Detroit Red Wings: Three Keys to a Prosperous Season

The Detroit Red Wings are coming off of a down season, but a strong draft seems to be a silver lining.  Let’s explore some positives we can hope to see this season.

The Detroit Red Wings look like they’ve had a wonderful draft to start off the summer.  A lot of top-notch potential talent has been injected into a franchise that desperately needs to get younger.

Going into the 18/19 season this fall, we would all love to think the Detroit Red Wings could be a contender to win a championship,  but that would be a fantasy.  The fact is Detroit won’t contend for a Stanley Cup, but that doesn’t mean it’s a lost season.

The Detroit Red Wings as a franchise have an opportunity to get a lot of positive things done this season.

The number one priority should be to designate the appropriate ice-time for the younger players on the roster.  Allowing them to develop through the rebuilding process.  The last thing Detroit can afford to do while rebuilding is continuing to give veteran players consistently more ice than the prospects who will start in the show.

Players like Tyler Bertuzzi, Michael Rasmussen, Filip Zadina, and Andreas Athanasiou all need to play 16 to 18 minutes a night rather than 10 to 14, to grow as professionals and to reach their full potential.

It doesn’t have to be a throwaway season.  If the Detroit Red Wings are competitive in hockey games and the younger players seem to be developing while being fun to watch, it will be considered a positive season.

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If the Wings start to get blown out night after night and the veteran players are logging the majority of the ice-time, the city will be calling for the removal of Jeff Blashill.

The second thing the Detroit Red Wings need to do, to have a successful season is making the most of trading rental players with expiring contracts away and in return, acquiring more draft choices.

The Red Wings have a handful of players that will draw some interest at the deadline or before.  Thomas Vanek was specifically signed to a one-year deal for this reason.  Last season the Vancouver Canucks acquired Tyler Motte who looks to be an AHL regular and Jussi Jokinen who is 35 years old.

Ken Holland can’t make a similar move to this and be successful.  Holland needs to focus on acquiring a mid-round draft choice for Vanek.

Gustav Nyquist should fetch a similar return as Vanek, quite possibly a draft choice one round better than what Vanek returns.  Nyquist (29) is significantly younger than Vanek (35 in Jan).

Jimmy Howard will need to turn back the clock about five years and have a season similar to those years past, to have any interest on the trade front.  The best case scenario is Howard does have a bounce-back season, and a contending team or a fringe playoff team loses a goaltender to injury.

Howard in the last year of his lucrative 5.25 million per season salary won’t be an easy contract to trade.

A couple of other trade candidates the Red Wings should explore league-wide are Martin Frk and Nick Jensen.  Frk will still be a restricted free agent next season.  Detroit has not been willing to play Frk enough to develop his game.

Frk may benefit from a change of scenery if Detroit continues this trend with Frk.  Jensen is going to be an unrestricted free agent and may return a late draft choice from a team looking to add a depth defenseman.

The Third goal the Detroit Red Wings need to set is; continuing to fill the cupboard full of draft picks.  In the salary cap era of the NHL, it’s imperative that the franchise drafts well and develops “cheap” talent.

After a team strings together a few years of high draft picks, they can come up and make an immediate impact on rookie salaries benefitting the franchise.

The future of drafting well could become challenging similar to the Chicago Blackhawks.  They struggled to retain all of their assets.  The reward was a string of contending teams along with winning multiple Stanley Cups.

The rebuilding process doesn’t just happen overnight.  It takes time to right the wrong.  Detroit needs to shed some bad contracts over the next couple of seasons along with staying “interesting” on the ice through the process.