Red Wings News
Ok so… the THN site doesn’t want to play nice with the link preview but they’re reporting that Husso is no longer in Sweden. According to Sam Stockton, baby Husso is (or was, by this point) expected imminently and Ville was flown back to Detroit on Monday. I haven’t seen this reported anywhere else, but if Sam is correct then we’ll most likely have our first Alex Lyon start for one of our two Global Series games.
UPDATE
She’s here! Welcome to the world, baby girl Husso! Reimer gets the nod Thursday, and the expectation is that Lyon will start Friday unless people and/or the universe go completely bonkers.
Around The League
Yes, Dom. Yes they did, out of courtesy to Holland’s “legacy”.
Dom lays the table pretty well in this piece regarding the complications Woodcroft faced at the hands of Holland. None of this is new to Wings fans, who saw Holland ink a string of bad contracts to end his tenure here in Detroit after being gifted generational talents to start his run as GM and lucking into late-round diamonds courtesy of Håkan Andersson.
Here’s the killer though – Holland still has to make a trade or two. Firing Woodcroft might buy him a month of favor with ownership, but Knoblauch can’t make goalies stop pucks. Knoblauch can’t un-tweak McDavid’s whatever. And this team is going to go how both of those things go. On any given night one might normally be able to cover for the other, but the two pieces that have to be 100% for this whole team to function are anything but 100% and can’t be fixed without GM-level moves.
McDavid isn’t going to magically get better playing on whatever’s nagging him every night. He needs a team that can at least tread water without him on the ice, including goalies that can make stops, and changing coaches isn’t going to fix that long-term. Maybe Holland isn’t too concerned with long-term moves, as the rumor is he’s retiring after this season, but that type of dereliction of duties would significantly erode his so-called legacy.
I get that Holland is a patient man. I get that other GMs have him over a barrel right now, and they know it, and those aren’t prices he can pay for roster changes. And I get that firing Woodcroft was his path of least resistance to look like he’s doing something. But he needs to actually do something instead of look like he’s doing something, otherwise his real legacy is going to be wasting the best years of hockey’s two best players.
