Answering all the tough Detroit Red Wings questions heading into February

Do you think Detroit Red Wings starting goalie Ville Husso can keep up with this workload?

Bluntly? No, not really. Ville Husso is still essentially a sophomore goalie on the North American rink. He’s being pounded pretty bloody hard into pulpy Finnish orange juice by an incredibly heavy workload–and we’ve all been told that the Red Wings have the hardest schedule in terms of quality of opponents in the entire damn league over the course of February, March, and early April.

Husso is still learning and growing into his North American game, in my opinion (he throws himself around the net laterally a little too much like Petr Mrazek for my liking when he loses his bearings). I think that the mental workload is a real bastard for him to have to work through right now, more than the physical grind might entail.

Can he keep up with it in terms of generally producing quality goaltending? I mean, I guess, but we’re not going to see a goalie on the “tippy top of his tippy toes” game when he’s playing 90-95% of the time. Unless he’s Martin Brodeur, and Husso isn’t Brodeur.

Can Alex Nedeljkovic win back the no.2 spot behind Husso, or do you expect it to be Magnus Hellberg the rest of the way?

In the words of the Josh Homme of the Queens of the Stone Age, covering Romeo Void, “Never say never.” Especially with goalies, and especially given the physical and mental wear and tear that Husso is going through, I mean, you’ve got to have as many goalies as humanly possible who have some NHL caliber to them. If that means that the Wings keep Ned in the AHL “just in case,” you do that–and you do that for the Griffins’ sake, too, because the tandem of Victor Brattstrom and Jussi Olkinuora wasn’t getting the job done over the first half of 22-23.

Do I think that Nedeljkovic will end up being the #2 goalie? Not if we see Hellberg continue to play some actual games (part one) in which he gets his skates under him and begins to stop some pucks and look like a competent netminder (part two of my evil plan, muahahaha) like he did in the Wings’ final game prior to the All-Star Break on Long Island.

Right now, it’s pretty bloody clear that the coaching staff has lost faith in Nedeljkovic. Nothing less than a “tour de force” (sorry, I’m thinking about that stupid Chinese spy blimp and China’s use of “force majeure” to say, “We totally can’t steer that motherfarker”) in the AHL, combined with a set of injuries, is going to give “Ned” the crease for the remainder of the season.

Now does that mean that you need to un-stitch the “Nedeljkovic” off your #39 jerseys yet? Not quite, because, should Nedeljkovic try his luck with the Red Wings next fall, after a winning, consistent AHL campaign, anything can happen. But for this season, I don’t see him regaining the reigns without a complicated situation taking place in the Red Wings’ crease.

Can Jakub Vrana earn his way back onto the Detroit Red Wings roster in’ 22-23?

On this one, I’m pleading the fifth because this is a situation where we very plainly have missing fundamental data here.

What do I mean? Now Vrana’s reason for heading into the NHLPA’s Player Assistance Program is certainly his own private business. Still, his and the coaching staff’s oblique, intentionally vague comments as to whether Jakub wants to have a future with the Detroit Red Wings organization has been perhaps the weirdest story of a weird season for me. Do the Detroit Red Wings have a place in the lineup for a 25-plus-goal-scorer? Of course, they do. Do the Detroit Red Wings have a spot in their lineup for Jakub Vrana?

Erm…Uh…If he wants to be there, which is almost impossible to tell because half the time it sounds like Vrana wants a fresh post-I-needed-some-help-so-I-got- some-help start anywhere except Detroit.

I don’t know if his heart and soul are still contractually obligated to the Detroit Red Wings. Usually, when you waive a guy of Vrana’s caliber, even with a year remaining on a $5+ million contract, you’re waiving him because you’ve already exhausted the trade market and found no takers, and that was my sense when Vrana was waived–that the GM absolutely exhausted his options to trade Vrana before offering a player of that kind of goal-scoring talent up to anybody who was willing to take him.

It’s not exactly “Something’s rotten in Denmark” here, but there’s some weird stuff going on that we don’t know about, and the vibes are just…Off.

That’s my technical explanation.

If the Detroit Red Wings make a splash and bring in a big-name player before the deadline, who do you think it will be?

Holy geez, I don’t see the Wings bringing in a big-name player before the deadline, period. I thought that Larkin and Perron’s pre-All-Star Break comments regarding “going on a run” to give GM Yzerman something to think about were intriguing, but I took those to mean, “So he doesn’t sell off the doors and the catalytic converter while the slightly beat-up mid-range automobile that the Red Wings competitively remain is still rolling down the road.”

It’d have to be either a disgruntled player with term remaining on his contract (Hello, Jakub Vrana? Except in reverse?) or somebody that is currently viewed as literally or figuratively “damaged goods.” I know that we can never rule anything out in terms of the YzerPlan moving in mysterious ways, but I don’t see a marquee addition happening here this season.

Who are a few current Detroit Red Wings that might be on the move before the March 3rd Trade Deadline?

The obvious names are Tyler Bertuzzi, who seems to have lost his hands after breaking them, and Olli Maatta, who’s remarkably good at being an invisible defenseman (and defensemen who make the game look that easy are hard to find).

I have never gotten the gut feeling that Bertuzzi is the Red Wings’ first priority. While I’m not going to rehash the whole vaccine controversy, I do think that his reputation took something of a hit with management through the process of Bertuzzi missing nine games over the sake of not taking “the jab.” Especially as the Larkin negotiations get more drawn-out and so contentious that we’re actually finding out information about them, I think that Bertuzzi has become, by default, something of a backup plan, and as he’s a year older, another free-agent-to-be and perhaps prone to more wear and tear as one of those drivers of play who also happens to engage in a high-mileage game…

Those kinds of players tend to be too irresistible not to move at some point prior to losing them as a free agent, presuming a contract agreement is not nigh.

After that, Maatta could at least provide a mid-round pick in return. I don’t think Pius Suter is in the Wings’ future plans. I’m iffy on Adam Erne coming back. I think that Jordan Oesterle and Robert Hagg are replaceable, as is Mark Pysyk (if he recovers from that Achilles injury). If somebody wants to take a flyer on Filip Zadina before he’s able to establish himself as a useful contributor, he’s saleable goods, too.

Realistically speaking, I think that it’s less likely that the Detroit Red Wings get on a run and “give Steve something to think about” than it is likely that this Detroit Red Wings team continues to look like a team that needs more roster tinkering; perhaps with more of an emphasis on growth from within as opposed to investment from outside the current roster this summer, and that our hopes as Detroit Red Wings partisans should lie upon this year’s Wings not absolutely going into the septic tank with a putrid last-third-of-the-season collapse into a team with “no compete” than anything else.

In other words, I think that this team has made a lot of progress, but its progression remains incredibly, infuriatingly inconsistent, and the results are likely to mirror the process there. This year, at least, I don’t expect the team to go off the deep end and to the bottom of the pool due to its rough post-ASG schedule, but the presence of a spine on this team may not necessarily yield the kind of results that indicate that this still-floppy fish is beginning to evolve to the point that it wants to take its first tentative steps toward the land upon which teams that are highly-evolved enough to actually compete for playoff spots tread.

That’s a very long and flowery way of saying, “I see some evolution, but not a revolution, at least not yet, from this year’s Red Wings, ” especially given how hard and condensed the ‘second half’ schedule appears to be.”

I would like to believe that there are fourth and fifth gears on this three-gear transmission team. I want to be pleasantly surprised by their resilient, pugnacious, tenacious play over the half-to-third of the season, but I think that we’re in for more fits and starts of forward progress, marred by half or full steps back from time to time.

As I’ve been taking a leave of absence due to my aunt’s health (her second hospitalization in three weeks =/= fun times), my faith in this team’s long-term potential has not waivered, but I think that those of us who fall under the pull of the winged wheel has got what we’ve got from a team that’s already shown us what it is, and what it has yet to achieve. This is still a team in the early steps of making real progress, and those first steps are always wobbly…

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Because hockey is a game where you tend to learn by making mistakes, and if you make enough mistakes, you’re going to lose some games learning how to be a winner. And that is where “we’re” at, for now.