from Steve Simmons of the Toronto Sun,
- When Brendan Shanahan won his first Stanley Cup, he led the Detroit Red Wings in playoff goal-scoring.
When he won his third Cup, he was second in Wings playoff goal-scoring behind Brett Hull. This was a Detroit team that featured Steve Yzerman, Sergei Fedorov and Luc Robitaille and five other Hall of Fame players, while head coach Scotty Bowman is the 10th member enshrined at the Hall.
This is what great players like Shanahan did when it mattered most: Which makes you wonder, why aren’t the Maple Leafs more like their team president? Why aren’t they tough like he was tough? Why can’t they score playoff-wise the way he could score? Why can’t they battle the way Shanahan battled?...
- What would have happened had the Edmonton Oilers drafted Matthew Tkachuk instead of Jesse Puljujarvi with their first pick in the 2016 NHL draft? Puljujarvi was taken fourth by the Oilers. Tkachuk was drafted sixth by Calgary. How could the Oilers not have won Stanley Cups by now with Connor McDavid, Leon Draisaitl and Tkachuk on the same team? That’s three of the most impactful forwards in hockey.
- My Hockey Hall of Fame class of 2023 would include Henrik Lundqvist, Alex Mogilny, Henrik Zetterberg and Curtis Joseph. And I’d add two more in the builders category: David Poile and Tom Watt, who won nine national championships coaching the University of Toronto. And soon, if not now, it will be time for Ken Hitchcock as well.
- The New York Rangers kept adding better players — Patrick Kane and Vladimir Tarasenko to name two — and kept getting worse. Their Game 7 performance against New Jersey, as a team, was embarrassing. A year ago, they looked like real Stanley Cup contenders. This year, they looked like a bad chemistry experiment and the absolute antithesis of the Seattle Kraken. Teams win in hockey. Individuals don’t.
more on the first topic and other notes too...
I don't normally agree with a lot that Simmons says but I think his comment on the Rangers is an interesting one. There have been previous discussions on this site holding the Rangers out as the proper way to rebuild and pointing out their progress as opposed to the Yzerplan. I certainly do not disagree that they have made some significant progress in a short time (the reasons why have, as I said, been discussed).
I just think that this playoff performance shows how complicated the process of a rebuild can be--what looks good on paper may not turn out that way in real action. My point is that there is no one foolproof method. The road to improvement is not a straight trajectory upwards. There are normally setbacks.
I think Wing's fans have been pretty patient. I do think we all expect progress and should hold Steve and his staff accountable but we need to recognize there is no perfect way to rebuild.
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