Jonathan Ericsson

The Detroit Red Wings franchise is peppered with a litany of prime time performers who stepped up their game when given the opportunity and kept the Big Red Machine running. 

Guys like Pavel Datsyuk, Henrik Zetterberg, Kris Draper, Sergei Fedorov, Tomas Holmstrom were either drafted very late or came to Detroit for virtually nothing (literally $1 in Draper's case) and have managed to blossom into All-Stars.

Ansar Khan of Mlive.com reported that in today's practice, Jonathan Ericsson was paired with Nick Lidstrom. 

Ever since the 2008-09 Stanley Cup playoffs, Ericsson has been on a downward spiral.

Looking at the Detroit Red Wings website, and one would be very surprised to find that the Red Wings have a three game win streak.

The symbol for "injured reserve" is a double star (**) and it appears five times (should be six because Dan Cleary is out for a while) on Detroit's web site.

Now, once again, the Red Wings are forced to go to the well and this time call up Doug Janik from Grand Rapids to replace the injured Jonathan Ericsson.

The Red Wings are slowly getting healthier, but still need you players to assume a bigger role on the team.

Today, I’ll take a look at the defensive players that the Wings are hoping can step in and step up.

As a Red Wings fan and a writer, I am having some difficulty understanding why this Wings squad constantly "forgets" to show up to games that seem to be easy victories. Yes, yes I am aware that no games are easy in the new NHL. Nevertheless, one would assume that teams should not "s*!t the bed" against the lowly Edmonton Oilers.

Some fans will blame the injuries, the losses to free agency, or the team getting old. But this just should not be the case. There are other things to blame as well. Most of these things are easily identifiable, but slightly harder to fix.