ESPN: Rebuild? Red Wings just keep winning

[jkutswings]

I'm not painting a picture, I am pointing out facts. You just don't like the facts.

I have no idea what is going on in the front office just like you. So all we can go on is facts.

You're right that none of us know every bit of the inner workings. Which is why the results are all we have to go on.

FACT: Holland retained a staff for many years that collectively did a poor job at improving the defense.

FACT: Despite having millions of cap space this summer, and still needing help on defense, the Wings used all their available funds to add forwards.

 

[Retire91]

Boston is such a weird story too. Everyone points to them as the rebuild on the fly success story. But there was also a lot of luck to it. They signed a Norris winning defenseman and a vezina winning goalie as free agents.

You're right that none of us know every bit of the inner workings. Which is why the results are all we have to go on.

FACT: Holland retained a staff for many years that collectively did a poor job at improving the defense.

FACT: Despite having millions of cap space this summer, and still needing help on defense, the Wings used all their available funds to add forwards.

Well aged Mediocre forwards at that

 

[HockeyinHD]

FACT: Despite having millions of cap space this summer, and still needing help on defense, the Wings used all their available funds to add forwards.

... after spending 6 mil a year on Green and then 5 mil a year on Dekeyser, with Kronwall and Ericsson also with 4+ per deals, your position is that they should have spent a bunch more cap space on the blue line? Uh, no. That's not a smart take.

 

[obey86]

... after spending 6 mil a year on Green and then 5 mil a year on Dekeyser, with Kronwall and Ericsson also with 4+ per deals, your position is that they should have spent a bunch more cap space on the blue line? Uh, no. That's not a smart take.

Yeah, until the Wings are able to dump Kronwall or Ericsson and their expensive contract somehow...there aren't going to be major changes to the blue line unfortunately.

 

[HockeyinHD]

Yeah, until the Wings are able to dump Kronwall or Ericsson and their expensive contracts somehow...there aren't going to be major changes to the blue line unfortunately.

Kronwall will be gone in 24 months tops, and Green's deal is up at the end of next year.

There is going to be some major upheaval on the Wings blue line fairly soon, my point was that throwing a bunch of money at it 3 months ago was a terrible idea.

 

[Pavels Dog]

Well cool; I guess the defense is perfect just the way it is because we won some cups almost two decades ago.

That's not what I said. But to say that we've somehow failed more than everyone else because we haven't drafted a top-pairing d-man lately is kind of ignoring the fact that a major reason that we've failed to do that is because we've had more success than anyone else in the last 25 years. So it's been 16 years since Kronwall... well the the first 10+ years of those we were a contender. Going all in, drafting in a terrible position. How many top pairing d-men have Chicago and Pittsburgh been drafting the last 8 years? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Extremely few elite d-men are drafted outside the top 10. Much, much fewer outside the top 20. Even fewer outside the 1st round. Reality hits you eventually when you're a top team. Think Chicago will just slide a new elite #1 d-man into Keith's position when he retires?

Tampa, Florida, Columbus, New Jersey, Minnesota, Arizona. I think that's about it. The list of guys I looked at is below, though some may be (or almost certainly are) debatable, and I may have accidentally left some off. Some (Ericsson, for instance) are on because ice time indicated they were playing top pair minutes, though them actually being top pairing guys may be debatable.

1st Round (11+)
Nashville 	- Dan Hamhuis, Ryan Ellis
Chicago 	- Brent Seabrook
Boston		- Mark Stuart
Washington	- Mike Green, John Carlson
New York R	- Mark Staal
Dallas		- Matt Niskanen
Montreal	- Ryan McDonagh
Colorado	- Kevin Shattenkirk
Buffalo		- Tyler Myers
Ottawa		- Erik Karlsson
Anaheim		- Cam Fowler
Edmonton	- Oscar Klefbom
Pittsburgh	- Olli Maata

2nd Round
Chicago 	- Duncan Keith
Colorado	- Johnny Boychuck
Nashville	- Shea Weber, Roman Josi
San Jose	- Marc-Edouard Vlasic
Montreal	- PK Subban
New York I	- Travis Hamonic
Carolina	- Justin Faulk

3rd Round
Buffalo		- Andrej Sekera
Vancouver	- Alexander Edler
Pittsburgh	- Kris Letang
Colorado	- Tyson Barrie
Philadelphia	- Shayne Gostisbehere
St Louis	- Colton Parayko

4th Round
Chicago		- Niklas Hjalmarsson
Calgary		- TJ Brodie
Anaheim		- Sami Vatanen

5th Round
Los Angeles	- Jake Muzzin
Dallas		- John Klingberg

6th Round
Philadelphia	- Dennis Seidenberg
New York R	- Marek Zidlicky

7th Round
Washington	- Johnny Oduya
Toronto		- Anton Stralman

8th Round
Buffalo		- Dennis Wideman
Atlanta/Winnipeg- Toby Enstrom
Chicago		- Dustin Byfuglien

9th Round
Detroit		- Jonathan Ericsson
Montreal	- Mark Streit

Yeah I would certainly debate a lot of those guys as being legit top pairing material.

 

[Frk It]

... after spending 6 mil a year on Green and then 5 mil a year on Dekeyser, with Kronwall and Ericsson also with 4+ per deals, your position is that they should have spent a bunch more cap space on the blue line? Uh, no. That's not a smart take.

That's where being good at drafting and developing comes in handy. You get Lindholm and Ristolainen for 5 million on post-ELC deals instead of UDFA Dekeyser for 5 million on his post-ELC deal.

Until we can do it, we're gonna have to pay more.

 

[njx9]

That's not what I said. But to say that we've somehow failed more than everyone else because we haven't drafted a top-pairing d-man lately is kind of ignoring the fact that a major reason that we've failed to do that is because we've had more success than anyone else in the last 25 years. So it's been 16 years since Kronwall... well the the first 10+ years of those we were a contender. Going all in, drafting in a terrible position. How many top pairing d-men have Chicago and Pittsburgh been drafting the last 8 years? Yeah, that's what I thought.

We've legitimately failed at drafting a defenseman more than most of the league. We haven't drafted a single guy since Kronwall who compares favorably with most of the list I posted, and you'll note, most of the guys went after the 1st round. I'd also note that Pittsburgh and Chicago are terrible examples, as Letang and Keith are better than anyone we've drafted in longer than the Streak has been a thing. And neither was a top ten pick.

Extremely few elite d-men are drafted outside the top 10. Much, much fewer outside the top 20. Even fewer outside the 1st round. Reality hits you eventually when you're a top team. Think Chicago will just slide a new elite #1 d-man into Keith's position when he retires?

I mean, the list is right there. It's pretty clear that more quality d-men go outside of the first than in it, and the thing is, we haven't even been drafting quality players. We've been pissing away picks on guys like Kindl, Smith or Ouellet, while other teams find Shea Weber and PK Subban in the second round. Either we're bad at scouting or we're bad at development, because the players were there and we picked around them (or traded down to add more marginal talent).

Yeah I would certainly debate a lot of those guys as being legit top pairing material.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's easy to handwave and say 'a lot' if you don't have to count or name anyone. There are a lot of teams on there who drafted guys who played top pairing minutes. I have a hard time believing more than a couple of those teams ought to be removed.

I dunno, I just don't see any way, given the guys we've passed on or traded away from, compared to the guys we have drafted, that we're either not simply god awful at scouting defensemen or that we're not god awful at developing them. We've taken some swings and come up worse than empty.

 

[Pavels Dog]

We've legitimately failed at drafting a defenseman more than most of the league. We haven't drafted a single guy since Kronwall who compares favorably with most of the list I posted, and you'll note, most of the guys went after the 1st round. I'd also note that Pittsburgh and Chicago are terrible examples, as Letang and Keith are better than anyone we've drafted in longer than the Streak has been a thing. And neither was a top ten pick.

Well it's kind of silly to talk about how bad we are at drafting because we didn't draft another Kronwall after 2000, yet talk about how good other teams are at drafting because they drafted a Kronwall-level player (or slightly better/worse) a few years later than we did? I mean Zidlicky was drafted in 2001. Stuart 2003. Edler 2004. Why is that a sign that those teams are great at drafting yet us drafting Kronwall in 2000 does not matter? When you take the collective accomplishments of 29 teams in the draft and measure it against ONE, the singular team will always look bad.

I mean, the list is right there. It's pretty clear that more quality d-men go outside of the first than in it, and the thing is, we haven't even been drafting quality players. We've been pissing away picks on guys like Kindl, Smith or Ouellet, while other teams find Shea Weber and PK Subban in the second round. Either we're bad at scouting or we're bad at development, because the players were there and we picked around them (or traded down to add more marginal talent).

More go after the 1st round because there's significantly more players drafted after the 1st round. It's easy to think there are soooo many elite d-men being drafted when you round 16 years worth of draft picks up. But spread them out between 30 teams, 7 rounds of the draft and 16 years and you realize how rare they are. "pissing away picks" is not what you do when you actually get NHLers out of draft picks. One other team found Shea Weber. Once. One other team found PK Subban. Once. Singular. In 16 years. And let me tell you, this is how 29 teams felt about us when we had Lidstrom, Zetterberg and Datsyuk all taken at insane positions in the draft. To ask that we should always be that lucky, without ever not having a perfectly smooth transition from one elite core to the next... that is pure delusion. Now we're at least drafting in the 15-20 range where good players are slightly more common than they are in the 20-30 range or late.

In reality that list also needs to be narrowed down to picks later than 15th, since we've never had a better drafting position than that. And if you remove all the d-men picked before our first selection of each draft, the list grows even shorter. In some years we didn't have a 1st round pick at all. Now it's easy to say in hindsight we should have saved our picks, but we were contending right up to 2010, maybe even later.

I don't mean to be a jerk, but it's easy to handwave and say 'a lot' if you don't have to count or name anyone. There are a lot of teams on there who drafted guys who played top pairing minutes. I have a hard time believing more than a couple of those teams ought to be removed.

For one, Oduya is a joke. #4 d-man on a good day. Mark Stuart, Sekera, Zidlicky, Klefbom and a few others I would definitely say are not legit top-pairing d-men. We're talking about drafting the kind of d-men that really make a difference to a team. Not just guys that may once or twice have been playing top-pairing minutes, usually on bad teams. At least you included Ericsson, so if minutes is all we go on then we did draft another top-pairing d-man after Kronwall.

 

[jkutswings]

Well it's kind of silly to talk about how bad we are at drafting because we didn't draft another Kronwall after 2000, yet talk about how good other teams are at drafting because they drafted a Kronwall-level player (or slightly better/worse) a few years later than we did? I mean Zidlicky was drafted in 2001. Stuart 2003. Edler 2004. Why is that a sign that those teams are great at drafting yet us drafting Kronwall in 2000 does not matter? When you take the collective accomplishments of 29 teams in the draft and measure it against ONE, the singular team will always look bad.

1) How would you rank Detroit's defense out of the 30 teams in the league?
2) What was that ranking 2 years ago? 4 years ago? 6 years ago?

When the facet has been a liability for several years, I don't care if you had zero picks at all, you still didn't sufficiently address improving the problem. Collectively, they used very few picks to try and draft defensemen, they made no trades to acquire defensemen, and Green is the only noteworthy free agent they brought in. When measured against the rest of the league, that's not doing enough to fix a well-established problem.

 

[SpookyTsuki]

1) How would you rank Detroit's defense out of the 30 teams in the league?
2) What was that ranking 2 years ago? 4 years ago? 6 years ago?

When the facet has been a liability for several years, I don't care if you had zero picks at all, you still didn't sufficiently address improving the problem. Collectively, they used very few picks to try and draft defensemen, they made no trades to acquire defensemen, and Green is the only noteworthy free agent they brought in. When measured against the rest of the league, that's not doing enough to fix a well-established problem.

So far? During October I'd say the dcore is in the 9-14 range. Surprising right?

At worst they are in the 15-20 range imo. Green. Really. Really helps

I'd have to do a lot to see how it was in the 2013-2016. Range but I'd think it was in the 20-25 range

 

[njx9]

Well it's kind of silly to talk about how bad we are at drafting because we didn't draft another Kronwall after 2000, yet talk about how good other teams are at drafting because they drafted a Kronwall-level player (or slightly better/worse) a few years later than we did? I mean Zidlicky was drafted in 2001. Stuart 2003. Edler 2004. Why is that a sign that those teams are great at drafting yet us drafting Kronwall in 2000 does not matter? When you take the collective accomplishments of 29 teams in the draft and measure it against ONE, the singular team will always look bad.

I don't necessarily think those teams are 'great' at drafting, so much as it is that almost every team in the NHL has been able to find a better defenseman than we have in the last ~20 years. I think it also comes down to this: if Ken Holland is just another guy at GM, then fine, expectations should be low and I can take our scouting as being roughly similar to throwing some darts at a wall of names. But if he's supposed to be a top GM, and the kind of guy you hang onto for decades, he shouldn't be worse at drafting a key position than most of the rest of the league. Yeah, he's found some late round middle-6 guys, but our top line is barely deserving of the name, talent-wise, so it's not like he's been stocking the team with top level talent elsewhere, at the expense of the D.

More go after the 1st round because there's significantly more players drafted after the 1st round. It's easy to think there are soooo many elite d-men being drafted when you round 16 years worth of draft picks up. But spread them out between 30 teams, 7 rounds of the draft and 16 years and you realize how rare they are. "pissing away picks" is not what you do when you actually get NHLers out of draft picks. One other team found Shea Weber. Once. One other team found PK Subban. Once. Singular. In 16 years. And let me tell you, this is how 29 teams felt about us when we had Lidstrom, Zetterberg and Datsyuk all taken at insane positions in the draft. To ask that we should always be that lucky, without ever not having a perfectly smooth transition from one elite core to the next... that is pure delusion. Now we're at least drafting in the 15-20 range where good players are slightly more common than they are in the 20-30 range or late.

I mean, yeah, obviously more players are taken, so you'll find more good defensemen, but at the same time, we had picks in all of those drafts. We passed on all of those guys, and typically did it for less talented players who amounted to far less. It's a scouting failure. And when it happens that many times at the same position for that long, it points to deeper failures in whatever evaluations the team is making when it's looking at these guys. Lidstrom, Datsyuk and Z are evidence that, once, we were seriously ahead of the game in scouting. Chalk it up to no one else bothering with Europe or whatever, but we consistently identified top level talent. We haven't identified or drafted a single player at that level in 16 years (I won't argue if you want to call Larkin one, but I'm not really including the last three drafts). That tells me that, while the league caught up, we stagnated. While other teams started identifying gems in Europe and Russia, we sat back and stopped trying to get better. And I think the evidence is pretty clear, other teams didn't just catch up, they surpassed us.

In reality that list also needs to be narrowed down to picks later than 15th, since we've never had a better drafting position than that. And if you remove all the d-men picked before our first selection of each draft, the list grows even shorter. In some years we didn't have a 1st round pick at all. Now it's easy to say in hindsight we should have saved our picks, but we were contending right up to 2010, maybe even later.

I think that's a bit of a strawman, though. In just about any draft, the team could've traded up to ~11 without a lot of issue, had they really wanted to. Instead, we found ourselves trading backwards to acquire more picks to take guys like Ouellet. I don't think you can restrict the talent pool, just because Holland & Co. identified and pursued the wrong talent. And while I don't entirely disagree with the traded picks being traded for good reason while we were contending, if you look at the 2012 draft, is it really impossible that we could've turned the 19th pick into the 9th pick, instead of into Quincey? I dunno.

For one, Oduya is a joke. #4 d-man on a good day. Mark Stuart, Sekera, Zidlicky, Klefbom and a few others I would definitely say are not legit top-pairing d-men. We're talking about drafting the kind of d-men that really make a difference to a team. Not just guys that may once or twice have been playing top-pairing minutes, usually on bad teams. At least you included Ericsson, so if minutes is all we go on then we did draft another top-pairing d-man after Kronwall.

Totally fair criticisms, though Zidlicky got top pair minutes for at least a 4 year stretch in Minnesota, Sekera had a similar stretch in Buffalo and Carolina, and Klefbom looks more like a future real (i.e. not there by force of circumstance) top pairing guy in Edmonton than anyone we have. I did only go off of minutes though (minus Stuart, who I misread), because it seemed like the only objective way to put in names for an initial list, so I do think there are probably guys there who ought not to be.

 

[iDangleDangle]

That's not what I said. But to say that we've somehow failed more than everyone else because we haven't drafted a top-pairing d-man lately is kind of ignoring the fact that a major reason that we've failed to do that is because we've had more success than anyone else in the last 25 years. So it's been 16 years since Kronwall... well the the first 10+ years of those we were a contender. Going all in, drafting in a terrible position. How many top pairing d-men have Chicago and Pittsburgh been drafting the last 8 years? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Extremely few elite d-men are drafted outside the top 10. Much, much fewer outside the top 20. Even fewer outside the 1st round. Reality hits you eventually when you're a top team. Think Chicago will just slide a new elite #1 d-man into Keith's position when he retires?



Yeah I would certainly debate a lot of those guys as being legit top pairing material.

Yet nearly all leaps and bounds better than anything we have.

 

[Pavels Dog]

1) How would you rank Detroit's defense out of the 30 teams in the league?
2) What was that ranking 2 years ago? 4 years ago? 6 years ago?

When the facet has been a liability for several years, I don't care if you had zero picks at all, you still didn't sufficiently address improving the problem. Collectively, they used very few picks to try and draft defensemen, they made no trades to acquire defensemen, and Green is the only noteworthy free agent they brought in. When measured against the rest of the league, that's not doing enough to fix a well-established problem.

1) Somewhere in the 20-25 range.
2) 6 years ago we were top 10, maybe top 5.

We made a trade for Quincey and Zidlicky. We acquired Dekeyser and Green as free agents (our current top pairing if you didn't notice). Maybe we could have done more but hindsight is hindsight. What would we have given up to address the problem? It's well established that a lot of the top trade targets over the years have turned out to be disappointments. Ehrhoff, Myers and Bogosian would not have made this team a contender.

I think that's a bit of a strawman, though. In just about any draft, the team could've traded up to ~11 without a lot of issue, had they really wanted to. Instead, we found ourselves trading backwards to acquire more picks to take guys like Ouellet. I don't think you can restrict the talent pool, just because Holland & Co. identified and pursued the wrong talent. And while I don't entirely disagree with the traded picks being traded for good reason while we were contending, if you look at the 2012 draft, is it really impossible that we could've turned the 19th pick into the 9th pick, instead of into Quincey? I dunno.

How often do you see teams moving up from ~20-25th to the top 10 of the draft? I would die to see a list of all the times that has happened.

Ask yourself this, if we get a top 10 draft pick next year and Holland trades down to 20.. what will be your reaction? That's right, you'd call for his head. Just like fans of every team. That's why it doesn't happen. Pretty much the only time you see a top 10 pick lost in a trade is Toronto/Boston scenarios.

And when I'm talking about the Wings being contenders, I'm talking about the period from 2000-2010 or so. When you're a contender, you don't spend massive amounts of assets to move up in the draft. Trading down is smart when you're a contender because you get extra picks.

Reality is that you can't contend for 20+ years while also saving all your draft picks, sometimes trading up in the draft, constantly finding great NHLers in the late rounds (we've basically done this for 25+ years, insane, just insane, but we haven't had a constant stream of #1D-men so who cares right), always being able to properly identify which promising young players to trade when their value is high (hey, remember when everyone wanted to trade Larkin the summer after he was drafted? or when everyone wanted to trade Tatar because they said Pulkkinen could just replace him? fun times. seeing the future = impossible), and with the salary cap you eventually run into a situation where your veteran players are overpaid and it starts to bleed your team of talent. It will happen to Chicago/Pittsburgh/LA too. If it hasn't already.

I mean, yeah, obviously more players are taken, so you'll find more good defensemen, but at the same time, we had picks in all of those drafts. We passed on all of those guys, and typically did it for less talented players who amounted to far less. It's a scouting failure.

Most other teams in the league have during the last 20+ years gone through periods, sometimes long periods, where they have been bottom of the barrel teams that have stockpiled draft picks and been sellers at the deadline. We have NEVER been sellers. That fact alone is important. If you're selling and you get some extra 2nd/3rd/later picks you increase your chances of getting a good player. You are using a lot of hindsight when you say things like we traded back to "pick up guys like Ouellet". As if ANYONE knew when he was drafted that he would only turn out to be what he is. As if the scouts were talking among themselves "hey should we draft a future HOFer or a future #6 d-man"? A guy like Subban was drafted late because he was a project. Maybe our scouts should have taken more chances on long-term projects, guys with massive flaws in their game but high ceilings. But Smith is kinda that. Sproul is pretty much that. Almqvist, Hicketts, Backman. Probably others. Bad drafting? I guess so. I can't believe we didn't draft the great players intead of the bad ones, such a bad drafting strategy.

But again, you're comparing what 29 teams have done combined, to what we have done. And yeah, maybe most of those 29 teams have managed to pull out ONE great d-man from the draft. But so what? That is luck. How many of those teams have managed to surround that one d-man with decent talent? If they're so good at identifying talent, why can't they draft a #2 and a #3 to surround their #1? Like why can't Dallas find decent talent to surround superstar Johnny Oduya? Why have Winnipeg been so bad for so long when they have Enstrom? Why are the Isles struggling despite having Hamonic?

Yet nearly all leaps and bounds better than anything we have.

Disagree completely. There's a handful of d-men on that list that would significantly alter the way our D looks. People just love to overrate every decent d-man around the league as if they're Nick Lidstrom. If you listen to this board, teams like Arizona and Nashville should dominate the league because they have OEL+Chychrun and Josi+Subban. Yet they're fighting over last place. Mark Staal is leaps and bounds better than anything we have? Wideman? Edler? Hjalmarsson is a better defensive version of Dekeyser, with even less talent offensively. And the list goes on. Heck we even have two of the guys on the list. And Dekeyser would fit right in with a lot of those names.

 

[Frk It]

Disagree completely. There's a handful of d-men on that list that would significantly alter the way our D looks. People just love to overrate every decent d-man around the league as if they're Nick Lidstrom. If you listen to this board, teams like Arizona and Nashville should dominate the league because they have OEL+Chychrun and Josi+Subban. Yet they're fighting over last place. Mark Staal is leaps and bounds better than anything we have? Wideman? Edler? Hjalmarsson is a better defensive version of Dekeyser, with even less talent offensively. And the list goes on. Heck we even have two of the guys on the list. And Dekeyser would fit right in with a lot of those names.

Well we didn't draft Dekeyser, so that doesn't really speak to our drafting ability.

 

[njx9]

How often do you see teams moving up from ~20-25th to the top 10 of the draft? I would die to see a list of all the times that has happened.

I think these cover most of them back to 2004. I tried to only include trades that happened between the end of the season and the draft, though there were several others that occurred a year or two earlier and ultimately involved a top ten pick. I did also include any trade into the top ten, rather than necessarily including a late round pick in the trade. A good team has multiple possible trading assets and avenues.

2013 - New Jersey traded #9 for Schneider
2012 - Carolina traded #8 to Pittsburgh for Jordan Staal (Colorado also traded #11 for Varlamov)
2011 - Columbus traded #8 (and Voracek) to Philadelphia for Jeff Carter (Blues also traded #11 to Colorado)
2008 - Leafs and Islanders swap #5 and #7, Preds and Islanders swap #7 and #9
2007 - Blues and Sharks swap #7 and #13
2004 - Columbus and Carolina swap #4 and #8

So no, it doesn't happen often, but it does happen.

Ask yourself this, if we get a top 10 draft pick next year and Holland trades down to 20.. what will be your reaction? That's right, you'd call for his head. Just like fans of every team. That's why it doesn't happen. Pretty much the only time you see a top 10 pick lost in a trade is Toronto/Boston scenarios.

If we had a long record of trading down and making good selections, I wouldn't care. But we generally have a long record of trading down and making poor choices (or, at least, non-additive choices). If we traded down and acquired a solid player in so doing, I wouldn't complain. *shrug* I also think we're in a very different scenario than a lot of teams who might be in that top ten area, where we desperately need stars, not role players and middle-sixers. I doubt a team like Toronto would turn down Patrick, but they could probably get a lot more value out of the extra picks they'd get by moving down a few slots.

And when I'm talking about the Wings being contenders, I'm talking about the period from 2000-2010 or so. When you're a contender, you don't spend massive amounts of assets to move up in the draft. Trading down is smart when you're a contender because you get extra picks.

I don't think any of the trades that occurred took massive assets. And trading down is only smart when you utilize the additional picks well. We, generally, haven't.

Reality is that you can't contend for 20+ years while also saving all your draft picks, sometimes trading up in the draft, constantly finding great NHLers in the late rounds (we've basically done this for 25+ years, insane, just insane, but we haven't had a constant stream of #1D-men so who cares right), always being able to properly identify which promising young players to trade when their value is high (hey, remember when everyone wanted to trade Larkin the summer after he was drafted? or when everyone wanted to trade Tatar because they said Pulkkinen could just replace him? fun times. seeing the future = impossible), and with the salary cap you eventually run into a situation where your veteran players are overpaid and it starts to bleed your team of talent. It will happen to Chicago/Pittsburgh/LA too. If it hasn't already.

I would strongly disagree with 'finding great NHLers'. We've found adequate players, and decent players. We have no great players that were drafted after pick 15, at this point. Again, feel free to argue Mrazek, but a great goalie wouldn't have been pulled for Howard last year, or be so maddeningly inconsistent. After that, I'm not sure what your point is. A team run by a great GM would be identifying players who don't have a future with the club, and would trade them while they have value. A mediocre GM sits on them for years, just in case, because he isn't actually able to scout or develop them.

Most other teams in the league have during the last 20+ years gone through periods, sometimes long periods, where they have been bottom of the barrel teams that have stockpiled draft picks and been sellers at the deadline. We have NEVER been sellers. That fact alone is important. If you're selling and you get some extra 2nd/3rd/later picks you increase your chances of getting a good player. You are using a lot of hindsight when you say things like we traded back to "pick up guys like Ouellet". As if ANYONE knew when he was drafted that he would only turn out to be what he is. As if the scouts were talking among themselves "hey should we draft a future HOFer or a future #6 d-man"? A guy like Subban was drafted late because he was a project. Maybe our scouts should have taken more chances on long-term projects, guys with massive flaws in their game but high ceilings. But Smith is kinda that. Sproul is pretty much that. Almqvist, Hicketts, Backman. Probably others. Bad drafting? I guess so.

What is scouting, if not trying to predict and gauge what players will be, years down the line? If other teams looked at Ouellet and didn't see an NHL-level defender, they did a better job at scouting than we did. "You don't know what will happen!" is a really lame excuse when we're talking about the front office of a pro sports team. It's their job to find players they believe will excel, and if they're consistently not doing so, they're failing. I just don't see how our drafting and development over the last ~16 years is even slightly defensible.

I can't believe we didn't draft the great players intead of the bad ones, such a bad drafting strategy.

If you truly think it comes down to that, then you must think we're basically drawing names out of a hat, with no thought or pretense behind the picks. The *entire* idea of the draft, and of scouting, and of development is to both identify players who *will be* good and then to ensure that they reach that level. If you're failing to do that as consistently as we are, you're failing as a front office.

 

[Unfriendly Ghost]

But if you need draft picks to have great defensemen, isn't that an argument for doing what it takes to get those picks? As in they've won too much, depleted the cupboard, and now they need to trade, sell, or lose and draft high.

If you prefer to keep the Wings in the playoffs year after year, you need to argue that either the defense is fine, or that the Wings can build a top notch defense without high picks. This is neither of those.

Comes across like supporting Holland's recent decisions AND the Wings' draft record is a bridge too far. They're not really compatible positions.

 

[Frk It]

I just, I really don't understand how you think you can get away with drafting only 20 defenseman over 11 drafts from 2005 to 2015, with only 4 in the first 2 rounds, and think you are going to end up with anything other than a defense that sucks.

That's like putting the absolute bare minimum into your 401K, and then being surprised when you get to 65 that you can't retire.

 

[njx9]

I just, I really don't understand how you think you can get away with drafting only 20 defenseman over 11 drafts from 2005 to 2015, with only 4 in the first 2 rounds, and think you are going to end up with anything other than a defense that sucks.

That's like putting the absolute bare minimum into your 401K, and then being surprised when you get to 65 that you can't retire.

I know it's not reality, but to play devil's advocate, you could certainly get away with drafting that few defensemen if you were lights out at drafting forwards (and centers, specifically) over the same time span. At least then you'd be accumulating tradeable assets that you could convert.

Our problem is that we haven't done either one. We've drafted a lot of middle six guys which was be admirable in the 00's when we had star players on the team, but just makes you into a middling team when you have no stars or even particularly great players.

 

[Rzombo4 prez]

It sounds to me as though Pavels Dog does not actually believe that rebuilding on the fly will actually work after all. Apparently our defense is currently in the bottom quarter of the league and you need to draft in the top 10 to have a realistic chance of drafting a top-pair defensemen.

Who knew?

 

[SirloinUB]

First off, Props to njx9 on compiling that list. Even when we don't agree I appreciate your effort.

Well it's kind of silly to talk about how bad we are at drafting because we didn't draft another Kronwall after 2000, yet talk about how good other teams are at drafting because they drafted a Kronwall-level player (or slightly better/worse) a few years later than we did? I mean Zidlicky was drafted in 2001. Stuart 2003. Edler 2004. Why is that a sign that those teams are great at drafting yet us drafting Kronwall in 2000 does not matter? When you take the collective accomplishments of 29 teams in the draft and measure it against ONE, the singular team will always look bad.

I think this is a great point. The numbers look ugly when its Detroit vs the league. We drafted just Kronwall in the last 16 years. How many of these other teams have drafted more than 1 first pairing dmen outside of the top 10? Nashville, Chicago and to a lesser extent Dallas. Is Detroit that much worse than the rest?

I mean, the list is right there. It's pretty clear that more quality d-men go outside of the first than in it, and the thing is, we haven't even been drafting quality players. We've been pissing away picks on guys like Kindl, Smith or Ouellet, while other teams find Shea Weber and PK Subban in the second round. Either we're bad at scouting or we're bad at development, because the players were there and we picked around them (or traded down to add more marginal talent).

Yes, quality dmen can be found outside of this first round but its like finding a needle in a haystack. You put together a list of what, 17-25 guys depending on who we classify as a 1st pair? And that list goes back to when? 2001ish?

There were 3150 players drafted in rounds 2-7 since 2001 and you have provided a list of 25ish guys (i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on some of those names). The odds of getting one of those 25 are less than 1.0% (specifically 0.79%). Factor in that a few years had rounds 8 and 9 and that percentage drives even lower.

In other words, a guy of that caliber is drafted once every 126 picks. Detroit has had 116 picks since they drafted Kronwall. Its fair to say we are due, but faulting failure over that period seems like a stretch to me.

 

[Winger98]

Let me throw this out there: instead of not drafting good enough players compared to the rest of the league, have we put our focus on the wrong strengths? Take the Pens, for instance. I don't think anyone questions Letang as a #1. But the rest of those guys? Maata's good, but wasn't he injured? But they played a style of game that works very well with where the NHL has went, and for what the pens were trying to do.

We seem to have put a heavy premium on guys not screwing up, but is it becoming more worthwhile to pursue guys who might screw up more once in awhile but who provide other attributes in a big way? And if we want to narrow this down to the wings, think Marchenko vs Sproul - at least in how they were perceived coming into this season before Marchenko got off to this rough start.

 

[njx9]

First off, Props to njx9 on compiling that list. Even when we don't agree I appreciate your effort.

Cheers! It's interesting to me to really see when evidence lines up with my belief. I think we all agree that the quantity on that list kind of overstates the quality, though.

Yes, quality dmen can be found outside of this first round but its like finding a needle in a haystack. You put together a list of what, 17-25 guys depending on who we classify as a 1st pair? And that list goes back to when? 2001ish?

There were 3150 players drafted in rounds 2-7 since 2001 and you have provided a list of 25ish guys (i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on some of those names). The odds of getting one of those 25 are less than 1.0% (specifically 0.79%). Factor in that a few years had rounds 8 and 9 and that percentage drives even lower.

In other words, a guy of that caliber is drafted once every 126 picks. Detroit has had 116 picks since they drafted Kronwall. Its fair to say we are due, but faulting failure over that period seems like a stretch to me.

I absolutely agree that the expectation that we pull a Nashville and pull a high quality defenseman out of basically every 3rd or 4th draft is silly. It's just never going to happen. That said, I think there are two confounding factors going on here: a) we don't/didn't take enough defensemen and b) we took the wrong defensemen. (a) is easy to address, especially when you see that our history on the forward front isn't really all that much better. We're not passing on defensemen to draft Wayne Gretzky. (b) I think is the more important issue: we're not identifying the right guys.

In 2007, in the first round, we took Brendan Smith, the 68th ranked skater in CSS's list. We passed on Subban, who was ranked 102. Given that it was pick 27 and we were reaching either way, I think that the ranking difference is fairly negligible. But I think we can reasonably assume that our scouts thought Brendan Smith would have a better NHL future than Subban, who went 17 picks later (and still well ahead of his ranking). I think we can call that either a scouting issue or a development issue pretty safely - either Smith wasn't worth that pick and our scouts missed something, or he was and he messed up his development. I'm open to other interpretations, but I don't think "he just wasn't very good" holds much water (not that anyone's saying that, specifically).

Given all of that, I think we can see two things - either we need to revamp the scouting and development program for defensemen, or we need to draft high enough that the chances of hitting a home run are much higher. To address your other point, while I think it does make it look a bit worse to say "here's what the rest of the league did compared to us", I don't think that's the best way to read the list. I think it's better to read it as, "here are the chances we missed on", which should lead to "why did we miss?" Yeah every other team might've only got one guy to match our one Kronwall, but we still missed on 20+ guys. If Holland is really as good a GM as people say, that shouldn't be happening, or if it's happening regularly, it should be getting addressed. If it was, and if we were even finding one top pairing defensemen a decade, I'm pretty confident that this team would be moving in a very different direction and the 'reload' would be a much better strategy.

Let me throw this out there: instead of not drafting good enough players compared to the rest of the league, have we put our focus on the wrong strengths? Take the Pens, for instance. I don't think anyone questions Letang as a #1. But the rest of those guys? Maata's good, but wasn't he injured? But they played a style of game that works very well with where the NHL has went, and for what the pens were trying to do.

We seem to have put a heavy premium on guys not screwing up, but is it becoming more worthwhile to pursue guys who might screw up more once in awhile but who provide other attributes in a big way? And if we want to narrow this down to the wings, think Marchenko vs Sproul - at least in how they were perceived coming into this season before Marchenko got off to this rough start.

I think this is the way we should be going, but I think it's basically a dead end with Blashill. Whether by his own design or by organizational directive, I don't think he's capable of working with a different system, and I think his stark terror at players who might make a mistake or two (regardless of their positives) means that guys like Sproul are going to regularly get the short end of the stick.

 

[Frk It]

There were 3150 players drafted in rounds 2-7 since 2001 and you have provided a list of 25ish guys (i'm giving you the benefit of the doubt on some of those names). The odds of getting one of those 25 are less than 1.0% (specifically 0.79%). Factor in that a few years had rounds 8 and 9 and that percentage drives even lower.

Are we really criticizing Holland and co. for not capitalizing on these insanely long odds?

Did we put ourselves in the best position possible to capitalize on the long odds we find ourselves in based on where we draft?

I look at trading away a first for Quincey, trading away 2nd and 3rd round picks for Cole, Legwand, Zidlicky. I look at drafting 47 forwards compared to 20 defenseman from 2005 to 2015. Not really sure you can say we did.

If we shouldn't criticize Holland for not finding a good defenseman in rounds 2-7, and we also don't draft high enough in round 1 for one, I just want to know where exactly a good defenseman is supposed to come from?

Let me throw this out there: instead of not drafting good enough players compared to the rest of the league, have we put our focus on the wrong strengths? Take the Pens, for instance. I don't think anyone questions Letang as a #1. But the rest of those guys? Maata's good, but wasn't he injured? But they played a style of game that works very well with where the NHL has went, and for what the pens were trying to do.

We seem to have put a heavy premium on guys not screwing up, but is it becoming more worthwhile to pursue guys who might screw up more once in awhile but who provide other attributes in a big way? And if we want to narrow this down to the wings, think Marchenko vs Sproul - at least in how they were perceived coming into this season before Marchenko got off to this rough start.

Even if we do that, if we don't have a defenseman of Letang's caliber it isn't going to matter. As far as results go.

 

[Flowah]

I think this is the way we should be going, but I think it's basically a dead end with Blashill. Whether by his own design or by organizational directive, I don't think he's capable of working with a different system, and I think his stark terror at players who might make a mistake or two (regardless of their positives) means that guys like Sproul are going to regularly get the short end of the stick.

Thing is he talks about it and we seem to try it for a few games.

Then it becomes clear we aren't talented enough to play that style and we revert.