The NHL on NBC’s lead announce team of Eddie Olczyk, Pierre McGuire and Mike “Doc” Emrick were on conference call for national media covering the NHL.
One topic that came up are the Midwestern traditional powerhouse, the Detroit Red Wings.
DOC EMRICK: Well, I’ll watch Gus Nyquist play any night of the week. But he is the young guy who broke out last year. I think Tatar and Jurco showed us a lot at the Olympics. They were the best players on their team, and I think that the fact that they’ll have some stability this year and be there start to finish, those guys, and actually be healthy will mean an awful lot.
But boy, when you have two guys that are so important to a team that don’t get a chance to play together because they’re not healthy too often, and Pavel is not going to be available at the start of the season as all of you that are listening to this know, that really does represent a concern.
I think Brendan Smith will get even better than he did toward the end of last season. Maybe he’s the guy that rises to something important because they’re going to really need some help on defense.
EDDIE OLCZYK: Doc touched on it there. To me they’re really going to need the back end of their defense to really play up and beyond maybe what they can. I mean, to me there’s a huge dropoff from Niklas Kronwall, Danny DeKeyser and Jonathan Ericsson. I mean, there’s a wide range there, so you’ve got to play the hand that’s dealt. You’ve got to play the cards that are dealt, and for me they look like they have some good young players.
They’re going to have to continue to evolve and to play the way we’ve seen Detroit play and the way that Mike Babcock wants to play. What’s going to happen with Petr Mrazek and Jimmy Howard. You’ve got I think Gustafson is still there, so you’ve got a lot of interesting dynamics, there, as well, but for me the question mark will be besides the health and the aging as Doc mentioned of the Detroit Red Wings is can those four, five, six, seven number defensemen really be invincible guys night in and night out and help the Red Wings because that to me is one of the biggest holes that they have.
PIERRE McGUIRE: I’ll finish it up with saying that unfortunately for the Red Wings, Anthony Mantha broke his leg in training camp. He’s coming off back?to?back 50?plus goal seasons with Val?d’Or and the Quebec Major Junior League. He’s a 6’5? over 200?pound power forward with unbelievably good hands. I think that he would have been one of the few Red Wings that ever would have been under Kenny Holland’s watch anyway that would have been rushed into the National Hockey League. I think Mantha has got the potential to be that good.
Eddie talked about there’s a limitation on defense, and I would agree with him on that, but I’m with Doc on Brendan Smith being able to take his game to another level. They’ve got a couple young guys on the way, Xavier Ouellet is a tremendous young player out of the Quebec Junior League that’s done some time in Grand Rapids playing for Jeff Blashill, and they also have Nick Jensen out of St. Cloud State, who I think has a chance to be extremely good. And then finally, Ryan Sproul out of the Ontario Hockey League, so actually they’ve got some guys that aren’t NHL names yet that have a chance to be very good NHL names, but the one up?and?coming, you talk about breakthrough players, I hope he gets Anthony Mantha. I think he’s got a chance to be really special for the Red Wings.
DOC EMRICK: I think one thing else is that whenever the Red Wings have had a chance to, in an open marketplace get what they need to win a championship, they’ve always done it. Now, we’re not in an open marketplace anymore except for general managers and coaches, and they already extended the general manager who was regarded as the best or one of the best in the league, and they’re in the process of discussing it with the coach. If you go back even to the Sergei Federov challenge from Carolina, when push came to shove, if there was excellence there, the OH family always stepped up. I’m not anticipating anything other than that in the case with the coach.
Transcript courtesy of NBC Sports Group
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