OT: Holland's worst blunder

[Ricelund]

I know this is beating a dead horse but there's not much else to talk about right now. What was Holland's worst move as Detroit's GM?

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[rwings01]

Can you add all of the above!

 

[lilidk]

Weiss have never had any good games for Red Wings, total waist of money

 

[ricky0034]

this is hard most of those were pretty awful

i'll go with the Dan Cleary one because it felt the most frustrating to watch as a fan because not only was he done as a player and kept coming back but Babcock kept playing him with Datsyuk/putting him on the powerplay and such for a while too

 

[Konnan511]

The Kyle Quincey Saga was something else.

 

[Sparty]

I'm sure I'll get razzed for this, but when you point them out, none of them are THAT terrible. It's just the sum total of all these that killed us. Mostly these were all low risk and somehow none of them seemed to work out. Gotta go with Nielsen though, since it was more costly than all the others.

 

[Gniwder]

I know this is beating a dead horse there's not much else to talk about right now. What was Holland's worst move as Detroit's GM?

We like to beat dead horses here. This is a great idea, now we can beat ALL of Holland's dead horses at once, lol.

 

[Heaton]

Letting Hossa walk was awful.

I also think passing up Chychrun looks really bad too. The risk/reward was there, but the reward never panned out. No Cholowski and Hronek isn't anywhere close to as good as Chychrun.

 

[OgeeOgelthorpe]

Abdelkader or the Kyle Quincey saga.

Man, Holland was absolute trash as GM from 2010 until he left in 2019. The list of good moves he made pales in comparison to the list of bad.

 

[Heaton]

Abdelkader or the Kyle Quincey saga.

Man, Holland was absolute trash as GM from 2010 until he left in 2019. The list of good moves he made pales in comparison to the list of bad.

Holland is a bad cap GM. He was given a gift in 2006 when he was forced to gut his roster of bad contracts. After Datsyuk/Z declined and Lidstrom retired, his safety nets were gone and his lack of ability to navigate the cap was magnified.

You see the same mistakes in Edmonton. He's been no better than any of the other bad GMs that went through Edmonton over the years.

 

[Gniwder]

The Kyle Quincey Saga was something else.

It was stupid to cut him. Oddly, I think the 1st to get him back was inconsequential only because Holland sucks at drafting and would have picked a player that never makes the team. Most people think we lost Vas, but realistically he would not have been Kenny's choice.

 

[Syckle78]

Everything he did after the Hossa signing turned to shit. It's not one major blunder but an era of being ineffective and passive.

 

[Lazlo Hollyfeld]

I would say the ones it's definitely NOT are bringing in multiple vets and the Hatcher deal. All teams bring in vets on relative short term deals. And if memory serves Hatcher blew out his knee and was coming off ACL surgery, then the cap was implemented. Slow player + knee injury + game suddenly played wide open = not gonna work.

The Quincey saga speaks to the entire organization's inability to draft and develop any good D-men since Kronwall.

And in isolation non of those contracts were killers. But you add the Weiss buyout to handing out those deals to Helm and Abdelkader? Yeah, it's pretty bad. Abby's contract was awful before the ink even dried.

 

[Syckle78]

I was stupid to cut him. Oddly, I think the 1st to get him back was inconsequential only because Holland sucks at drafting and would have picked a player that never makes the team. Most people think we lost Vas, but realistically he would not have been Kenny's choice.

Yea there's virtually no chance we draft a goalie at that point in Howard's career.

 

[Lazlo Hollyfeld]

Everything he did after the Hossa signing turned to shit. It's not one major blunder but an era of being ineffective and passive.

As I've said before I think in his heyday Holland was great at tinkering with a well built franchise. Making an occasional big move and a lot of small conservative ones. But when the team needed more than that, he seemed incapable of changing his style.

 

[bellringer77]

I mean we got Hronek as part of the deal so it lessens the blow but moving down from being able to draft Chychrun stings on top of using the money to sign Nielsen

 

[Syckle78]

As I've said before I think in his heyday Holland was great at tinkering with a well built franchise. Making an occasional big move and a lot of small conservative ones. But when the team needed more than that, he seemed incapable of changing his style.

I think Holland was fantastic as part of a brain trust of him,Bowman,Jimmy D and an aggressive Illitch. I don't think he has the aggressiveness on his own to out and get what a team needs. He is content to keep his guys and take what comes to him like a Weiss,Frans or Hyman. Once Bowman was gone,Jimmy D was a bumbling old bag of gas and Illitch was locked into winning a World Series Holland was on his own in a one dimensional passive front office where nobody was forcing his hand.

 

[izlez]

They obviously didn't work out, but I'll always support the Weiss, Legwand, Nielsen moves. Trying to build a winner was always the right move.

The Quincy thing... yeah, that was mismanaged from start to finish

 

[Bench]

The Abby deal broke any remaining confidence I had.

 

[Ricelund]

I said this in another thread but I think bringing Hasek back with Joseph and Legace under contract might be his worst move. For a GM who loves stability and high character guys in the locker room, you have to wonder how he ever thought that was a good idea.

 

[PullHard]

I would say the Abdelkader extension is up there as one single move, but the Datsyuk extension and inevitable trade was so so so bad.

That deal broke us down in so many ways
1) stuck with $7.5M of dead cap because the team/ Pavel's agent seemingly didn't communicate the implications of a 35+ contract to him (not all on Kenny)
2) end up dealing the contract away in order to have cap to speak with Stamkos but ultimately sign Nielsen and Helm to gross contracts
3) miss on Chychrun/ Fabbro/ etc who are seemingly already first pair defenders, while we swing and miss on Cholowski

The team did grab Smith and Hronek in round 2 with the extra pick, and I like both of those players, but I'd also trade both of them for Chychrun or Fabbro without hesitation

 

[Frk It]

How much time do you have?

 

[HisNoodliness]

For me it's Abdelkader. With most of his mistakes I could see the logic behind them. Nielsen and Weiss both performed as poorly as they possibly could have, but there were reasons to believe that they could be decent players for us with a long track record of performing. Helm's contract wasn't as bad as Abby's. Leech over Quincey was understandable... A first to bring him back is pretty indefensible but if you wanted to compete we needed a top 4 defenseman. That wasn't Quincey, but like Weiss and Nielsen, it could have been.

Legwand and Cole were obviously huge busts but ultimately the pieces we gave up weren't anything all that special. Franzen over Hossa was pretty reasonable too especially after the way Franzen performed in the playoffs for us.

These were all bad moves, but through some twisted logic, misplaced priorities and fantasizing about how things could have been, I can see why those moves were made. That Abdelkader deal has no ground to stand on. He made $2 million too much for five years too long. He got trade protection. Holland signed him to a contract that he had no history of performing up to. I was terrified we were going to sign him to a 3 mil, 4 year deal. We signed him to over 4 for 7 years. It was insane the second it was signed. There was never an even twisted view from which it was okay. It was insane. Honestly it was one of the most indefensible contracts in NHL history.

 

[MBH]

I know this is beating a dead horse there's not much else to talk about right now. What was Holland's worst move as Detroit's GM?

Letting Hossa go.
A few other things forced his hand (one year dropped cap, Cleary contract), but he should have found a way.
Maybe we win another cup or two, maybe not.
I don't know.
If nothing else, it would have prevented Chicago from winning 3 cups.
Maybe having that one extra star forward would have helped Holland acquire a Dman to replace Lidstrom.

Our problems would have gotten worse around 2015, of course.
But 5 years in the top 10 of the draft happened anyway, sooo.

 

[Ed Ned and Leddy]

I think it depends on what his goal was at the time and how important you feel that goal was.

If the goal was to continue to contend during the 2010s, then his biggest failure was the collective overpayment of average vets like Abdelkader, Weiss, Quincey, Ericsson, Helm, etc.

If his goal was to kickstart the rebuild, then passing on Chychrun to spend way too much money on Frans Nielsen was a pretty tragic step in the wrong direction as of 2016.

As others have said, it was really a broader failure after 07/08 though. Consistent overpayment of free agents, spending draft capital on underwhelming rentals, and not drafting/developing well enough to bridge the gaps.

He admittedly had a very tough job to keep that train rolling, but a lot of the damage was self-inflicted.