By Jeff Moss
DetroitSportsRag@GMail.com
December 22, 2013
After last night’s Red Wings victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs, I figured it would be a good time to rehash an interview that GM Ken Holland did with 105.1’s Matt Dery on November 20th of this year.
This was the infamous “Q & A” where Holland dropped these now-classic sound drops sure to make Holland’s upcoming Greatest Hits album.
“This is a Men’s League”
“Kid’s Aren’t the Answer”
This is a men’s league. Kid’s aren’t the answer. That’s what this dolt was saying a little more than a month ago, when Gustav Nyquist still had yet to make his 2013 regular-season debut with the Wings, Tomas Tatar was wasting away on the team’s fourth line, Tomas Jurco was lighting it up for the Griffins and Riley Sheahan was still perfecting the art of creating fake ID’s in Grand Rapids.
Fortunately for Red Wings fans, the organization has been smashed with a rash of injuries of biblical proportions to the team’s forwards, so Holland’s horrid master plan of burying talent in the bushes has been undermined. Can’t “over-ripen youth” when ya can’t fill out a lineup card.
“Kid’s aren’t the answer.” Well, if the question is “how can we keep losing games with corpses like Daniel Cleary, Mikael Samuelsson and Jordin Tootoo in the lineup?”….. well …. yes, that is an accurate statement.
Unfortunately for the above wastes of locker room space, they didn’t get the memo that the NHL is a “Men’s League,” as their statistics contradict their GM’s mantra:
In 21 games this season, Samuelsson has a goal and two assists.
In 10 games in Detroit — before getting sent to Grand Rapids and then being recalled — Tootoo has a grand total of one assist.
And finally, in 36 games in the “Men’s League,” Danny Cleary has netted three goals and handed out three assists.
We can also add in recently-injured free-agent signing and fully-formed adult Stephen Weiss’s two goals and two assists in 26 games.
We now interrupt this depressing rundown of “men’s” stats for this announcement ….
Anyway, those MEN have played a combined 83 games and have put up the following stats between them:
6 goals
8 assists
14 points
-16
Now, let’s check out the numbers for the “kids,” who are clearly playing out of their element. Ya know, the “children” who weren’t good enough to make this Wings squad because of those above-listed stalwarts standing in their way. Including Nyquist, who is 24 fucking years old and got buried in the minors because of the Cleary signing; he only was granted a salary cap reprieve to join the team due to Danny DeKeyser’s injury.
Tatar has lit the lamp seven times and assisted on seven other goals in 30 games.
Before Nyquist got injured, he had four goals and four assists in 13 games.
With very limited ice time, Jurco has put the biscuit in the basket twice and added a helper in just four contests.
And finally, Teletubbie has chipped in with two assists in three games.
The Wings players that aren’t allowed to sit at the adult dinner table have appeared in a grand total of 50 games. Let’s go to the tote board, Ed McMahon ….
13 goals
14 assists
27 points
+11
IN 33 FEWER GAMES, the children who are our future — teach them well and let them lead the way … show them all the beauty they possess inside — HAVE SCORED 13 MORE POINTS THAN THEIR ELDERS HAVE!!!!!!!!!!
Read that again. The Not Yet Ready for Primetime Players have 27 points. The MEN have registered 14. And the BIG BOYS have 33 games in-hand.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME??!??!?!?!?! And is ANYONE in the mainstream Detroit sports media reciting these numbers? Nope. Instead, this is what we get from shitbags like noted hockey expert Drew Sharp:
Holland’s unaccustomed to having his decisions second-guessed. If this were Greek mythology, King Midas would’ve had the “Holland Touch” in turning everything he touched into gold. When Holland saw something others didn’t, rarely was he proven wrong.
I mean, someone please slit my throat with a Bauer Vapor APX2 skate, please. Go right for my Clint Malarchuk jugular. I beg of you.
The scariest part about this story is that the Wings are now getting healthy. And while I will welcome players like Henrik Zetteberg and Darren Helm returning to the fold, I am terrified of what that will mean for the ice time of Nyquist and Tatar and the status of Jurco.
These “kids” are hard workers, relentlessly back check, can skate and have a knack for SCORING POINTS in the National Men’s Hockey League. Something the losers who are ten years older have failed to do for a season and a half now.
Seriously, listen to this clip from that same Dery interview where Holland explained why Jurco shouldn’t be in Detroit ….
Yep, he was scoring points ONLY because of extended power play time, Ken. It’s amazing how Jurco has equaled the goal-scoring production of one of your marquee offseason signings in 22 fewer games played, while averaging only 13:29 of ice time.
Consider that during the final minute of regulation last night in a TIE game, Mike Babcock trusted a line of Tatar/Jurco/Sheahan to be on the ice when a huge point was at stake.
Maybe that was Babcock’s fuck you to your “Kids aren’t the Answer” and “Men’s League” memes. Or maybe he just really wanted to win that game in Toronto, and figured that playing those KIDS was the best way to go about it.
This is real simple. Nyquist is a top-six forward. Tatar should NEVER be on a fourth line again. And Jurco’s size and skating ability MANDATE that he should remain on this roster.
I don’t care what their driver’s licenses say about their date of birth, Cleary, Samuelsson and, to a lesser extent, Todd Bertuzzi have to make way for the future. And the future is NOW!!!!!
Finally, one last piece of advice to the Emperor GM with No Clothes. When this team does get healthy, there is at least one more KID who needs to get recalled from Grand Rapids.
And I don’t give a shit if it is defenseman Ryan Sproul or fellow Griffins blueliner Xavier Oulett.
But that human pylon that you reacquired a couple of seasons ago (Kyle Quincey) has to go. Forget his pathetic one goal and four assists in 38 games. Or the sometimes-misleading +/- stat where Quincey currently is a -10.
Just watch this carcass play night after night and explain to me why the fuck he is on the ice. The Wings dominated much of last night’s game at Air Canada Centre. Then Quincey coughed up a puck in his own zone that led to a Leaf goal. Then he took a penalty that led to another Toronto tally.
You know, Ken, the Kyle Quincey whom you re-acquired for a first-round pick two seasons ago.
Or, as I like to call it, you just displaying your MIDAS TOUCH for the masses.
You can’t tell me that Oulett, Sproul or even Adam Almqvist couldn’t produce more in Detroit than the “Medical Examiner” has.
You can’t because I have witnessed your judgment with the rest of the youth in this organization and you have no fucking clue. This isn’t 2002, Ken. You don’t have an unlimited budget and a FOURTH line loaded with future Hall of Famers.
Adapt or die.
The kids might not be the answer. That might be too simplistic.
But they are clearly part of the SOLUTION.