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Game #45 – Red Wings vs. Hawks: Q&A With JJ From Kansas

By Sam Fels 1895 0

For ten seasons now, when we’ve needed Red Wings info, we’ve been forced to travel to a local swamp and rap on the door of a dilapidated shack where social outcast and deranged gnome JJ From Kansas lives. You can follow him on Twitter @JJFromKansas and read his work on WingingItFromMowtown.com, if you really feel the need to mentally injure yourself. 

Let’s start here: The Wings are a capped out team, and they aren’t any good. While they lose Mike Green’s salary after the season, Dylan Larkin, Andreas Athanasiou, and Anthony Mantha all need new contracts after the year. So basically… why does Ken Holland still have a job?
Ken Holland still has a job for the same reason Stan Bowman will still be with the Hawks through iteration #4 of “We just need this NEW large pile of also-ran nobodies to give overwhelming value on their low-cost deals because we can’t afford to fit the proper supporting players under the weight of the contracts for Kane, Toews, and Brent Seabrook.” Winning cups buys a lot more leeway than it ought to, even as we approach the end of the 10th year since Holland’s crew last lifted one. Fortunately, the increases to the cap and the other deals falling off should make more than enough space for Larkin and Mantha (with the hope they come to their senses on Athanasiou and don’t end up trading him), but yeah it shouldn’t be Ken Holland’s ring-heavy hand pushing those deals across the table to the only reasons to tune in and watch Detroit these days.
Dylan Larkin had 23 goals his rookie year. That dropped to 17 last year with the move to the middle. He’s only got six so far this year. What’s the deal?
Eh, I’m not so worried about Dylan Larkin the goalscorer as long as he continues to be Dylan Larkin the growing-up capable two-way playmaking center. The 23-goal rookie season was a lot of him being fed by Henrik Zetterberg and defenders not having enough of a concept of how quick he can turn a corner on you. The 17-goal output last season taught him that defenses adjust to one-trick ponies really well. He’s currently on pace to put up 23 more points than in his rookie season and, while I’d like it more of them were goals just because goals are more fun to watch than assists, I can rest well knowing he’s playing better now than he has at any other point in his still very-young NHL career.
Will the Red Wings trade Mike Green, and possibly Gustav Nyquist, before the deadline?
Mike Green seems like such a no-brainer trade that it makes me irrationally angry thinking about how it’s still entirely possible the team holds onto him for some dumb reason. Bob McKenzie seems pretty confident Holland won’t do the dumb thing and hold onto Green, but I need to see it before I can relax. I don’t think Nyquist moving is all that likely though. He had his NTC kick in this year and there really hasn’t been a lot of chatter about moving him out, even though the team absolutely ought to be doing that. Honesty, it might surprise me less if they traded away newly-signed Tomas Tatar this season before his no-trade clause kicks in over the summer.
They wouldn’t really get rid of Athanasiou either during this season or in the summer, would they?
This team once gave up a first-round pick for Kyle Quincey.
 
What gives you hope about where the Wings might be in two or three years?
There’s already a lot of promise in Larkin and Mantha with more promise to come. While the team doesn’t have that real franchise cornerstone piece, it seems the organization has finally gotten the hint that they’re not going to get two of those out of the 6th and 7th round again and that they haven’t yet re-upped Ken Holland to another deal. The rest of Detroit’s division outside of Tampa and Toronto is also wheel-spinning stuck-in-the-mud trash, so that should give them plenty of opportunity to gain traction first and get back to those actually-useful trips to the postseason where you can come out of losses saying at least the kids who are going to lead us in the future learned something valuable. I’m just not sure that two or three years is the realistic timeline for this kind of optimism though. Maybe three or four?

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Game #39 – Hawks vs. Rangers: Douchebag Du Jour – If Brendan Smith Plays In The League So Can I

By Sam Fels 2244 0

Generally we reserve this section for a pest, or goon, or someone who just kills the Hawks. Rarely do we allot this to someone whose mere presence we find objectionable. The fact that he is just there, no matter what he does, leaves us with a look on our face akin to whenever we’re told vanilla ice cream is more popular than chocolate.

Brendan Smith will make $4.3 million this year to play NHL hockey. You, dear reader, will not. And believe us when we tell you that you aren’t that much less qualified to do so than he is.

Brendan Smith sucks. He has always sucked. And really, perhaps we should love him, because without his 2013 Game 6 Tour De What The Fuck in the 3rd period, the Hawks might not come back against the Wings that year. But thankfully, because Smith was wandering around his own zone like he got into the devil ether, the Hawks did. The highlight of course was keeping the Hawks onside for Bickell’s go-ahead goal.

But that’s always been Smith. And yet he keeps getting work. The Rangers gave up two high draft picks to acquire his services last year. And then they signed him to this deal for the next four years. Signing Brendan Smith to do anything for four years other than to clean the dressing room is a fireable offense, or at least it  should be.

This is how much Red Wings glow still exists. Anyone with a handful of functioning neurons knows now that Ken Holland is actually an idiot who just happened to win the raffle a couple times with late-round picks and a wheelbarrow of Mike Illitch’s money. So any player that is a draft pick of that guy should come with huge scrutiny. But no, there are still a lot of GMs who think he must be a stud and the Wings just have too many good players for him to find the lineup.

Smith has no positioning. He has no ass. His passing is barely ok. Sure, he can skate, but who the fuck cares when it’s never in any specific direction? He’s a puck-moving defenseman who doesn’t move the puck or play defense. Great.

And if the Hawks can’t directly benefit from his presence anymore, then it’s just upsetting. Maybe the worst part of the Wings fleeing to the East was that the Hawks didn’t get a handful of points simply because Smith was out there performing in a chorus line only he could hear. Damn you, Red Wings.

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The Jay Cutler Salute: Hawks 2 – Wings 4

By 1256

I suppose it’s fitting that in the first day of the post-Cutler era the Hawks showed about as much verve as he was falsely accused of showing on some gamedays (#CuttyForever). I’m not going to put any more focus onto this wrap than the Hawks did in this game tonight, so here’s a musical representation of just how interested the Hawks were in Joe Louis Arena tonight:

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Burn That Seat: Hawks at Wings Preview/PFT

By 1251

 vs. 

RECORDS: Hawks 42-19-5   Wings 25-29-11

PUCK DROP: 6:30pm Central

TV: CSN, NHLN for those not around here

THE UNMENTIONABLES: Winging It In Motown

PROJECTED LINEUPS

ADJUSTED TEAM CORSI %: Hawks – 51.2 (9th)  Wings – 47.4 (25th)

ADJUSTED TEAM xGF%: Hawks – 49.2 (17th)  Wings – 47.3 (27th)

POWER PLAY %: Hawks – 19.3 (15th)  Wings – 12.6 (Dead Ass Last)

PENALTY KILL %: Hawks – 77.2 (27th)  Wings – 81.3 (13th)

The last game at the Joe. There probably won’t be any tear shed by any Hawks fan. I suppose there’s some feeling of lost that this is basically the last “old” building in the league, and it’s going to go the way of all the others. Soon, the Wings will move into yet another faceless, corporate, sterile building to go with their faceless, sterile team. But for Hawks fans, the amount of fucksticks and shitheels that used to grace the surface at Joe Louis Arena will mean sentimentality will certainly be at a minimum.

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Wings Spotlight: THE STREAK (Extreme Wanking Motion)

By 1188

It’s gonna die. All things do, but we’ve waited for this one for a long time now. It should have died a while ago. It should have died in 2013, but Columbus spit up all over themselves. It was so close. And then Bruce Boudreau had to go and give it credence by then spitting up all over himself in a Game 7 at home, the first time he’d done it with the Ducks but the fourth time overall after departing DC. It shouldn’t have had to come to that.

And then they fucked off to the Eastern Conference, after Quenneville woke up just in time in 2013 to save us from the ultimate embarrassment. Had they stayed in the West beyond the lockout year, this streak would have died ages ago. Oh sure, they stretched the Lightning to seven games by some miracle once, and have gotten clocked twice more. They’ve never been a threat. And now that the East has finally usurped the West as the power conference, even though they play in the far worse half of it, they’re going to miss out. It’s finally over.

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This Used To Be My Playground: Wings at Hawks Preview/Roof Tiling

By 1338

RECORDS: Wings 17-18-5  Hawks 26-12-5

PUCK DROP: 7:30pm

TV: WGN

THAT NERD LOOKS LIKE JAM: Winging It In Motown

PROJECTED LINEUPS

ADJUSTED TEAM CORSI%: Wings – 47.9 (23rd)  Hawks – 49.9 (16th)

ADJUSTED TEAM xGF%: Wings – 47.9 (22nd)  Hawks – 47.8 (23rd)

POWER PLAY %: Wings – 11.2 (Dead Ass Last)  Hawks – 18.5 (15th)

PENALTY KILL %: 83.2 (9th)  Hawks – 76.1 (28th)

TRENDS: The Wings are o-for their last-54 on the power play. They’re even putting Steve Ott on it. I can’t begin to express the joy this makes me feel.

This has been something of a sweetheart homestand for the Hawks. The Sabres are awful, the Preds are hurt and struggling, the Canes were the biggest challenge and overcome, and now it ends with the complete hobo village that is the Detroit Red Wings these days. Guys… seriously, you haven’t seen a Wings team this bad since names like Barr, Burr, Cheveldae, Gallant, and Racine were involved. And chances are, you don’t recognize any of those names, which is just how long it’s been.

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Wings Q&A With Wayward Rodeo Clown Kyle

By 1537

Strange, the Wings blogosphere is actually one of our favorites, made up of people we somehow get along with. I can’t explain it either. Anyway, we were able to distract Kyle from WingingItInMotown.com from staring at something shiny long enough to answer our questions (on Twitter @KyleWIIM).

We’ll start here. Tatar – 8 goals, Nyquist – 4 goals, Abdelkader – 4 goals (though only 22 games), Larkin hasn’t really scored more than he did last year… are the Wings unlucky and bad? Or just bad?

They’re not a very good team, that is for sure.. Take your pick at what the cause is… Coaching, complacency, bad luck, whatever. I mean, what it boils down to is that the team is underachieving. I’m not convinced that the skill level (or lack thereof) they possess is the culprit of their record.

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Gotta Get In To Get Out: Wings 1 – Hawks 4

By 1316

Box Score

Event Summary

War On Ice

You’ve probably written this wrap in your head before you even get to this. The Hawks aren’t great, Crawford holds a deluge of shots and chances at bay, Hawks get enough from the power play and a couple mistakes from the opponent to make it look like an easy win. I don’t know how many of the Hawks now 41 wins would fall into this category, but it’s gotta be approaching 40% or 50%. It matters not, he is your king.

I thought the Wings would try and come out a little more conservative than they did on Wednesday. Shows what I know, Detroit was even more aggressive this time, though it led to a bad pinch for the first Hawks goal and a penalty for the second that each came on Hawks rushes.

But after that… well you could safely say the Hawks were rolled. From the time Keith scored in the first until Anisimov scored in the 3rd period the Wings had 43 attempts. The Hawks had 20. The Wings constantly buzzed the Hawks defense down low, causing a gaggle of turnovers and mistakes. Their defense held the line and the Hawks couldn’t get past them. They couldn’t play at the Wings’ speed, but it didn’t matter because Crawford was in net. You don’t take advantage of dominance like that, you’re asking for it when playing a team like the Hawks. Sure enough, Hawks get a PP in the 3rd, ballgame. It’s just that simple.

To the bluffs!

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You Used To Be Beautiful: Red Wings at Hawks Preview/Can Can

By 1319

1202413387 vs. Hawk Wrestler

PUCK DROP: 4pm Central

TV/RADIO: CSN, NHL Network, WGN Radio 720

PIZZA!PIZZA!: Winging It In Motown

Red Wings Stats

Red Wings War On Ice

A rare Sunday late-afternoon start will see the Hawks and Wings wrap up their now miniature season-series, because their fans were tired of having to stay up past 11pm or something. It’s not what it was, but the limited engagements does make them feel special in a different way. Beauty is not in permanence, it would seem.