Quick Hits: The Undefeated Season Edition

Jeff Hancock

• 2 min read Front Page

In Red Wings Land

Late Rasmussen goal sends Wings to exhibition victory over Blackhawks | Detroit News

Michael Rasmussen, fighting for a roster spot after spending all of his rookie season in the NHL with the Wings last season, scored a power-play goal at 15 minutes, 23 seconds of the third period, breaking a 3-3 tie.

Rasmussen, parked in front of Chicago goalie Robin Lehner, took a pass from Taro Hirose and bounced a shot off a Blackhawks defender and past Lehner.

He was the subject of yesterday’s Quick Hits and last night he helped the Red Wings kick off their undefeated season. It’s great to see Rasmussen get off to a good start. Let’s see if he can keep it going and give Steve Yzerman something extra to think about when he finalizes the opening night roster.

Bonus Round

From Peter:

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been less active recently. I spent the last few months putting this presentation together.

The short version is that I put together a dataset of every contract signed in the cap era (Through May 2019) and combined it with GAR data from Evolving Wild.

I used an estimate I’m calling Excess GAR to look at how different GMs have fared in signing different types of contracts. The presentation is geared towards the entire league, not specifically Detroit, although I think Detroit fans will like the parts about Steve Yzerman.

I designed the presentation so it can be understood by people who aren’t into stats. It’s very math-light.

I’m going to continue to work on this project and plan to write some articles specifically about Detroit from this data. If you have some free time, I hope you’ll check it out. The audio isn’t great, so it would be best to listen with headphones.

The slides are available in the tweet that Jeff linked above this. It’ll probably be hard to see some of the info on the slides in the video, but that should help out.

It SHOULD start when I’m introduced, but if not, it starts at 8:29:00 (There were a lot of presenters)

Around the League

Lafreniere leads loaded class in TSN Hockey’s pre-season draft ranking | TSN

Three years ago, Nolan Patrick entered 2016-17 as the unanimous pre-season No. 1, but by season’s end he was surpassed by Switzerland’s Nico Hischier. Could Lafreniere face a similar challenge from any of the other top prospects in a highly talented 2020 top end? It includes No. 2 centre Quinton Byfield, No. 3 right winger Lucas Raymond and a pair of special scorers in a dead heat at No. 4, centre/left winger Cole Perfetti and left winger Alexander Holtz?

There’s likely a future Red Wings player somewhere on this list.