeff Blashill; even the Red and White players skated for 40 minutes under the guidance of the Red Wings’ coaching staff before preparing for the Red vs. White Game itself, and as that was taking place, the Red Wings’ front office interviewed 9 players who were sent back to their major junior and professional teams.
Continue reading Impressions from the third day of the Red Wings’ training camp ’19Fox Sports Detroit posted two episodes of its “The 313” video series today, in which Brooke Fletcher first speaks with defenseman Dennis Cholowski…
And then catching up with Red Wings play-by-play announcer Ken Daniels:
The Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan provides a training camp injury update in his daily notebook:
Dylan Larkin, Mike Green and Darren Helm didn’t participate in the scrimmage, all bothered by “minor little tweaks,” Blashill said.
“Common with training camp,” Blashill said. “We have a bunch of guys with little tweaks and what-not, the normall stuff with going 100 miles-per-hour into training camp. We’ll have to adjust our practice accordingly.”
Andreas Athanasiou, who scored a goal in the scrimmage — the Red team ultimately won 2-1, in a shootout — left the ice in the second half (they played two separate halves, rather than three periods) because of a “tweak,” Blashill said.
The Wings end the training camp portion of the schedule Monday at Centre Ice Arena, and head home to face Chicago Tuesday at Little Caesars Arena in the first of nine exhibition games.
Continued; as far as we were told today, none of the Wings’ “tweaks” are major issues.
Update: In the longer-term vein, from MLive’s Ansar Khan:
Defensemen Mike Green, Trevor Daley and Jonathan Ericsson all missed extensive time last season due to injuries. Each heads into the final year of his contract in good health.
“Green has had no ill effect from last year’s virus so I think that’s a great thing for him,” Blashill said. “He said he felt great as he started to really train hard this summer.
“In talking to Dales, same thing. Dales ultimately had a real tough year as well; every 10 games he was out of it. He’s felt great coming into training camp. I think we have a whole bunch of guys that have little tweaks and whatnot, the normal stuff that comes with going 100 miles an hour into training camp, so we’ll have to just adjust our practices accordingly, but I think overall, the health’s good.”
Updated at 5:48 PM: Red Wings assistant coach Jared Nightengale has consistently sprayed orange paint on the ice at Centre ICE Arena before every Red Wings practice, spraying a square that encompasses the close-to-the-net halves of the faceoff dots out to the tops of the faceoff circles, and then a square that encompasses the goal crease and the interior hash marks.
The Red Wings have Nightengale do that to send a message: 80% of NHL goals are scored within the outer perimeter, and 40% of NHL goals are scored within the inner perimeter. That’s a bit of fuzzy math thanks to the fact that the squares overlap, but the point is clear: you’ve got to get to the net to score in today’s NHL.
After today’s Red vs. White Game, Filip Zadina first spoke with the media, and then coach Jeff Blashill followed a slightly shy and demurring Zadina, with Blashill emphasizing to DetroitRedWings.com’s Dana Wakiji that that Zadina is not going to earn a spot on the Red Wings posting the kinds of assist-only game that he did during the prospect tournament:
“He’s got to score. He’s a goal scorer,” Blashill said. “Now he can’t do it cheating. If you cheat for offense you don’t have any chance to win so you got to be able to score without cheating. I don’t want to put undue pressure on him. You don’t have to score every game but you gotta have opportunities to score every game and then you gotta score. That’s what he does best. He’ll have to do that while balancing being a complete player.
“If I were to say to him what would drive his performance, 40 percent of the NHL goals get scored in that little square we have drawn on the ice. I think he can score from that other square which is 80 percent of the goals get scored but he needs to get to the 40 percent in order to really score. I talked about that with Mantha a couple years ago on net-front power play, that’s where easy goals are. So get to that area, whether it’s by dragging it in yourself or most likely, getting there on rebounds and stuff like that while still being a complete player.”
Zadina told Wakiji that he believes his status as a sophomore professional player pushes him that much further ahead of where he was at the start of last season:
With a year in the American Hockey League under his belt and nine games with the Wings, Zadina gained invaluable experience that he expects to translate on the ice this coming season, whether that is back in Grand Rapids or in Detroit.
“The game is going to be a little bit slower for me this year because I know what it’s going to like,” Zadina said. “It’s about the space I guess but it’s about the patience. Then if you get a puck, you just gotta skate and that’s it I guess. Be smart and a good skater and I think the game will be easier.”
Update: Here’s more from MLive’s Ansar Khan:
Continue reading Fill the net, Filip Zadina