“Don’t trade away your high picks.”
That warning, offered by an NHL source after Steve Yzerman was no longer the general manager of the Detroit Red Wings, lands as a useful reminder for anyone watching the Vancouver Canucks’ rebuild under Ryan Johnson.
The message is simple: if you’re trying to build something real, you have to find young stars with your first-round picks. You can be aggressive everywhere else, but not by giving away the best young talent you’ve got.
Draft picks alone don’t create a contender. Smart choices do.
Yzerman was hired in 2019 to fix a franchise he once captained, and the expectation was obvious. He arrived with a huge reputation from his work in Tampa Bay and with the kind of name that could signal a new era in Detroit. Instead, the Red Wings never reached the playoffs during his run.
That’s a brutal outcome for a team with 11 Stanley Cups and one of the league’s deepest histories. Detroit has now gone a decade without a postseason appearance, with that drought reaching back to the final years of Ken Holland’s two-decade stretch as GM.
Under Holland, and with Yzerman as captain for part of that era, the Red Wings spent a long time as the NHL’s winningest team and captured three Stanley Cups. The return of Yzerman was supposed to reconnect the franchise with that standard.
It never really happened. There were flashes, but no sustained progress, and the blame sits with Yzerman and the failed “Yzer-plan,” as fans called it.
The rebuild also started with a handicap. Three of the four first-round picks made by Holland’s staff before Yzerman took over turned into disappointments: Evgeny Svechnikov, Dennis Cholowski and, most importantly, Filip Zadina. The Red Wings passed on Quinn Hughes, who went to Vancouver one pick later.
All of those players reached the NHL, but none became major difference-makers. Yzerman’s first three drafts did bring real first-round value with Mo Seider, Lucas Raymond and Simon Edvinsson. After that, though, the first-round returns thinned out.
The bigger issue was what came after the first round. There simply wasn’t much there.
Yzerman’s two 2023 first-round selections, Nate Danielson and Axel Sandin-Pellikka, have both reached the NHL and may become quality players, but neither projects as a true star. Elite Prospects’ J.D. Burke put it bluntly: “They hopped on so many landmines,” he said.
Burke also pointed to the bigger problem with Detroit’s approach. “You look at the Danielson, (Marco) Kasper and Michael Brandsegg-Nygård picks and you can maybe justify each of them in a vacuum, but not for a team that needs franchise players,” Burke added. “Even in a world where they hit on all those of those three picks, none of them has franchise player upside, so it wouldn’t really do anything for a team like Detroit.”
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