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Abel to Yzerman

Blast Away Drapes

by IwoCPO on 12/07/09 at 03:56 AM ET
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Not sure if the statistics back it up or not, but the common word amongst our Diggers is that the Wings have played 5 consecutive strong periods.  Awesome, eh?  100 minutes of good hockey.  105 if you count OT in Jersey.  Neat.  What a monumental turnaround after two months of garbage. 

Apparently, somebody’d had enough.
Khan(!)

Perhaps it’s no coincidence the turnaround came after Kris Draper, a team leader and the second-longest serving Red Wing, lit into his teammates during the first intermission in New Jersey.

Howard said Draper “let us have it,’’ and “said enough is enough.’’

Oh…so it’s not just the injuries.  And maybe it’s a bit more than Mike Babcock shifting lines.  Maybe, and this is just a frigging nutjob guess…maybe this 31 game nap is due more to a team malaise than any other convenient excuses.

And yeah, do the math. I said 31 games.

We called for it last week didn’t we?  I think we did, or maybe I dreamt it.  But I swear we wondered here when somebody was going to step up and have some collective ass in that room.  And I believe, correct me here too, that we singled Draper out as one of the few guys fiery enough (and with enough credibility) to do it.

DetNews

“Yeah, things were said and we obviously took it to heart,” said Danny Cleary, who scored the winning goal Sunday with 2:03 left in the third period.

Draper, who finished the scoring with an empty-netter Sunday, got fed up with his and his teammates’ uninspired play.

“It just seemed like a lot of the same things were being said and nothing was being done,” Draper said. “I just got in there and had a little bit of a snap and just kept on going. I was embarrassed with the way I had played and I look at myself as one of the leaders on our team, work-ethic wise and emotional-wise and I didn’t think anything was there.

Interesting.  So Draper pulled a page out of the Yzerman playbook, chapter 97.  I wouldn’t be surprised if that portion of his fireside chat included some exact verbiage, identical to what The Captain told His team after they’d fallen behind some bitter bitches from St. Lose.

But Draper took it a step further and played a risky card.  While chewing multi-millionaire ass, Kris Draper used a ploy that might work in, maybe, three rooms in the NHL.

“I said a lot of things but it was from the heart. There’s so much tradition and this is such a great jersey to put on day in and day out. I have a lot of pride in being a Red Wing and I felt like we weren’t playing with enough pride.”

We’ve pretty much alienated the casual Wing fan here at A2Y.  You guys are just a little too…attached…for the “normal” fan to understand.  They don’t get the references, the vocabulary, the stress train or bickering.  But even here, where fanaticism is the norm?  Even here we rarely mention poor play or lack of effort as being some sort of disgrace to the Winged Wheel. 

But Draper went there, didn’t he?  But he can only use it once.  Tradition and loyalty and allegiance to team and organ-I-zation and history…pie in the sky stuff if you choose the wrong time, the wrong venue or circumstance. 

But maybe Kris Draper picked his spot.

And if it works, if they’re still talking about this in June?  Well, “turning points” are pretty tough to spot I’d bet.  But this would be a fairly obvious one…the night in Jersey when the red-headed kid reminded the Wings that a lot of tough bastards had gone before them, a bunch of great players had sacrificed a whole lot to establish a legacy that was getting more and more tarnished with every lackluster shift.

Reading Draper’s after-action report, it sounded like he was a little surprised, like stuff just kept coming to him.  Maybe Draper said that missing the playoffs is acceptable for teams in Denver, not Detroit.  Maybe Draper said, speaking of Denver, that he’d given his frigging face to this organ-I-zation and that he’d do it again because it was the Red Wings who saved his career and gave him everything he has today. 

What you read in the papers today is as close to knowing what was actually said in there as you’re ever gonna get.  And we dig that.  We’ve always dug the secrecy and the mystery about that room.  But we know voices were raised and maybe some stuff was chucked.  Maybe a few feelings were hurt and maybe, just maybe, pride and heart were called into question.  As it frigging should have been.

So, we’ll see.  We’ve turned into a jaded band of bitches here the last month or so, and it’s going to take a bit more than a hundred minutes of effort to swing the pendulum back toward firetrucks, frolicking puppies, rainbows and hookers. 

Draper may have lit a fire, let’s just hope it lasts longer than five periods. 

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Welcome to Abel to Yzerman, a Red Wing blog since 1977.  No other site on the internet has better-researched, fact-laden and better prepared discussions than A2Y.  Re-phrase: we do little research, find facts and stats highly overrated and claim little to no preparation.  There are 19 readers of A2Y. No more, no less. All of them, except maybe one, are juvenile in nature.  Reminding them of that in the comment section will only encourage them to prove that. Your suggestions and critiques are welcome: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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