Down the Playoff Stretch for the Red Wings

      The Detroit Red Wings have five games left in the regular season and as it stands going into play on Thursday 4/18, they are in ninth place two points out of the last playoff spot.  If they miss the post season it will be the first time in 21 years.  Can they pull it out, make the playoffs and extend that streak?  If they want to, they need to play better and get help from other teams in these last few games.  The Columbus Blue Jackets are the team the Wings are chasing and they have four games left in the season.  The play in Los Angeles, in San Jose and in Dallas before returning home to play Nashville, which means they face two teams already in the playoffs, one team that is out and one team, Dallas, that still could make it.  The Jackets are 0-2 against the Kings this season, 2-0 against the Sharks, 1-1 versus Dallas and 3-1 against Nashville.  Detroit, on the other hand, has games at Vancouver, at home against Phoenix, Los Angeles and Nashville before going to Dallas to end the season, meaning two playoff teams, two out and Dallas fighting for their playoff lives just like Detroit.  The Wings are 2-0 against the Canucks, 1-1 against the Coyotes, 1-1 against the Kings, 2-1 against the Predators and 1-1 against the Stars.  Of course this means nothing if Detroit can't start winning their own games.  I have written a few posts about the struggles of the Red Wings and there hasn't been anything done to fix the issues I spotlighted.  The powerplay is still awful, the stars aren't scoring,   the defense is still a sieve and Jonas Gustavsson is a horrible netminder, what ever happened to Petr Mrazek?  If the Wings have any hope at all they need to start by winning Saturday night against Vancouver.  That is the game they need to focus on, if they can't win that one the season is over.  If they get by the Canucks then the Coyotes become the one game to think about.  That is the only way this will work..  Babcock and his coaches have to keep everybody focused as a laser on the next game, not what are the Blue Jackets doing, or how are the Stars playing.  Nope, the only thing they can be thinking about is the team  they play that night and if they're good enough and lucky enough  to get help from the other teams in the league, then they might get the honor of facing the Chicago Black Hawks, in which case they will be golfing really early and planing on starting the 2014 season in the Eastern Conference.  I'm starting to get to the point of writing them off this year and just looking forward to 2014.  I hope that I'm wrong and they can make the playoffs and go on a deep run but I don't think so.    

Continuing Woes for the Red Wings

       The struggles for the Red Wings continue, they have lost their last three games and are now in a three way tie for the eighth playoff spot in the West with Phoenix and Minnesota.  If the Wings can’t right the ship and start playing much better than this could be the first year they miss the playoff since 1989/90 season.   Injuries have played a role in this streak of poor play but the team cannot hang it’s hat on that excuse.  The Wings aren’t playing with the fire they’ve had in years past, the fore-checking is spotty and the special teams are atrocious.  Detroit is getting outshot in 33% (5 of 15) of the games so far this season.  In past years the Wings would go a full 82 games without being outshot in that many games.  What factors are causing this strange phenomenon?  Injuries do play a part in this stat but aren’t the only factor the retirement of Nicklas Lidstrom is looming larger than anyone thought.  He was the cornerstone of that defense and a mentor of the younger rear guards and now that he is gone the defense just doesn’t seem to have a leader.  Ian White is back from his injury and Kronwall, Ericsson and him need to step up and provide that leadership.  Another factor in the Wings being outshot is the lack of consistent fore-check by the forwards.  They are letting the other team start up ice without having to make passes to get around fore-checkers, giving their offense a head of steam and not allowing the defense to stack up on the blueline and stop them.  All the forwards, but especially the third and fourth liners need to pick up their fore-check and keep the opposition bottled up.  An aggressive fore-check will also lead to turnovers, scoring chances and penalties.  Of course, having the other team shorthanded isn’t as much of a benefit as it usually is because of the lack of scoring on the man advantage. 

      I wrote a blog a week ago about the lack of powerplay scoring and it hasn’t improved at all.  They are operating at 14.5% which is good for 23^rd in the league.  The Wings still have not scored a powerplay goal on the road and it doesn’t look like that will happen anytime soon.  Tuesday 2/19 the Wings go to Nashville whose penalty kill is clipping along at an 89% pace and are only giving up 1.03 goals per game.  The Wings still haven’t solved the problem of Holmstrom’s retirement and it seems like they are trying too hard to get the perfect shot rather than following the old hockey adage that if you throw rubber at the net good things will happen.  With both Franzen and Bertuzzi on the IR Detroit just doesn’t have a traditional big body to put in front of the net.  As I said in the other entry I believe Abdelkader and/or Tootoo could do the job although not in the power forward sense but in the sense of just having a body screening the goalie.  Just as I said before someone on the back end needs to step up and become the powerplay quarterback the Wings have been without since the retirement of Lidstrom.

      Detroit also needs to have more scoring from the defense, the nine defensemen that have played this season have 6 goals and 18 assists and nine of those assists belong to Kronwall.  I’m not saying the Wings need to turn everybody loose and defense be damned, but the rest of the defense corps needs to start shooting more.  This will lead to more scoring chances both for them and the forwards.  Speaking of the forwards, Babcock needs them to start scoring too, after the first line of Datsyuk, Zetterberg and Brunner scoring has been sparse.  The top line has accounted for 19 goals and 28 assists in the 32 game so far and the other 15 forwards that have played this season have 14 goals and 24 assists or to put it another way the top line has scored 1.47 points per game and everybody else 1.19 per game.  To put it one more way, the top line is scoring 15.7 points per person and everybody else 2.5 points per person.  That needs to change if the Wings have any hopes this season.  Patrick Eaves, Jordin Tootoo and Justin Abdelkader have yet to score a goal this season and Darren Helm hasn’t scored because he has yet to play a game this season.  The Wings need all these guys as well as Johan Franzen and Todd Bertuzzi to start scoring.  I also think letting Jiri Hudler go to free agency was a mistake, something Ken Holland doesn’t do very often.  Last year Hudler scored 25 goals and already has 4 this season which would put him fourth on the Wings.  There just doesn’t seem to be the usual swagger in the Wings and they are letting teams dictate the pace of games and giving up leads entirely too often.  The Wings have surrendered five leads this season, and that doesn’t count a one goal early lead but just two or more goals.  If the Wings want to win then they have to protect those leads especially late in the game.  I guess everything has to come to an end eventually but I’m not ready to see the Wings miss the playoff for the first time since 1989/90.  I hope Ken Holland, Jimmy Devellano and Mike Babcock have something in store for the team and the fans or this could be a long shortened season.

Should Tomas Holmstrom Make The Hall of Fame

      Should Tomas Holmstrom be elected to the Hall of Fame when he becomes eligible in 2016?  I believe he should, he was a key piece of four Detroit Red Wings Stanley Cup Championship teams.  There has never been another player in NHL history that was better at screening goalies and causing havoc in front of the net.  Goalies and defensemen hated to see him skating to the net to take up a position just outside the crease and attempt to re-direct a shot from the point into the net.  Holmstrom was hacked, whacked, crosschecked and tripped, he had goalies ram their sticks into his crotch and defensemen try to keep him on the ice after being knocked down.  The area in front of the crease became known as "his office."  He wasn’t the fastest skater and didn’t have the hardest shot but he had the best hand/eye coordination in league history.  There wasn’t a better player at knocking a puck out of the air or tipping it on the ice.  Few players absorbed as much punishment in the quest to score a goal as Homer did.  He earned the nickname of Demolition Man for both the havoc he caused and the punishment he took.  In his 15 seasons with the Red Wings, he amassed 243 goals and 287 assists for 530 points in 1026 games.    He scored 20 or more goals five times and had at least 50 points twice.  Holmstrom had 97 points in 180 playoff games and won Stanley Cups in 1997, 1998, 2002 & 2008.  He is sixth in games played, fourth in playoff games played and thirteenth in points all-time for the Red Wings.  Is this an impressive enough resume to warrant election into the Hall of Fame?  I believe that it is, especially when the stats of some of the other Honored Members are compared to his. 

       There are at least ten Members with stats comparable to Holmstrom, I don’t see how the hockey writers can put these guys in and not elect Holmstrom when he becomes eligible.  Bill Mosienko, Bill Cook, brothers Charlie, Roy and Lionel Conacher, Bryan Hextall, Busher Jackson, Toe Blake, Teeder Kennedy and Dick Duff, are all players in the Hall of Fame with stats close to Homer's.  Mosienko who played most of his career with Chicago and racked up 258 goals and 282 assists for 540 points.  Cook had 229 goals 138 assists for 367 points mostly for the New York Rangers.  Charlie Conacher scored 225 goals, 173 assists for 398 points for the Maple Leafs.  His brothers Roy and Lionel who played for Boston/Chicago & the New York Americans/Montreal Moroons respectively, garnered 226 goals, 200 assists for 426 points while Lionel had 80 goals 105 assists for 185 points.  Hextall had 187 goals, 175 assists and 362 points for the Rangers.  Jackson racked up 241 goals, 234 assists for 475 points playing for Toronto and Boston.  The great Toe Blake earned 235 goals, 292 assists for 527 points for the Canadiens, while Kennedy had 231 goals, 239 assists for 560 points playing for the Leafs and Duff had 283 goals, 289 assists for 572 points for Montreal and Toronto.  I'm sure nobody would say that any of these players don't deserve to be in the Hall, so what would be the knock on Holmstrom? 

      You can't say it is because of his longevity, because only five other Red Wings have played more games.  It can't be because of a lack of championships, because he has four Cups.  Holmstrom was not the prototypical sniper but that wasn't his game.  His job was to irritate and annoy goalies and defensemen, get tip-ins and deflections and clean up garbage around the net and I think he is the best there has ever been at that.  Patrick Roy and Ron Hextall hated Holmstrom and received more than one penalty for slashing or roughing and even if they weren't called, they were thinking more about him than the game.  It is impossible to quantify how many goals he had a hand in beyond those he was given credit for.  How many times were goals scored because the goalie was thinking about Holmstrom or because Homer was blocking his vision?  We can never know but four Stanley Cups says quite a few.  Tomas Holmstrom also changed the game, before he came into the league, a player screening goalies happened but wasn't a designed play.  Homer and Scotty Bowman, his coach when he came into the league, started putting him in front of the goalie, using his big body to shield the puck from view.  It started on the power play but it was so successful that Bowman started having him do it all the time.  Before long, every team had a guy who had the job to screen goalies.  If that isn't enough to get into the Hall of Fame, I don't know what is.