The Beginning of Hard Times
Times are hard right now if you are a Red Wings fan. There’s no denying it. Last year was a struggle. Finishing in the bottom half of the division, getting embarrassed on a nightly basis, and watching the team not sell at the trade deadline broke my heart. However, with being bad, the Wings were able to get the #6 draft pick. That’s when the rebuild was on. I’d rather be bad with the young talent than be bad with the likes of Jonathon Ericsson or Nikolas Kronwall out there. Oh wait, they are still on our team. At least we have some new comers on the team to make up for the fact that they are still in the Winged Wheel.
The times of winning and winning championships are on hold for at least the next 5 years. Like the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. We witnessed that especially last season. The first time for fans my age have ever witnessed the Wings losing. And losing bad. How bad you ask? Montreal beat us 10–1 last year. 10–1. And to make it even worse, it was the first year at the new arena. That arena will see a lot of losing before it sees any winning (both Red Wings and Pistons). Us Red Wings fans have been absolutely spoiled. 25 straight years in the playoffs. 1990–2016. In that time, we saw the Wings raise Lord Stanley 4 times. But now, the likes of Zetterberg, Lidstrom, Datsyuk, Hasek, Osgood, Chelios, Fedorov, Konstantinov, Larionov, McCarty, Shanahan, and Yzerman are gone. A new wave of young superstars are coming. Larkin, Mantha, Athanasiou, Rasmussen, Cholowski, Zadina, and Hronek are the names we must get familiar with. Something else we should get familiar with? Being patient.
A rebuild doesn’t happen over night. Red Wings fans need to trust Ken Holland and others in the organization to draft the right players, and trade those away we can get draft picks for. If we want the bleeding to stop sooner rather than later, we have to use these high draft picks to our advantage, and if we are lucky, and that’s a huge IF, the Red Wings could be back to their winning ways in the next 5–7 years.
