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Wings need to do some summer tinkering to end Cup drought

Anyone who says the Avalanche eliminated the Red Wings last week because it was more physical and beat up Detroit, missed the WingsÕ series against St. Louis and Winnepeg. All three teams beat the Wings up, leading to a compounded fracture, so to speak.

A point can also be made that the Wings were hurt by the lack of penalties called in the playoffs, especially for obstruction. The problem is that Detroit should have expected that to happen. Hockey is the only sport where the rules change when the playoffs begin (a fact Claude Lemieux should be very thankful for). What is a penalty between October and April, isn't in May and June. One could also look at stars such as Sergei Federov and Keith Primeau, who were missing in action for most of the ill-fated Stanley Cup run. But when you get to the bottom line, none of this matters. All that anyone cares about is the fact that Colorado and Florida are playing for the championship. Detroit will go down in the books as the greatest team never to win a thing.

The only question that really matters now is this: What's next?

For starters, Scotty Bowman needs to do something he apparently didn't do after last year's Jersey Turnpike Massacre Ñ make some adjustments. With a few exceptions, the Detroit team that lost to Colorado was the same team that was picked apart by the Devils. The Wings just aren't put together for the playoffs. There isn't enough grit and determination.

Detroit doesn't necessarily need guys that can go out and hurt the opposition, but it does need players willing to go into the corners and muck it up and dig for pucks. The fancy drop passes look good and all, but they don't work in the playoffs. It has been proven two years in a row. At the same time, though, the Wings don't need to completely change the record-setting lineup from this season. It just needs to be tweaked a little. As for my fellow Detroit fans, whose drinking binges are probably just ending, it will be OK.

You have to figure that eventually, even by accident, the Wings will end their Cup drought. Until then, just hang in there. In fact, the worst thing about this latest letdown, at least here in Michigan, is this: It's baseball season, and a lot of us are Tigers fans. Everybody can laugh at that.

Ñ Thankfully for all of us, Ryan White did not do to himself what he would have liked to do to Claude Lemieux. For condolences and other words of wisdom, he can be reached on e-mail at target@umich.edu.