Nobody does it better...

No professional team does a better job of securing the right talent than the Wings. Look at their record since the mid 1990s for proof. Ken Holland always says the team is looking for players who can skate and are good in puck possession/puck pursuit. That's why the team's third set of D is a combo of Lebda and Lilja, with a future Hall-of-Famer in Chelios. Look at the late draft picks, from Franzen to Lidstrom. It is simply amazing that these guys slip through the early rounds to the Wings year after year.
The Wings find more guys to fit their puck-possession skating game than any team in hockey. While most teams are filling their first two lines with scorers then scrambling to fit pluggers and muckers into fourth-line spots, the Wings counter with layers of talent.
For example, is there are better young, third-line scorer IN THE GAME than Filppula? I mean, he can fly, he's so strong on the puck and he finishes. And this kid Helm; he absolutely flies, he's 21, and they get him in the fifth round?
Look, I know this sounds like a die-hard fan, but how can anyone who follows this team really bad-mouth the last decade or so, even the horrible first-round losses to Anaheim, Calgary, LA and Edmonton?
This team has given us nearly 15 tremendous years and three Stanley Cups. If you remember the late 70s and early 80s, then you know where I'm coming from ... look it up. In a 20-season stretch beginning in 1967 the Wings missed the playoffs 16 times.
One thing we might consider, as fans and followers, is the contributions of Bryan Murray in the early 1990s. He did an excellent job of securing some talented players, and the Wings seemed to really take shape then. Murray re-shaped the organization from a rough-and-tumble, veteran group that had reasonable success under Jacques Demers, to a finesse team. When Bowman came in, he had a lot of the pieces to the puzzle. And when he needed to plug in tough, young guys like McCarty and Lapointe, they were in the system. So were some of the Russians, like Konstantinov and Kozlov, and Swedes, like Saint Nicklas.
Murray gets a lot of teams close (Anaheim, for one, and maybe Ottawa) but he doesn't seem to be able to win the big one.
Hey, we should give the guy credit. He deserves it.