According to Helene St. James of the Detroit Free Press, the Red Wings have a project to do this season, and that is to get forward Valterri Filppula mad.
The reason?
Many within the locker feel that there’s way more offense in him than the 40 points he has given the team the past four seasons.
To help Filppula, the team placed his locker next to fellow European Henrik Zetterberg in hopes that he (Filppula) would develop a bond with the talented Swedish forward.
The good news is Zetterberg may have discovered something about Filppula…
“I think it has to do with his personality,” Zetterberg said. “He’s too nice. It’s OK to be nice off the ice, but he has to be a little more selfish on the ice, not passing all the time, or not always thinking about others. He has to think about himself and do it himself. We’ve had this talk, and hopefully he will be more selfish this year.”
Filppula agrees that he should shoot more…
“I definitely should have a lot of opportunities to get to play a lot and when you play more, you expect more of yourself, too,” he said. “I want to do better than I did last year, but that’s the mindset I go through every season: I want to do better.”
Going forward Zetterberg believes he has the solution to firing up a Finn, and that is to “talk about all the good things about Sweden.”
Re: Detroit Free Press