Detroit Red Wings Keep Winning and Kill Draft Odds
The Detroit Red Wings just won their 8th game in their last 9. One might think that this is the perfect time to get hot. The season ends this week, the playoffs start next week. What could be better than to ride this heat wave? As it turns out, the Red Wings won’t be in the playoffs for the 3rd straight season, two years since the famous 25 straight playoff appearance streak ended. Fans seem torn on whether this winning streak has been good or bad for us. They had the second-best odds to land the top pick in the draft lottery just a little bit ago. With every win, they kill those odds.
Some fans love that the “young kids” are playing well and developing, creating chemistry for next season. Other fans hate that they’re winning and wanted them to “Lose for Hughes,” which is a famous campaign started for teams to lose as much as they can so they can draft the highly touted prospect, Jack Hughes. The Red Wings have been on that train for the majority of the season, until now.
Momentum has never been proven to carry over from season to season. What the team is doing now means absolutely nothing for next season. The players will develop whether they win or lose, they do so with the NHL experience. Next season has higher expectations, but it doesn’t mean that they will be beating some of the teams they have been beating, such as, San Jose, Vegas, Boston, and Pittsburgh.
If Jack Hughes turns out to be the player that all the scouts says he will be, then the Red Wings have basically killed their chances at being able to draft a talent such as him. The Wings have a few nice pieces in Dylan Larkin, Anthony Mantha, and Tyler Bertuzzi, but adding someone like Jack Hughes, or even Kaapo Kakko to this lineup would have been a huge boost for this team, and for the city of Detroit, who desperately needs a winning team.
The Red Wings announced today that they are giving head coach Jeff Blashill a two-year contract extension, much to the dismay of fans, who were hoping that he’d be let go at the end of the season. GM Kenny Holland stated that one of the reasons behind the contract extension was because of this recent run the team was on. Whether Blashill should have been extended or not can be debated, but the question is if this winning actually means anything?
The Red Wings are a franchise that demands excellence, and the fans expect Stanley Cup appearances. They realistically haven’t had a Stanley Cup caliber team since just after they won it all in 2008 and returned in 2009. With some awful veteran contracts still on the books until at least 2023, it is hard to see how this team can really add a ton of talent other than through the draft. It would be a different story if those veteran players were playing up to their contract, but unfortunately, it looks like they were gifted a long contract that the Wings will be stuck with. They will have some free money this offseason, but it still won’t be enough to build depth on the four lines or be able to build the defense up. All our answers lie with the young players being called up from Grand Rapids.
We will have to wait and see what happens with the last couple of games, there is still some hope, but it gets slimmer with every win. For the fans who love the winning, ask yourself if this streak will be the thing that puts the Detroit Red Wings back on the map, or will it be one of the few highly praised prospects coming out of the 2019 draft? The NHL draft lottery is on April 9th this year, so Red Wing fans have to pray that one of those balls fall their way so they can have both the winning and the draft pick.
