Detroit Red Wings fans finally got a reason to exhale on Tuesday when the club locked up Alex DeBrincat on a seven-year, $91 million deal. It was the kind of move that had been expected for a while, and it got done without much drama.
But for all the relief that came with it, the timing raises a fair question: did the Red Wings take care of the easier business before the more important one?
That’s the real issue here. This is not about cap space.
It’s about optics, and about which player the organization should have made the priority. The argument is that Simon Edvinsson should have come first.
DeBrincat’s deal was never going to be a heavy lift. The Cat had made it clear he wanted to stay in Detroit, so there was little reason to think this would turn into a drawn-out negotiation. In that sense, it was the cleaner of the two situations.
Edvinsson is the tougher one, and those are the kinds of matters teams usually want to handle first. If there’s one piece of business that demands urgency, it’s the one that could become complicated. The easier extension can wait.
There is a case to be made for Shawn Horcoff wanting to clear DeBrincat off the board so he could focus entirely on Edvinsson and Dylan Larkin. Still, given how often Horcoff has stressed his desire to sign the 23-year-old defenseman, it would have made sense to press harder there first.
Red Wings GM Shawn Horcoff says he has "zero interest" in trading Simon Edvisson. "Not something I'm entertaining. We want to sign him."
Kudos to Horcoff for taking the obvious step and getting DeBrincat done. Plenty of teams would stall on the easiest item while chasing bigger headaches. Detroit at least avoided that.
Even so, the Edvinsson situation can’t be allowed to linger much longer.
The DeBrincat extension matters because of what it says beyond the player himself. The Red Wings have taken some hits to their image, from the Larkin trade request to the GM mess to the Edvinsson situation. Getting this deal done cleanly helps push back against that noise.
It also sends a message to Edvinsson. The club is showing that it isn’t falling apart.
There was the hiccup with former GM Steve Yzerman and Larkin, but Larkin has kept playing well even after losing his captaincy. Horcoff, meanwhile, is trying to steady things after a rough start to the season.
There may even be a little hidden value here for Detroit. If anything good comes out of the DeBrincat extension beyond the contract itself, it’s that an Edvinsson deal may not be far behind. The organization has put the right message out there, and now it’s a question of whether that carries over into actual good will.
Sometimes a move like this does more than settle one player’s future. It can shift the mood around the entire team.
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