After seven seasons running the Detroit Red Wings, Steve Yzerman is gone from the GM chair, and the obvious question hanging over his tenure is whether the modern game simply moved faster than his plan.
That’s a harsh way to frame it, but the results invite it. Detroit still owns the NHL’s longest active playoff drought at 10 years and counting, and that stretch surely mattered when the organization decided to make a change. Along the way, other clubs kept climbing past the Red Wings, including the Buffalo Sabres, who finally ended their NHL-record 14-season playoff drought and leapfrogged Detroit.
Yzerman’s approach was built around the draft, and there’s no denying his fingerprints are already on the roster. Moritz Seider, Lucas Raymond, Simon Edvinsson, Emmitt Finnie, Axel Sandin-Pellikka, and Albert Johansson are all Yzerman picks. The rest of his legacy will depend on how players such as Michael Brandsegg-Nygard, Carter Mazur, Nate Danielson, William Wallinder, Carter Bear, Trey Augustine, and JP Hurlbert, among others, develop from here.
But the draft alone hasn’t been enough to turn Detroit into a contender, and last spring’s Stanley Cup final was another reminder of that. The Vegas Golden Knights have basically ignored the draft as a primary team-building tool, while the last two Cup winners, the Carolina Hurricanes and Florida Panthers, leaned on major trades and free-agent additions to bolster their homegrown core. Yzerman, by contrast, was too hesitant to make the kind of bold moves that can accelerate a rebuild.
Detroit also never fully committed to a real youth movement. Seider, Raymond and Edvinsson were trusted with major roles, but the organization still felt stuck between two timelines. Yzerman kept leaning on the familiar Detroit method of letting prospects marinate with the AHL Grand Rapids Griffins, and that approach even led to goalie Sebastian Cossa, a 2021 first-round pick, being traded after he had played less than a full game in the NHL.
The result was too many middling veterans filling spots that could have gone to younger players. While Buffalo, Ottawa, and Montreal embraced their youth and moved ahead of Detroit in the standings, the Red Wings kept treading water.
There was also the analytics piece. The Red Wings talked about it, and former coach Derek Lalonde often referenced the underlying numbers, but the club never seemed fully committed to what the data could provide. That matters, especially with owner Chris Ilitch said to be highly impressed by Tigers GM Scott Harris and the way analytics have helped fuel that club’s turnaround from basement dweller to playoff team.
Whether Ilitch saw a similar gap in the hockey operation may be answered by the next hire. The replacement for Yzerman will say plenty about what the Red Wings want to be going forward.
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Now the bigger question around the rebuild is not just what Yzerman wanted to do, but what he was actually allowed to do. Reports from the Detroit Free Press suggest some of his roster plans may have met resistance higher up the chain, adding another layer to a tenure that has already been judged harshly by fans looking for progress. In a market that has waited a long time for a turnaround, the debate over who deserves the blame is only getting more complicated. [Read more 🡒]
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If Detroit does go down that road, the ripple effects would likely reach well beyond one trade. The idea would be to lean harder into youth and development, giving younger forwards a chance to take on bigger responsibilities while the organization continues searching for its next direction. It is the same sort of tension that has shown up elsewhere in the city, where the line between trying to win now and planning for what comes next has started to blur. [Read more 🡒]