The Detroit Red Wings have made the playoffs for twenty-five consecutive years. During that time, they've competed in the Stanley Cup Final six times; won the Stanley Cup four times; finished first in their division, conference, and league multiple times; and in an unusual-for-hockey-stroke of hubris, assigned the city of Detroit the moniker of Hockeytown.
It's been nothing short of a dynasty.
However, somewhere along the way, Hockeytown stopped being fun.
It took me longer to find out just how fun hockey is than my dad would have liked. I grew up in Troy, Michigan and when a new state-of-the-art arena opened he camped out to sign me up for youth hockey. The only problem was that I had no interest in this and made my opinion abundantly clear.
I was in elementary school, the Red Wings had not yet won a Stanley Cup despite being an excellent team and I did not yet have hockey fever.
That all changed though with the back-to-back Stanley Cups. I started playing in a learn-to-play program when I was in middle school. It was already too late for me to develop any significant skill; but I could skate fast, play gritty, and make plays. I modeled my game after Kris Draper.
The the league shut down for a year and my interest dissolved. I stopped playing hockey. However as the lockeout went on I started actively participating in various online forums to discuss the game. When the league came back with new rules and the salary cap in place, I became an avid fan.
Eventually my Red Wings fandom bloomed into more of a fandom of the sport at large and that's where I find myself today.
Even still, I live in Michigan and the Red Wings are my team.
And they're just not fun anymore.
Ask any fan and he or she will agree. Oh, sure, there's moments. The blazing speed of Dylan Larkin or Darren Helm, the acrobatic heroics of Petr Mrazek, the riverboat gambling of Brendan Smith, the dazzling dangling of Andreas Athanasiou.
But these moments are too few and far in between.
Winning matters, no doubt. Winning is fun.
But I think we should know that the process is just as important. In the late 90's the teams to beat were Detroit, Colorado, New Jersey, and Dallas. Of those four teams, New Jersey was infamous for playing a boring, low-scoring brand of hockey. They also from what I know were the team that developed the smallest fan base.
So while the Red Wings have had little success in the playoffs in recent years, I don't think this is the only reason why the team is no longer fun. It's not why watching them throughout the season has become an absolute grind.
Instead, it's because of the way the team plays.
It shouldn't be like this. There's a lot of talented players with fun skill sets on the team. There's even some absolutely electric players. But they aren't allowed to be electric.
Why not?
Well, I think it all goes back to when Nicklas Lidstrom retired.
At this point the Red Wings had lost Lidstrom, Rafalski, and Stuart within the past year. The former two were elite puck-moving defenders. Lidstrom may have been the greatest of all time.
Mike Babcock realized his team had one consistent, proven puck-mover in Kronwall and made adjustments. The adjustments were to play a much more conservative game tailored to giving up as few opportunities as possible.
This worked more or less and was probably the right call. However, it also stunted the development of possible puck-movers in Brendan Smith and Jakub Kindl.
The bottom line though was that forwards had to do more defensively and had less to give offensively. This meant they weren't able to entertain as often as they had before. The aging process didn't help, either.
At this point, the conservative Red Wings have become a stale team. The recent UFA signings haven't done much to help.
I had hoped Jeff Blashill would have helped last year, as his AHL teams always played an exciting brand of hockey. We were all disappointed in that though, even if the Wings ended up being a positive possession team.
The bottom line is if this team is going to continue to be a playoff bubble team, and that's most certainly what they're looking at the next couple of years, then they at least need to play an entertaining brand of hockey in order to keep fan interest high.
This should be of particular importance for the team since they have a new arena to fill in a year.
So please let the players and the team be fun again.
Monday, July 4, 2016
Sunday, December 6, 2015
Holy Jumpin'! FS-D's Broadcasts of Detroit Red Wings Games Are Bad
I've had a problem watching the Detroit Red Wings this year: that the local broadcast by Fox Sports Detroit has become completely awful.
The past few years I've subscribed to hockey packages that allowed me to watch any team's broadcast and learned the various nuances of many teams' local broadcasts. So I feel like I have some idea of what makes a local hockey broadcast good, average, or mediocre.
This year I didn't subscribe to any of those packages or subscribe to the cable package that provides the NHL Network and thus am relying on NBC Sports and Fox Sports Detroit for my NHL hockey. And as far as Fox Sports Detroit is concerned, it hasn't been anything worth watching. In fact, I've put the games on mute several times.
Here are some of the problems off the top of my head:
The Intermissions
The panel of Johnny Kane, Darren Elliot, Manny Legace, sometimes Chris Osgood, and even once Dave Coulier has not been very good. Local intermission talk is often mediocre for local broadcasts, so I can manage that even if this intermission panel has been pretty low bar. Plus the intermission is a time for productivity anyway.
However, Fox Sports Detroit has been doing live look ins of their intermission this year. They literally turn on the cameras on the host and commentators/analysts as they talk about what to talk about next or are just having a random conversation. Maybe it was funny and quirky the first time. But it seems to happen twice each intermission, and is awful. I'd honestly rather watch a commercial.
Plus/Minus
I've been a hockey fan since the 90's. Even then, broadcasters regularly talked about how plus/minus wasn't that great of a statistic as it can be completely random due to luck and being such a small sample size. Two decades later it's absolutely irrelevant apart from fantasy hockey leagues that still use it and that you can find it on the NHL's website, where you can find just about any statistic. There are many better stats that do what plus/minus was supposed to do such as Shot Attempt Differential (a,k.a. Corsi or Fenwick). Nobody talks about plus/minus anymore.
Nobody except for the Red Wings, that is. Ken Daniels and Mickey Redmond discuss it multiple times every game, usually when talking about how great of a player Dylan Larkin is. There are so many other and better stats to tell us that Dylan Larkin is a special player. It's ridiculous.
It should be noted that this isn't just Fox Sports Detroit here though. The beat writers that cover the Red Wings also use plus/minus as if it were still a relevant statistic. But that's another story.
Ken Daniels Doesn't Fact Check
There were two instances in the December 5th game against Nashville where Ken Daniels stated something as a fact, when it in fact was not true.
The first was when discussing Nashville forward Cody Hodgson. Daniels said something along the lines that Hodgson was bought out by Buffalo because he didn't want to play there anymore. That's simply not how/why buyouts happen. Players get bought out because the team decides they would rather pay the player and suffer a cap hit for the player to not play for them than have the player in their lineup.
The second was when talking about the rookie scoring race. Daniels repeatedly stated that Larkin was second in rookie scoring, while Arizona's Max Domi was first. This completely ignores the fact that both players are behind Chicago's Artemi Panarin. Maybe he meant goal scoring, but then he forgot to mention that New York's Oscar Lindberg was at the time tied with both players. You can find this information right on the NHL's site.
Mickey Redmond Talking about Fighting
Look, this is a bit of heated topic right now. But the facts are that fighting is diminishing in the NHL largely due to the fact that we now know some of the very serious dangers of repeated head trauma.
The other day though Mickey Redmond got excited over a fight between Brendan Smith and Arizona's Kyle Chipchura. Redmond's an old-time guy and he likes fighting. Okay. But then he showed a fight between Bob Probert and Tie Domi, asking rhetorically multiple times, "Isn't that good stuff?"
You can find the comments beginning at the 3:59 mark of this YouTube video uploaded by awood40.
The problem isn't that Mickey (and Ken Daniels) got excited about the fight. The problem is Mickey suggesting that Bob Probert's fight was good stuff.
Bob Probert died of heart failure at the age of 45 in 2010. He drank heavily (not sure if it was ever diagnosed alchocolism) and used cocaine. His brain was donated to science after his death, and it was discovered that he suffered from CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. It's unknown how much of Probert's problems were due to the disease, but easy to speculate. You can read more about it here.
The bottom line is that it's not a happy story at all, and looking at some of the things that led to the tragic ending and cheering about them seems distasteful at best and repulsive to me.
The Bottom Line
The Detroit Red Wings have been a fascinating team to watch this year.
For the first time in ten years, they have a new head coach who is quite young but brings with him an impressive track record. They have a teenage rookie who looks like a star. They still have one of the most exciting players ever to play the game in Pavel Datsyuk. Detroit still calls itself HockeyTown. They have a lot of young and exciting players breaking into the league or developing into go-to guys. They struggled to begin the year, but have been dominant recently.
I think that as an organization, they should want as many eyes watching their product as possible. Having at least an average local broadcast would go a long way to helping with that.
The past few years I've subscribed to hockey packages that allowed me to watch any team's broadcast and learned the various nuances of many teams' local broadcasts. So I feel like I have some idea of what makes a local hockey broadcast good, average, or mediocre.
This year I didn't subscribe to any of those packages or subscribe to the cable package that provides the NHL Network and thus am relying on NBC Sports and Fox Sports Detroit for my NHL hockey. And as far as Fox Sports Detroit is concerned, it hasn't been anything worth watching. In fact, I've put the games on mute several times.
Here are some of the problems off the top of my head:
The Intermissions
The panel of Johnny Kane, Darren Elliot, Manny Legace, sometimes Chris Osgood, and even once Dave Coulier has not been very good. Local intermission talk is often mediocre for local broadcasts, so I can manage that even if this intermission panel has been pretty low bar. Plus the intermission is a time for productivity anyway.
However, Fox Sports Detroit has been doing live look ins of their intermission this year. They literally turn on the cameras on the host and commentators/analysts as they talk about what to talk about next or are just having a random conversation. Maybe it was funny and quirky the first time. But it seems to happen twice each intermission, and is awful. I'd honestly rather watch a commercial.
Plus/Minus
I've been a hockey fan since the 90's. Even then, broadcasters regularly talked about how plus/minus wasn't that great of a statistic as it can be completely random due to luck and being such a small sample size. Two decades later it's absolutely irrelevant apart from fantasy hockey leagues that still use it and that you can find it on the NHL's website, where you can find just about any statistic. There are many better stats that do what plus/minus was supposed to do such as Shot Attempt Differential (a,k.a. Corsi or Fenwick). Nobody talks about plus/minus anymore.
Nobody except for the Red Wings, that is. Ken Daniels and Mickey Redmond discuss it multiple times every game, usually when talking about how great of a player Dylan Larkin is. There are so many other and better stats to tell us that Dylan Larkin is a special player. It's ridiculous.
It should be noted that this isn't just Fox Sports Detroit here though. The beat writers that cover the Red Wings also use plus/minus as if it were still a relevant statistic. But that's another story.
Ken Daniels Doesn't Fact Check
There were two instances in the December 5th game against Nashville where Ken Daniels stated something as a fact, when it in fact was not true.
The first was when discussing Nashville forward Cody Hodgson. Daniels said something along the lines that Hodgson was bought out by Buffalo because he didn't want to play there anymore. That's simply not how/why buyouts happen. Players get bought out because the team decides they would rather pay the player and suffer a cap hit for the player to not play for them than have the player in their lineup.
The second was when talking about the rookie scoring race. Daniels repeatedly stated that Larkin was second in rookie scoring, while Arizona's Max Domi was first. This completely ignores the fact that both players are behind Chicago's Artemi Panarin. Maybe he meant goal scoring, but then he forgot to mention that New York's Oscar Lindberg was at the time tied with both players. You can find this information right on the NHL's site.
Mickey Redmond Talking about Fighting
Look, this is a bit of heated topic right now. But the facts are that fighting is diminishing in the NHL largely due to the fact that we now know some of the very serious dangers of repeated head trauma.
The other day though Mickey Redmond got excited over a fight between Brendan Smith and Arizona's Kyle Chipchura. Redmond's an old-time guy and he likes fighting. Okay. But then he showed a fight between Bob Probert and Tie Domi, asking rhetorically multiple times, "Isn't that good stuff?"
You can find the comments beginning at the 3:59 mark of this YouTube video uploaded by awood40.
The problem isn't that Mickey (and Ken Daniels) got excited about the fight. The problem is Mickey suggesting that Bob Probert's fight was good stuff.
Bob Probert died of heart failure at the age of 45 in 2010. He drank heavily (not sure if it was ever diagnosed alchocolism) and used cocaine. His brain was donated to science after his death, and it was discovered that he suffered from CTE, a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated head trauma. It's unknown how much of Probert's problems were due to the disease, but easy to speculate. You can read more about it here.
The bottom line is that it's not a happy story at all, and looking at some of the things that led to the tragic ending and cheering about them seems distasteful at best and repulsive to me.
The Bottom Line
The Detroit Red Wings have been a fascinating team to watch this year.
For the first time in ten years, they have a new head coach who is quite young but brings with him an impressive track record. They have a teenage rookie who looks like a star. They still have one of the most exciting players ever to play the game in Pavel Datsyuk. Detroit still calls itself HockeyTown. They have a lot of young and exciting players breaking into the league or developing into go-to guys. They struggled to begin the year, but have been dominant recently.
I think that as an organization, they should want as many eyes watching their product as possible. Having at least an average local broadcast would go a long way to helping with that.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
2015/2016 NHL Season Prediction: Central Division
Here are my predictions for the placement in the Central Division, which I consider the best division in the game:
1) Minnesota Wild
I really think this could be the year Minnesota puts it all together. They have been a decent team the past two years, and with Dubnyk and the continued development of young players like Granlund, Coyle, Brodin, and Dumba; I think this will be the best team during the regular season. They have four lines that can score, and three defensive pairings that are quite good. This team will surprise a lot of people.
2) St. Louis Blues
St. Louis should be the best team in their division, but then they went and traded T.J. Oshie for a worse player in Troy Brouwer. They also brought back head coach Ken Hitchcock for only a year, which isn't much a vote of confidence. This team will be good, but I think they will suffer a bit from the lack of direction.
3) Chicago Blackhawks
Chicago has shown they don't run away with the division ever, but are close to unstoppable in the playoffs. I think once again they'll find themselves without home ice advantage, but comfortably in the playoffs.
They do have a lot of distractions with the Patrick Kane mess and waiving Bryan Bickell, but this team is just too good to perform lower than this.
4) Dallas Stars
A lot of people are really high on Dallas, and they will be a really fun team to watch. Their goaltending and defense should be better and I think they'll be a wild card team, but don't see them being a top three team in the division.
5) Nashville Predators
Nashville has a legitimate star goaltender, the best defense in the league, and a good group of forwards. However, they are weak at center with Mike Ribeiro and Mike Fisher as the top two pivots. I think that will end up hurting them.
And on a personal level, I can't believe they brought back Mike Ribeiro. With the Patrick Kane mess, this got overlooked but is almost as ugly.
6) Colorado Avalanche
I don't like what I've seen from Patrick Roy as an NHL head coach, and honestly it's more likely that Colorado finishes last in the division. But this team just has so much young, high-end talent that I can't see them being last.
7) Winnipeg Jets
The Winnipeg Jets are a good team, and were a playoff team last year. They should be better as a team this year. However, the play in the toughest division and their goalies over-performed last year. This is a team with bad goaltending unless they find room for their AHL starter. And having one weakness in the Central Division could ruin a team.
1) Minnesota Wild
I really think this could be the year Minnesota puts it all together. They have been a decent team the past two years, and with Dubnyk and the continued development of young players like Granlund, Coyle, Brodin, and Dumba; I think this will be the best team during the regular season. They have four lines that can score, and three defensive pairings that are quite good. This team will surprise a lot of people.
2) St. Louis Blues
St. Louis should be the best team in their division, but then they went and traded T.J. Oshie for a worse player in Troy Brouwer. They also brought back head coach Ken Hitchcock for only a year, which isn't much a vote of confidence. This team will be good, but I think they will suffer a bit from the lack of direction.
3) Chicago Blackhawks
Chicago has shown they don't run away with the division ever, but are close to unstoppable in the playoffs. I think once again they'll find themselves without home ice advantage, but comfortably in the playoffs.
They do have a lot of distractions with the Patrick Kane mess and waiving Bryan Bickell, but this team is just too good to perform lower than this.
4) Dallas Stars
A lot of people are really high on Dallas, and they will be a really fun team to watch. Their goaltending and defense should be better and I think they'll be a wild card team, but don't see them being a top three team in the division.
5) Nashville Predators
Nashville has a legitimate star goaltender, the best defense in the league, and a good group of forwards. However, they are weak at center with Mike Ribeiro and Mike Fisher as the top two pivots. I think that will end up hurting them.
And on a personal level, I can't believe they brought back Mike Ribeiro. With the Patrick Kane mess, this got overlooked but is almost as ugly.
6) Colorado Avalanche
I don't like what I've seen from Patrick Roy as an NHL head coach, and honestly it's more likely that Colorado finishes last in the division. But this team just has so much young, high-end talent that I can't see them being last.
7) Winnipeg Jets
The Winnipeg Jets are a good team, and were a playoff team last year. They should be better as a team this year. However, the play in the toughest division and their goalies over-performed last year. This is a team with bad goaltending unless they find room for their AHL starter. And having one weakness in the Central Division could ruin a team.
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