On the Detroit Red Wings …
Helene St. James of the Detroit Free Press: Red Wings fans are going to have to be patient. After a playoff run from 1991 to 2016, four Stanley Cups, trades and high draft picks have left the organization low on high-end talent.
“There is no magic wand,” general manager Ken Holland said. “There is no hockey store. It’s the old-fashioned way: you have to draft and develop. You probably have to be bad for a period of time.
“It’s about patience. Those teams in the league that are good now, they probably were bad for a period of time. They picked high, they used that bad period of time to acquire an excess of draft picks, and then they did a great job at the draft and they built up a core. Now they’re going to run it for six or seven or eight years and they’re going to see what that foundation can do.”
The Red Wing had 10 draft picks last year and currently have 11 for the 2018 draft.
The Wings do have some bright spots in Dylan Larkin, Anthony Mantha, and Tyler Bertuzzi.
The Wings could be in the running for the right to draft Rasmus Dahlin if they win the lottery, but they would need more than Dahlin to turn it around.
2017 first-round pick Michael Rasmussen will get a shot next season, and 2016 first-round pick Dennis Cholowski will go pro this spring. Other young guys will get a look at training camp.
GM Ken Holland has been criticised for the long-term signings of Jonathan Ericsson, Justin Abdelkader, and Danny DeKeyser.
“It’s a conscious decision because no one understands,” Holland said. “They don’t know all the information. They’ve only got pieces of the information. They don’t understand what factors into drafting, into developing. You’re going to have some things that don’t go your way, and at the end of the day, we made the playoffs 25 years in a row, we won Stanley Cups.”