Detroit Red Wings: Jiri Hudler Becoming a Casualty of Detroit's Healthy Start

It's something an old boss of mine commonly referred to as a "high-quality problem."

A situation that may be stressful, unexpectedly demanding or difficult to deal with—but in a good way.

Detroit's hockey team has a high-quality problem early on this season in that they have more able-bodied forwards than they have space for them to play.

Contrast that with last year's dismal start and constant parade of players to the long-term injured reserve list, and one can see that clearly, this is a problem Detroit is just fine with.

At the beginning of the season, Detroit's top two lines quickly established themselves as the fast, aggressive, high-scoring trios they were supposed to be.

All the way at the bottom, Detroit's fourth line, consisting of Patrick Eaves, Darren Helm and Drew Miller also lived up to their billing as a defensive, fore-checking, penalty-killing three-headed monster.

All was right at the top, and there was nothing wrong at the bottom, however, Detroit's problem was in the middle.

The well-documented struggles of Detroit's third line, centered by Mike Modano, became the only glaring problem in Hockeytown, which, in and of itself, wasn't really that bad of a dilemma.

With the scoring coming early and often from his top six, and the defensive duties being handled ably by his fourth line, head coach Mike Babcock didn't need to worry much about his third line's struggles when it came to winning hockey games.

However, in an effort to get the trio going in the right direction, he inserted Justin Abdelkader into the line in place of Jiri Hudler.

Since then, Detroit's third line has been their best.

With Abdelkader on the wing, the Mike Modano line has produced 10 points over the past four games.

They combined for just six over the previous eight.

With this success, the problem of what to do with Jiri Hudler arose, and at least for two games, the answer was simply, "nothing."

However, Mike Babcock felt that Hudler was too good of a player to be kept out of the lineup so, he subbed him in for Drew Miller on the fourth line the next game, and then, booted out Patrick Eaves to make room for Hudler the next game.

However, Hudler didn't fare much better on line four than he had on line three.

Additionally, putting in Hudler, a skilled and experienced offensive player, didn't exactly provide an upgrade to the fourth line.

The trio of Helm, Miller and Eaves has found chemistry early on, so suddenly switching out wingers to make room for Hudler didn't do much to improve the defensive game that those three were so consistently executing as a unit.

In fact, extracting Hudler from the lineup gave the Red Wings, for the first time this year, four solid lines with which to roll—a staple of Red Wings hockey.

This is not to say Hudler should be kept out indefinitely, as Babcock is right in saying he is simply too good to be a routine healthy-scratch, however, the results with Hudler out of the lineup are too good to ignore.

So, what does this mean for Hudler, a man who was counted on to be a major secondary-scoring factor (if there is such a thing) this season?

Well, it's far too early to label him as trade-bait, and Detroit would be loathe to even think about such a thing as Hudler is bound to catch fire at some point (and Ken Holland surely doesn't want another "Ville Leino incident" on his hands).

He could be used to sub-out a player on one of the top two lines, but, until they show signs of trouble, no coach, and certainly not Mike Babcock, is going to tinker with star players' units to give a struggling bottom-six forward more playing time.

Ultimately, Hudler, and Mike Babcock for that matter, have little choice but to wait for an injury to pop up that would nicely open up a spot for Jiri Hudler on the roster.

Imagine that.

After the season they had last year, the Red Wings could not only stand, but perhaps even benefit from a player getting injured.

As terrible as it sounds, that's Hudler's ticket to an extended stay in Detroit's line-up that could provide him ample opportunity to re-establish his game.

Were I his teammates, I'd stay clear of the man when eating a banana as he just might decide to throw the peel at someone's feet.

Follow Matt on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MAhutter12