Will Burchfield

Morning, Will.

How are you?

I'm doing good, guys.

How about you?

Yeah, not great, Bob.

To use the familiar gif.

You know, especially because that 10-year playoff drought, which, as you said, is now...

the nhl's active longest comes directly on the heels of the nhl's longest active playoff streak at 25 years and the wings have been close over the past four seasons to snapping this now 10 year drought and the ending has played out exactly as it did this year with a a late season collapse only i think you know in the prior three years the collapse was sudden and it was swift

And it happened over the course of six or seven games when the Wings would lose and they couldn't recover, whereas this collapse was drawn out.

Like, it was less of an extreme nosedive and more of an extended viral that nobody could stop, beginning in late January.

And, you know, I think in some ways that's probably more alarming and to me definitely more shocking

damning of the current roster construction under Steve Eisenman.

I can, and there were warning signs all season long.

The Wings were counting on John Gibson to carry a number one goaltender's workload, and his track record recently anyways in Anaheim would suggest that he wasn't physically equipped to do that.

And

That proved true over the second half of the season, and for as well as Gibson played for about three months from December into March, he played almost that poorly down the stretch when the workload caught up to him and the Wings just sort of ran him into the ground.

And the fact of the matter is, Don Gibson was covering a lot of the Red Wings' flaws when they rose to the top of the East, as I mentioned, in late January.

This was a team that struggled all season long to produce 5-on-5 offense, but they were winning a lot of

3-2, 3-1 type games when Gibson was stellar.

And when he faltered, their reality shined through and it wasn't a pretty one.