yave1964 Posted March 23, 2019 Share Posted March 23, 2019 It looks as if within the next day or two Jeff Blashill will be signing an two to three year extention as the Wings head coach which begs the question, what the hel does he have to do to get fired? The Wings have the second worst record in the game barely edging out the Senators and will easily miss the playoffs for the third year in a row. Rumors have swirled that Yzerman was coming and Kenny Holland was on the way out but this makes it almost a certainty that Holland will remain as Blashill is clearly his guy. Giving Blash an extention is like peeing to mark your territory, Blashill admittedly has not exactly had a silks purse to work with, Holland has given him a bunch of barely NHL quality players such as Abby, Helm, Ehn, Daley, De la rose, Witkowski, Vanek, and Ericsson some has beens mixed in with never weres'. That is Hollands fault, you could make a case for Blashill suing for non support even. But he cannot coach. He has been terrible with the kids as for their growth, Athanasiou was yoyo'd up and down the lines with minutes fluctuating for years, I have made a point of watching his face when he scores, he NEVER looks at the coach, rarely smiles, Blashill has poisoned him badly. Mantha may or may not be a player, we may never know until he finds a new team. Rasmussen and Cholowski were used as wrong as any two players I have seen in years, Hronek has had a great second half but should have stuck around all year he was wasted for half a season in Grand Rapids. The Wings are a bad mix of aging (poorly) veterans and inexperienced kids who are not being broken in properly by an inept coach and the old GM is planning on keeping him around staking claim to his own job by doing so. The dark days are here with no end in sight. AN ASIDE: Jimmy Howard just resigned for one year, sighting his love for the Wings and the Detroit area, I like the signing, as bad as the Wings have been without Howard this year they could and would have been bad of biblical proportions. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpikeDDS Posted March 24, 2019 Share Posted March 24, 2019 @yave1964 While I'm not as vehement as you are, I agree with you, and am stupefied by why they are not at least investigating their options. My reason for not being as vehement is merely a difference in how much weight we are giving the lack of talent pool he has had to work with. I actually don't think that a great coach could have coached this team to the playoffs this season or last. Now, that does NOT mean that more could not have been done to better develop our players. On that we agree completely. There are some players--like Dylan Larkin, like Hank Zetterberg, like Pavel Datsyuk--that you don't really have to coach much. They are driven players, and with little refinements from coaching, they take themselves from good to great mostly on their own. But our second tier and younger players--AA, Mantha, Bertuzzi, Chowlowski, Hronek, plus our other young prospects--these guys need direction, discipline, and encouragement that helps them find their game. And the reality is that NONE of them look like they reach what he had hoped was their potential--unless they are on the last year of their contract and will likely be moved ala Nyquist. Let's look at what other players that Blash has coached have done one they left. Tatar is having the best season of his career with Montreal. He's scoring at at roughly the same rate, but his assists have gone up significantly. Now, is some of that because he's playing with better players? Probably. But it's a fairly big jump, so we can't give all that credit to the talent pool around him. He's playing better. It might be too early to look at Gus Nyquist, but so far he has NOT been very impressive with San Jose. 0.5 PPG. 3 goals, 3 assists in 12 games. Too soon to judge, but if anything he's gotten worse, not better. Jensen, kinda the same thing, and even harder to compare apples to apples going from one of the wrost teams in the league to the defending Stanley Cup champs with a LOT of talent around him. 0 goals and 2 assists in 13 games since the trade vs. 2 and 13 in 60 games before it. TBD, but so far, no better. He does have double the number of shots per game with the Caps since his departure. Brendan Smith. Red Wings look smart for dumping him. But this season he is returning to form some. Blash only had him for one full season (which he played about the same has he did under Babcock) before a bad last year that got him moved. He didn't fare much better in the last 3 seasons until this one as compared with his last partial year under Blash. Clearly, that last year with Blash, he didn't like how he was being used and I'm sure that affected his production. But he didn't get better right away either. Mixed judgment here. I guess what I'm saying is that if our gut instincts are correct, we SHOULD be able to see a consistent rise in player production from the players which have left the team and gone somewhere else. But that isn't what we see. But our instincts that say that Blash isn't coaching them to their potential is driven by the disappointment in performance that we see across the lineup. Look at Frans Nielsen! He's a shadow of himself from his NYI days. Granted, he isn't feeding pucks to Tavares any more. But was Tavares responsible for THAT much of a production difference? I think not. And it's not like the NYI were THAT much better than the DRW. AA is mixed also. I think he is frustrated though. You're probably not wrong on that. But losing does that too. But has he made strides this year? Was Blash moving him to center a gamble that has paid off? I think so. He is probably gonna score 30 goals, and he has DEFEINTELY improved his defensive game since Blash made the move. But it just seems like the kid could be so much more than he is. Why isn't he? How much of that is Blash? Tough to say, but gut says it's significant. Mantha is the other biggie. Gosh, you would THINK he could be more productive, but he is not. Blash is right, though, that Mantha sometimes doesn't skate. Is it because he is frustrated? Probably. WHEN he skates, he's a better player, but he's so inconsistent. Just like AA. Just like everyone else seems to be, with the exceptions of Larkin and Howard. (Howard has looked great up until the last little bit here, but look at what's left of what is in front of him, and I've gotta give him a pass.) One thing I DO pin on Blash--the best argument IMHO--is the PP. It has NEVER been respectable under Blash. Granted, at the end of Babs' tenure, it hadn't been good either. But Blash has done NOTHING. We've changed assistants. That hasn't worked. To me, statistically, there is no better argument for his replacement than a PP that has CONSISTENTLY SUCKED, even when our talent was better than it has been lately. All that to say this: I agree that it may be time for a new voice in the room. I don't blame Blash as much as you do for their plight, but he's certainly not been the solution, and there isn't really a sign that he's gonna be. Why not bring in a respected and fresh voice to try to dissociate these players from their frustration? So what if it's not Blash's fault entirely. Kenny Holland's biggest flaw is being TOO loyal to current players/coaches. He doesn't pull triggers as much as he should. That is beneficial as you are growing and maintaining a good program. But at the level we are at, the message that you need to play at your potential or we will find someone else who will do that and let you play like that elsewhere is not a message that is hitting the target. If you had told me it looked like a 1-year extension, I might buy it...except that Quennville's available, and he most likely won't be after this summer. The 1-year would allow Steve Yzerman to come in, shake things up, turn up the heat of accountability and say, "Coach/play like your job depends on it, or it's see you later! We want to win." If Steve isn't GM by the end of the summer, I'll be ticked. KH hasn't done too badly in the last 2 years, but it is high time for new leadership. He doesn't have to go completely away. He's a good advisory voice to have. But I'm really hoping this is Stevie's team again next year, and I just think the potential under Queneville has got to be better than that of Blashill. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
hf101 Posted March 30, 2019 Share Posted March 30, 2019 Blashill extended 2 years. I've mentioned it before, but I think still think Yzerman will GM Seatle. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
yave1964 Posted March 30, 2019 Author Share Posted March 30, 2019 3 hours ago, hf101 said: Blashill extended 2 years. I've mentioned it before, but I think still think Yzerman will GM Seatle. Sadly I agree. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpikeDDS Posted April 2, 2019 Share Posted April 2, 2019 On 3/30/2019 at 1:11 PM, hf101 said: Blashill extended 2 years. I've mentioned it before, but I think still think Yzerman will GM Seatle. Aaaaand now it's official. I would love to think that you are wrong about Yzerman, but I don't think you are. Like Holland doesn't know how to cut current Red Wings loose, the Red Wings don't know how to move on either. They wait too long to cut cords. Sometimes far too long. The upside of this is when things are going OK, you know even when there is a blip of a bad stretch, you know your loyalty to the organization actually has value, so you are driven to work through it to remain part of a great organization. The bad news is that it takes too long to get new blood in to reenergize/redirect your franchise/team, and sometimes you end up missing the golden opportunities that come along. McDavid. Eichel. Matthews. Dahlin. Svechnikov part dvah. Hughes? Kaapo? Quenneville. Yzerman? And you're left with Abdelkader. Helm. Ericsson. Glendening. Nielsen. Larkin (to be fair, he's great for a #15). Blashill. Holland? And a bunch of decent players who might end up with a number of playoff appearances, but never get that elite generational player that puts you in serious Cup contention. We never had to do this after Yzerman. Our pieces were mostly diamonds in the rough, finding European talent in the lower levels of the draft. Whereas we figured out how to do that before anyone else really caught on, that is what brought us Cups. That, and buying hordes of talent, which can't be done anymore without serious sacrifice due to the cap. In the cap era, I'm just not sure the Wings have fully figured out how to work the system. Perhaps they will prove me wrong. After all, I would not have predicted the 6-of-7 game run that we have going now with the AHL+ lineup we seem to be playing now due to injury and player evaluation opportunity. I just think that if we end up missing Hughes, we have missed a good number of potentially-franchise-changing players. No disrespect to Larkin AT ALL intended. But we need to have more elite players than just him. Maybe AA and Mantha are shifting gears, and if so, I'll gladly eat crow. I just don't know if they can sustain elite level playing full season after full season. As I often say: History has a tendency to repeat itself. History has a tendency to repeat itself. With all that said, if you ask me if I am for Datsyuk coming back for a season if he is willing, my answer is heck yes! I'd love Larkin and AA and Zadina and Veleno to witness firsthand the work ethic that it takes to be an elite NHL player. Z showed Larkin. Pavel would still show the others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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