Our #4 prospect is a kid who is part of the Red Wings excellent, and partially lucky, 2018 draft class. With two first round picks, the club snatched Filip Zadina and Joe Veleno. The topic of today’s projection, Jonatan Berggren, was expected to go late into that first round, but fell to day two, where…
We live in an interesting time when it comes to evaluation and projecting talent in the National Hockey League. The analytics movement is moving ahead at full speed, with many teams creating entire departments to support and draw conclusions from them. This is great for the game of hockey and competition in general. It means…
The number 19 is an important one in Detroit Red Wings history, so I consider Kasper Kotkansalo to be pretty lucky slotting in at #19 in our top-25 prospects series, even if he is in the bottom half of the rankings.
Givani Smith just wrapped his first pro season with the Grand Rapids Griffins to mixed reviews. He was a big boy in junior, one of the toughest guys in the OHL, but when you’re suddenly playing with men in a professional league, you can feel pretty small at 21-years-old. When the Red Wings drafted him…
There’s no telling where Joe Hicketts would be right now if he was only a few inches taller. The 5’8″ defenseman from Kamloops, British Columbia has been told his whole life that he’s too small for a professional career in hockey. It’s why he went undrafted. But Hicketts never listened to those voices. He stayed…
A week after free agency period opened and the dust has started to settle on the 2019 UFA class. Most teams have made their big signings and the amount of players on the market has shrunk considerably, but it has not dried up completely. There is still a small amount of players out there who…
The Vegas Golden Knights had a late-season win prior to the playoffs when they signed Russian winger Nikita Gusev. Now, with the KHL leading scorer reportedly asking for a two-year, $8-million deal (with an AAV of $4-million), the Golden Knights might be forced to trade him. The Red Wings are one of the teams that…
When you’re in the the hunt for a Stanley Cup, July 1 is a big day. It’s an opportunity to add depth to your roster in the form of a mid-6 or bottom-4 defenseman. Rarely do elite players hit the market, but when they do, teams scramble to create cap space.
As a marketer, we have to make these decision at work all the time: is this a job that can be accomplished internally or externally? In other words, do we have a person with the skills already working for us that can accomplish what we need to accomplish or do we need to outsource the…
The Red Wings shocked the hockey world when they took Moritz Seider with the 6th overall pick at this year’s NHL Entry Draft. With a few projected top-line centers still on the board, Steve Yzerman and his crew opted for a big, right-handed defenseman out of Germany that few had seen going in the top-10.
The top defenseman is such a coveted asset in today’s NHL that when teams land one, they usually lock them up early or oversell them on the trade market. This year’s crop of UFA defensemen was supposed to be much more exciting, but Drew Doughty signed his extension last July and Erik Karlsson just locked…
In the past, the Red Wings have loved their veteran UFA signings so much that they’ve signed Thomas Vanek twice in the last three years. With the team under different leadership now, they’re heading in a different direction. Vanek is once again a free agent, but he’s been informed that there’s not a fit with…
