I had an epiphany about Hossa... What if the blunder was actually signing him in the first place?
If you consider that:
A. His last ditch effort to retain Hossa likely lead to his lowballing and departures of Samuelsson and Hudler (a departure that gave them a whole 'nother headache).
B. Holland did kind of (correctly) predict from the beginning that Hossa's one year deal could end up just being a
rental.
Then what if instead of blowing nearly every dime of cap space he had on renting one elite player in free agency (which left them with no space to make any other notable upgrades or even recall decent players for most of the season without someone going on LTIR), he signed a reasonably priced upgrade over the outgoing Dallas Drake and then saved $4-5M (which is like $16-20M at the deadline) to eventually commemorate the 10th anniversary of his wild 1999 trade deadline and brought in 2, 3 or even 4 secondary pieces to bolster the line up at the deadline?
They could've added another top 4 D (Schneider, Derek Morris, Leopold and Montador) which would've pushed Lilja or Lebda to the pressbox and probably kept Chelios and Meech there for the duration of the playoffs... Could've brought in some decent center depth (Domenic Moore, Vermette and Pahlsson) for the bottom 6 so they don't have to rely on Kris Draper playing injured, extra grit (Moen), and some secondary scoring depth (Guerin, Recchi, Antropov, Kotalik and Erik Cole... Olli Jokinen and Justin Williams also moved, but had remaining term that likely wouldn't work for Detroit).
I'm sure the fan base would've been pissed at all the assets traded away, but given the assets they had at the time, it probably would've been long forgiven by now.... Aside from Helm, Abdelkader, Ericsson, Smith and probably Howard (an eye popping list in and of itself...), their list of "top prospects" at the time consisted mostly of notable future gems such as Kindl, Leino, Daniel Larsson, McCollum, Dick Axelsson, Jan Mursak, Cory Emmerton, Evan McGrath, Matias Ritola, and Joakim Andersson.... And on top of that, I'm sure some teams still saw upside in a 24YO Derek Meech buried behind a solid top 4, and the Wings also still had their 2009 1st rounder, which they would use to eventually trade down and select Ferraro and Nestrasil...