Before the NHL's 2019-2020 season was abruptly ended due to the COVID-19 outbreak this past March, the Detroit Red Wings, once a dominant team that had made the playoffs for 25 consecutive seasons, was the absolute worst team in the league. After playing 71 games, the Red Wings compiled a record of 17 wins, 45 regulation losses and 5 overtime losses, for a paltry 39 points. To put things in perspective, the next worst team in the Eastern Conference, the Ottowa Senators, had amassed 62 points in 71 games. Any coach who had overseen such an abysmal performance would be hard put to explain it as anything but a failure. But what if Donald Trump had coached the Red Wings this past season? What would he have to say?
"Yeah, sure you could look at the statistics and say yeah, that's really bad. Look at the Red Wings! They're the worst team in the NHL! But if you want to be honest, we really were one of the best teams in the league. A lot of those games were close games, really, really close. We lost by one or two goals. If things had gone just a little bit different, if we had scored one or two more goals and the other teams had scored a little bit less, we would have won those games and we would have made the playoffs. Plus the refs were really unfair to us, calling penalties on us that we really didn't deserve, which gave the other teams some power play goals. So a lot of those losses were because of the refs, who were really, really vicious to me. The fake news media won't talk about that. If you only listened to them, you would never know that I coached one of the best teams in the NHL this season."
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