Steve Yzerman’s tenure as general manager has produced plenty of Red Wings names that stuck. Some for the right reasons, some for all the wrong ones. But the real challenge is remembering the guys who barely registered at all - the players who slipped through Detroit so quickly they almost vanished.
That’s the fun of this exercise: sorting through the most forgettable additions of the Yzerman era and asking which one disappeared fastest from memory. A few candidates stand out for how little they left behind.
Dmytro Timashov might be the name that kicks the whole thing off. Acquired on waivers from the Toronto Maple Leafs on February 24, 2020, the Ukrainian-born Swedish citizen had trouble getting a work visa for the USA, so he didn’t make his Red Wings debut until well into March.
When he finally did play, there wasn’t much to remember. He appeared in five games and finished pointless.
Mitchell Stephens had a little more staying power, though not much. Yzerman sent a sixth-round pick to Tampa Bay to bring over the center, who had already won a Stanley Cup with the Lightning in 2019-20.
Stephens was handling fourth-line duty fairly well on a bad Detroit team in 2021-22 before a November 13 game against Montreal changed everything. He crashed feet-first into the boards and fractured his ankle.
He ended up with six assists in 27 games, then moved on in the summer of 2022 when he signed as a UFA with the Canadiens.
Carter Rowney is the kind of player you may already be mixing up with somebody else, and that’s part of the point. Even the writer of the source admits to constantly confusing him with Conor Sheary.
Rowney also brought a championship background, having won the Stanley Cup with the 2016-17 Penguins, and he had five NHL seasons under his belt before arriving in Detroit. But he was a healthy scratch eight times in his first 15 games with the Wings, then a January knee injury cost him 17 games.
A March shot block led to a lower-body injury that ended his season. In 26 Detroit games, he scored four goals.
Mark Pysyk’s case is almost in a category of its own because he never actually got into a Red Wings game. Signed as a UFA in the summer of 2022, he came to Detroit with 521 NHL games of experience and the reputation of a steady, if unspectacular, defenseman.
But barely a week after signing, he suffered a ruptured Achilles tendon while doing off-ice training. Surgery followed, and he never played another NHL game.
Then there’s Zac Aston-Reese, who arrived with a more convincing resume than his Detroit stint suggests. He had scored 10 goals the previous season with the Toronto Maple Leafs and came in as a six-season NHL veteran.
None of that translated into much with the Red Wings. He appeared in only three games, collected just a minor penalty, and spent 61 AHL games with the Grand Rapids Griffins.
Those are the candidates on the board, the brief Red Wings who barely left a trace. The question is which one vanished most completely into the blur of the Yzerman years.
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