Wow!! What a difference a year makes for the Red Wings. Last year they were shunned by free agents Ryan Suter and Zach Parise and as the late Bob Ufer use to say our Red Wing dobbers were down. Okay he used a different name in front of dobbers. However we as Red Wing fans were not used to being turned down in free agency. The Red Wings headed into the strike shortened season in uncharted waters. We had just lost the best defenseman in the world (in my opinion) to retirement. We had just lost a top four defenseman the prior year to retirement. Thus we were looking at a questionable defense corps and team that were already offensively challenged. We all know what happened last year. Some of our young defensemen came of age. Bendan Smith will only get better and the late addition of Danny DeKeyser has really upgraded this core. Experts who know allot more than me say that DeKeyser’s injury in the Anaheim series may have cost them the Chicago series. He was playing that well. In any case we took the eventual Stanly Cup Champions to an overtime 7th game and had them on the brinks of elimination with a 3 to 1 series lead before eventually succumbing. Sorry to bring up painful memories. However in the off season we have added Daniel Alfredson and Stephen Weiss. The Red Wings knew they needed more offense but it could not be at the expense of team defense. In the additions we got 2 guys who in my opinion are 20 plus goal scorers per year. Alfredson has of course scored more than 40 in some years but we cannot expect that at this age. However he is obviously a character guy as he was captain of the Ottawa Senators. We also added Stephen Weiss who is a two way skilled center and good on face-offs. Weiss has 10 years in the league and 5 of those he scored 20 or more and 3 of the seasons he did not score 20 were season when he did not play a full season. We did lose Valtteri Flippula who great things were always hoped for but for whatever reason could not seem to put it together. Only in one year did he hit the 20 goal plateau. We also lost Damien Brunner. However it appears that he and the Wings could not come together. His sample size was just too small. While he got off to a great start. Whether it was the length of the season or the league catching up to him he could not keep up the production for a full year. In addition the news on Jeff’s favorite player, Darren Helm also is optimistic. Rumor also has it that Cleary will also return once some cap space can be cleared. All in all with our move east the Red Wings future appears to be much brighter than it was heading into last season. With the move east hopefully our only challenging TV nights will be trying to watch the Wings games watching the Tigers in playoff and beyond.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Jul 2013 16:53:51 +0000
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