Insane blog posse
You know, I try real hard to ignore the little blog community. People seem to have fun with it and I know everybody is entitled to an opinion. I kind of treat it like a parallel universe, one I am not living in. But every once in a while something gets thrown at me that I can't ignore.
There's been some chatter about why Mike Babcock altered his lineup after the Wings beat Washington. Some are even criticizing the media for not asking "tough questions" about it. To ask about that would have been dumb because the answer was obvious. One, Johan Franzen was hurt. Two, Darren Helm came back. Three, Danny Cleary and Henrik Zetterberg have been struggling. End of interrogation.
On to other topics:
It will be fun to see how Zetterberg responds to what Babcock said after the skate this morning. Babcock has been annoyed at Zetterberg since the start of camp. The longer Zetterberg stayed out to nurse his sore groin, the more annoyed Babcock got. And, right before the season, Babcock accurately predicted that Zetterberg and Cleary both would struggle early. "Missing camp makes great players good and good players average," Babcock said.
Thursday morning, he said, flat-out that Zetterberg needs to take his game to another level. "He's got to skate," Babs said. "It's easy for me to say that, but anytime you don't play in training camp it takes you a bit to get going. It's been five games now. I think he had 10 shots in the last two games so I think maybe it's starting to come. We need that from him."
Babcock is going to lean heavily on his veterans to settle this mess down. That's why put Kris Draper and Kirk Maltby back together with Tomas Holmstrom. Yeah, you all can snicker about the collective age of the group, but they know how to maintain the structure. They aren't going to score a ton of goals, obviously, but they will help prevent things from coming completely unglued like they did in Buffalo.
Here's Draper: "One thing we've always been proud of, walking out of this rink or another rink, we've always been able to feel good about ourselves on most nights and now it's the exact opposite. There hasn't been any desperation in our game. The last game our structure wasn't there. We have a structure in place for a reason and we all saw what happens when we don't do it. For us, it's time to respond."
More Draper: "We just have to start doing things right. We have to be way better defensively, way more committed defensively, and if we do that, we can get this thing turned around. But the thing is, you look around this room and we believe in everybody in here. That's the key thing. We are going to stay together and work through this as a group and be stronger for it."
