One of these men has watched the Red Wings. The other had someone type "GO WINGS!" and misspell "prestige" on the way out the door.
The hockey site Octopus Thrower did the smart, simple thing: it went to both Michigan Senate campaigns and asked them, straight up, what they make of the Red Wings' ownership mess and the Simon Edvinsson standoff. Two answers came back, and they aren't close.
Abdul El-Sayed says he was at the game when Darren McCarty took on Claude Lemieux. That's the March 26, 1997 brawl Detroit fans still call Fight Night at the Joe, the night the Red Wings finally answered Colorado with their fists. He names the '97 and '98 Stanley Cup championships as the highlights of his childhood. Then he turns it on the people in the owner's box: the recent teams are "a far cry from the Wings I came to love as a kid," they're "stacking losing season on losing season, yet the Ilitch family's wealth has done nothing but grow." He finishes on the Edvinsson holdout as "the latest example in a long series of ownership prioritizing their bottom line over the team and the fans."
Whether El-Sayed was actually in the building that night is his word against nobody's; take it as a personal anecdote, nothing more. But you don't reach for McCarty-Lemieux unless the sport lives somewhere in your memory. You reach for it because it mattered to you.
Now look at what Mike Rogers sent back. Detroit "will always be a coveted destination for the world's top players." The Red Wings "boast one of the league's most storied and respected histories." Original Six. "Tradition, legacy and rpestige." GO WINGS! This reads like a press release a staffer wrote without ever turning on a game, run through spellcheck too fast to catch that "prestige" came out as "rpestige." Both renderings of the quote carry the same typo, so it's real.
The spelling mistake is a minor embarrassment. What he actually said is the real problem. Rogers called Detroit a "coveted destination for the world's top players" in the same week captain Dylan Larkin, a Michigan kid who wanted to be a Red Wing his whole life, is reportedly asking for a trade, while Edvinsson skates overseas rather than sign. Players are trying to get out. Describing that team as a magnet for the league's best shows a man who has no idea what's happening and didn't care enough to check.
The honest version of this story is on the ice. The Red Wings were a genuine power when Mike Ilitch ran them and won four Stanley Cup titles. Since his son Chris took over, the team has spent years out of contention, and now the captain and a prized young defenseman both want out at once. El-Sayed's answer at least looks at that and says something true about it. Rogers' answer pretends it isn't happening.
Grading a candidate on hockey trivia might be a silly standard, and a cautious, neutral statement could pass for professional restraint. Nobody should pick a senator based on who knows the McCarty brawl. But Rogers gave a wrong answer. He made a factual claim about the current team, that top players covet it, that is the opposite of what's actually going on. He just didn't bother to look.
This is the same Rogers whose October ad had him in a bar, Labatt in hand, saying "watching the Red Wings" doesn't "get any more Michigan than that" before pivoting to tariffs and declaring "Canada is not our enemy." Fine message on the trade war. But the Red Wings keep showing up as a prop to look like one of the guys. El-Sayed named a specific night and a grievance against a specific billionaire family. Rogers name-dropped the logo twice and got the state of the team completely backwards.
There's a reason a Republican running statewide won't say a hard word about the owners. Criticizing the Ilitch fortune isn't the comfortable play for that campaign, so you get greatness-by-assertion instead, a team declared coveted and storied while its best players ask for the exit. El-Sayed had the easier lane and still said the sharper thing.
If you want to know which of these two has ever actually sat in the building and cared whether the team was good, you already know. One of them remembered how it felt when the Wings fought back. The other couldn't spell his way through a fan letter.
