Full confession - I'm more excited and entertained by this team than I have been since the 2009 Season.
I know they are bad. And they are playing poor hockey right now but this season feels like a new beginning in a sense; an opportunity to grow with what could be a new generation of Wings players where there is a ton of opportunity and a world of what ifs.
The Wings from 10-17 were far better teams than this current iteration but each progressive year felt like poor imitation or shadow of the previous year. It was hard to get excited about, at best, a second round exit. It was obvious that those teams lacked the sheer potential upside to win it all. They were the worst possible thing in sports; a declining mediocre team that wasn't good enough to attract an impact free agent or bad enough to be awarded the opportunity to draft an impact prospect.
Instead, they atrophied and we found ourselves trying to talk up the potential impact of Sundin, Weiss, Modano, or Richards. We had to justify why premier free agents who once took pay cuts to play for Detroit were now ignoring Holland's phone calls or ducking him the lobby of a hotel. We would grow overly optimistic of every late draft pick would blossom into the next great superstar to revive the franchise but the outside shot of that was as likely as Pulkkinen slapshot hitting the net.
Those teams, those years, were not entertaining because in none of those years, did they realistically have a shot at winning the championship OR improving on the year prior. It was another year older, another year with a stopgap signing to replace what was a once productive position and another roll of the dice to hope that something would happen with a weak prospect pool who received little playing time in meaningful roles in a veteran ladened team.
Now? The worst has happened. They've bottomed out. They are a bad team with limited prospects. But honestly, at this point, there is nowhere to go but up and part of the fun is watching them figure it out and find a way to be better than are and I think that's the difference for me. The last decade was watching a team that was interested in trying not to lose versus watching a team with nothing to lose, trying to figure out how to win.
We finish the worst record in the league? Great. Hello, Jack Hughes! Now, for the first time since Yzerman, I get to have a 18 year old superstar to cheer on and argue with EDM and TOR that he's the best young center in the league! Can't wait. We finished 28th at the end of the year? Fantastic. Better than I would have guessed and I bet it was because our kids started playing better and began to find the path forward and that's entertaining to watch. Maybe the find out they are a up-tempo, crash the net style team or they found a better rhythm as with cycling puck possession or maybe they are secretly a great defensive team that shuts out top scoring teams and grinds out goals. Who knows? A world of possibilities as that's exciting to me.
Obviously, the pinnacle of sports fandom is watching your team work hard and win a championship and we are light years away from that. But watching them grow and build momentum game after game, season after season, is part of the fun and makes the championship all that more rewarding.