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Kukla's Korner Hockey

Holland’s Philosophy

by Alanah McGinley on 05/25/08 at 06:27 PM ET
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From Eric Duhatschek at the Globe & Mail,

Holland was talking about a time, back at the 1999 NHL trading deadline, when he and his assistant, Jim Nill “blew out all those draft picks” in deals to acquire, among others, Wendel Clark and Chris Chelios in a bid to win another Stanley Cup. That didn’t work out.

That night, sitting in a sports bar near his house, seeing his picture on every TV screen, Holland said he turned to Nill and said from then on: “we’ve got to draft defencemen because eventually, when (Steve) Yzerman’s too old and (Brendan) Shanahan’s too old and (Sergei) Fedorov’s gone, how do you stay competitive? If you’re in the top five in goals-against in the league every year, you’ve going to be competitive. You have to be, even if you don’t score a lot. So if you look at our drafts the last six or seven years, all we draft are defencemen. We’ve got lots of kids that we think our close to playing.”

much more

Filed in: NHL Teams, Detroit Red Wings, | KK Hockey | Permalink
  Tags: drafting, jim+nill, ken+holland

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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