Debating the Yzerplan III: FAILURE or Hope?

Some thoughts about the Red Wings at Christmas 2024

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Since I’ve been writing (occasionally) on this Substack, I’ve written two sets of pieces examining the so-called “Yzerplan”, a nickname for the Detroit Red Wings rebuild since Steve Yzerman was hired as GM in April 2019. The first was a set of two comprehensive pieces back in the summer of 2023, where I argued it was too early to know anything because most of Yzerman’s picks weren’t on the roster yet. Then there was this past summer, where I had a series of takes on the team that once again revisited the Yzerplan, which mostly came to a similar conclusion but did voice some concerning trends, amidst some general optimism.

Now we must revisit the topic once again. On the doorstep of Christmas 2024 the Red Wings find themselves in dire straits in a near-term sense. After just barely missing out on the playoffs last season, this year has seen the team crater to second-last in the East. Only the dystopian Buffalo Sabres are preventing Detroit from falling to the basement, now ranking below a Montreal squad still openly in the dredges of a rebuild, who swept them this past weekend. Their -19 GD is only one better than Chicago, a team also still in the tanking phase.

Things have gone disastrously wrong this season, leading many in the national media to declare that the Yzerplan has FAILED. Yet, there are simultaneously local writers writing that “the rebuild has succeded”, because younger players on the roster are performing well despite the struggles around them. So what’s going on here? Is this rebuild cooked? Or should we still have hope despite the disappointment of this season? As someone firmly agnostic on the Yzerplan 6 and 18 months ago, I will do my best to update the takes today and also fill in the less hockey-knowledgeable readers on how we got here:

The bad 2024-25 Red Wings and how we got here

So yeah, these current Red Wings suck. To the untrained viewer, which is a lot of folks in the Detroit market, it might be pretty shocking. If you’re not a hockey junkie like myself, you watched this team win a bunch of games and battle close to the playoffs last year and now a similar roster is tanking. That comes as a surprise to most, but to those tracking the data, there were issues lingering under the surface.

The Red Wings shot 11.6% last season, one of the highest marks in the league, and shooting percentage is often fickle. After playing games fairly evenly in the first half of last season, the team was increasingly outplayed down the stretch. Their March cold streak that ultimately cost them the playoff spot was a bit of warning sign as well and by the season’s finish, they graded out as one of the lowest 5v5 expected goals teams in the league. Expected goals aren’t actual goals blah blah blah, but the reality is most of the best teams in expected goals are the teams that win.¹ You don’t want to be 26th in the underlying metrics, plain and simple. Some shooting percentage luck covered that up, which the untrained observer won’t necessarily notice.

This year they’ve sunk a bit further in the underlying metrics but not all that much. The difference is now the bounces aren’t going that way and a team getting out-chanced with regularity is having the goals more closely align with the chances. Personally, I don’t think the talent on the Red Wings’ roster is befitting of the analytical profile they’ve generated (I’ll discuss that in coaching), but I don’t think this is a good roster by any stretch, which is why the team is not in a playoff spot.

Figuring out how the Red Wings, eight years since their last playoff appearance, are still being a lottery team is a long journey. It starts with the rebuild beginning its first few years under a GM who had little idea what he was doing (Ken Holland). The Red Wings had been in a rebuild for 2 years when Yzerman was hired and hindsight revealed to us that they’d made zero progress. Yzerman was starting clean because Holland’s final four drafts (2015-2018), which saw him select five times in the first round, produced almost nothing of value. He picked in the top ten twice and the best player he got is a third line forward with a career high of 33 points in the NHL. Holland made 34 selections over his last four drafts and in all he handed Yzerman one player of note, a solid defenseman in Filip Hronek.

The rebuild was going to take longer than it should for reasons Yzerman couldn’t control, so we are going to look only at the last five years. Yzerman’s strategy of building the team has been slow and steady. He had the 6th overall pick in the ‘19 Draft handed to him by Holland, before leading the team on three tanking years of various flavors. After picking thrice more in the top 10, Yzerman decided it was time to try and improve, making several UFA signings in the summer of 2022. The team improved some more but was still subpar in ‘22-23, though competitive for awhile before tanking at the deadline.

The Red Wings made more signings in the summer of 2023, plus a notable trade for Alex DeBrincat, and then embarked on their “good” season of 2023-24. They were in the hunt all year and seemed likely to make the playoffs at the end of February. Then they added a jersey patch for a freakin’ garbage collection company, saw their captain get injured, and the team tanked in March. The Wings rebounded a bit and had a good shot at the playoffs in April but were unable to defeat the Capitals twice in two key games and missed out on the playoffs via tiebreaker. Then in the summer of 2024 the team retained a few players like Patrick Kane but lost several notable contributors at D/F, swapping them out for similar but different names. Fast forward to the fall and the pucks have not been bouncing right and the result is a 13-16-4 record.

[Amy Irvin/The Hockey Writers]

Where the Yzerplan has failed

Again, the “failed” isn’t declarative, but rather a header for the part where we should talk about mistakes that have been made. Even conceding how Holland screwed Yzerman over (thus we’re starting the Yzerplan specific rebuild clock at April 2019), it’s not good to be dreaming about the draft lottery with an unwatchable product in the sixth season of a rebuild. Mistakes were made to get to this point. I don’t really think they are fatal mistakes (we’ll engage the optimism part in the next section), but we can’t ignore this part as Yzerman defenders would like to. So now let the hate flow through us…

An under-discussed reason for this current predicament is the fact that the Red Wings’ amateur scouting department did not do its job in the 2019/20 drafts, Yzerman’s first two drafts. No, I’m not talking about the first rounders, as those were very good selections. But that’s less about amateur scouting, because everyone (including the GM) is very involved in a first round selection. Those are the most scouted, debated, followed picks in an organization and in hockey broadly. It’s the 2nd-7th rounds where you lean on your amateur scouting, from the low level scouts up to the scouting directors, to do the work, with less direct involvement from the GM.

Those guys didn’t pull their weight, because Detroit picked 19 times outside the first round and four/five years later not a single player is an established NHLer or very likely to be one, with only two players having a shot. Albert Johansson (2nd rounder, 2019) is on the team as a depth player this year, TBD on him. William Wallinder (picked 32nd in 2020²) is in Grand Rapids with a shot to play. The door has more or less closed on anybody else playing games.

Which is rough! Later round picks do take longer to develop, but home run 2nd-7th rounders pop much quicker and by now you can typically get a good sense of who might be a steal. Right now, there don’t seem to be any steals. For example, in the 2019 Draft Chicago got Alex Vlasic (a good young cornerstone D) in the 2nd round, Washington got Aliaksei Protas (27 points in 32 games as a 6’6 forward) in the late 3rd round, and Arizona/Utah got Mattias Maccelli (57 points last season) in the 4th round. In the 2020 Draft, when the Red Wings picked Wallinder, they could’ve selected JJ Peterka (one of Buffalo’s only bright spots, 24 points in 32 games) or Brock Faber (one of the best young D in the NHL).

They didn’t royally screw up, but the Red Wings took a lot of picks, as rebuilding teams should, in those first two drafts and they didn’t exactly come up with any Brad Holmes bangers in the 2nd/3rd/4th rounds. You’d expect with that many selections to at least get one or two. The Red Wings with Brock Faber and Aliaksei Protas would be a much better team (#analysis). I’m not asking for the 1989 Red Wings draft, I’m just asking for a couple legitimate NHL players from the non-first round. You need those kinds of guys to hit to have a quicker rebuild, if you’re only picking once in the first round each season because you have 19 spots on a hockey team to fill.

Which is a pretty big change from Yzerman in Tampa. The Lightning had the best amateur scouting operation in the NHL when Stevie Y led the Bolts, unearthing stars from the mid to late rounds, and even off the UDFA scrap heap. His Red Wings scouting staff is not even in the same universe unfortunately and it’s worth pointing out that Al Murray, the scouting czar in Tampa, didn’t come with Yzerman to Detroit. I’m not saying that Al Murray made Yzerman one of the league’s best GMs, but I am saying that it’s a lot easier to build a Stanley Cup Champion when your amateur scouting team is mining future 50 goal scorers and MVPs in the 2nd/3rd rounds.

All of this is why, in year #6 of the rebuild, very few Yzerman draft picks are on the team. Some of it is developmental style, as the Red Wings still have some of their old identity of over-ripening prospects, something they were famous for back in the dynasty years.³ I think that applies more to the 2022/23 picks, but also if you hit a home run on a pick, they force their way onto the roster. Lucas Raymond was on the team a year after being drafted and Moritz Seider probably could’ve (he made it two years after and then won Rookie of the Year). There haven’t been enough home runs in the early period of Yzerman’s drafting.

In a rather crucial decision, Yzerman chose to swerve the team out of full-on tank at one of the worst possible times. Look, I’m not a fan of tanking forever because of the culture of losing effect (see: Buffalo, Anaheim, Detroit Pistons). But there’s also a bit of timing luck involved with rebuilding and Yzerman’s peak tank years coincided with some weaker drafts, 2019 in hindsight, while 2021 and 2022 were obviously weak years at the time. 2023? Loaded. Teams like Chicago and San Jose that got to start their all-out tank period beginning in 2023 had it much easier than Detroit, who were making a decision whether to continue a culture of losing to keep on tanking in search of a true difference maker at forward or actually begin to turn it around.

I understood why they started to push to sign guys, but the result is picking 9th in 2023, a draft that had five possible high skill forwards available. Detroit wouldn’t even have had to win the lottery (after all, that’s never happening to this team) but merely finishing near the bottom like a past year would’ve netted an Adam Fantilli or a Will Smith or a Matvei Michkov. Not just an ostensibly higher skill prospect than a Nate Danielson but also a guy who could be in the NHL more quickly. I always say it never pays to pick between 6 and 12 in the draft, bad but not bad enough. The Red Wings, unfortunately, have been the kings of picking between 6 and 12. Some of it is lottery luck, but some of it was a deliberate decision, which is another area of possible criticism for the Yzerplan.

So without good young players to fill the roster ASAP, you need established NHLers. Here we can see that Yzerman has had some successes, but also some egregious misses that have driven the team into suck territory. The trade for Alex DeBrincat was a good one, even with a somewhat underwhelming first season. He’s not a true star but he’s a mid-20s forward who scores you 30 goals if you give him good players to play with. DeBrincat isn’t on a crazy contract, only cost a late first rounder to get, I have no problem with that. I think Yzerman’s goalie moves have also been solid, Alex Lyon giving the team good goaltending and Cam Talbot has been awesome this year.

Unfortunately the acquisitions on defense have been atrocious. The decision to sign Ben Chiarot repulsed me the moment it happened and not much has changed since then. Chiarot was really bad his first year in Detroit, actually serviceable last year, but so far this season may be the single worst defenseman playing meaningful minutes in the NHL. His track record before Detroit was spotty, someone who never passed the eye test (nor the analytics test) for me, but NHL GMs were higher on him. Giving Chiarot four years was a major blunder.

Acquiring Jeff Petry is okay, they gave up nothing to get him and he has a small salary, but Petry is asked to do too much. Signing Justin Holl made no sense from the start, as the Red Wings did not have a Jake Muzzin-style hoss on the left side to support Holl. Erik Gustafsson this past summer was a gadget signing more than anything else. Jettisoning Jake Walman for a shockingly high cap dump cost was maybe the most baffling move anywhere in the NHL this summer.⁴ The pro scouting on defenseman has been terrible, assembling a veteran core that cannot form a remotely competent second pair, while asking its young defensemen to shoulder all the weight. You bring in veteran D to alleviate the stress on your young players, not tax them even more. That’s what Detroit has done.

At forward it’s been less of a blunder, but still not very inspiring. Patrick Kane gave the Wings good play last season, a nice Yzerman signing, but Kane has regressed significantly this year, either because of age/health-related decline or motivation. Vladimir Tarasenko has not gotten going in Detroit, while the rest of the roster is filled with solid two-way forwards who are fine on a good team but not fit to carry weight on this Red Wings team. JT Compher and Andrew Copp, two longer-term signings the past few summers, are players I have a lot of time for on teams with star power at forward like a Colorado Avalanche. The Red Wings are not that team.

The pro scouting errors at defense reveal a concerning over-reliance on size, veteran traits, and name brand value, perhaps best exemplified in the fact they’ve tried to acquire Jacob Trouba twice.⁵ But the forward decisions in the pro scouting department reveal a glaring lack of creativity and risk-taking, which is less talked about but just as important. My favorite example of a team willing to take risks in their pro acquisitions is the team who has pulled off the best re-tool on the fly in the NHL, the Washington Capitals.

Two years ago a bad Chicago Blackhawks team cut bait with Dylan Strome, a 25 year old center and former top 3 pick with offensive skill, who was coming off a season scoring at a 57 point pace. He was available for any team to sign, for a reasonably low cost. The Capitals signed Strome, while the Red Wings signed Copp. I’m not here to hate on Andrew Copp; I would never do that to a fellow Ann Arborite and Emerson School alum. But Copp was a safe choice. A solid player, works hard, plays good defense, scores a bit but not a lot. The best case for signing Copp was that he might be a 50 point center who could play on a 2nd line. Strome was more of a risk, an up-and-down player without a defensive profile, but the best case was a first line producer. 2.5 years later and Strome has scored 65 points, 67 points, and now 38 points in 32 games this year, driving Washington’s 1st line as the Caps are 22-8-2. Copp is still the same solid player he’s always been… playing on a 3rd line.

In Detroit Yzerman has signed forwards who could reasonably complement a team of elite forwards while having zero elite forwards. Safe, two-way, hard-working, good intangibles dudes. Copp and Compher are clones of the same player for god’s sake, and they extended Michael Rasmussen, another similar guy. The result is a roster of dull forwards who cannot score outside of their top line. If you’re going to try and build a team out of pro acquisitions (while you wait for your prospects) that can win games and compete, you need to take far more risks and be more opportunistic than Detroit has.

You need to sign a Dylan Strome. You need to try and snag Kaapo Kakko in a trade when the Rangers are going to dump him. Or Andrew Mangiapane when the Flames are offloading him. Maybe try and offer-sheet Dylan Holloway to take advantage of a cap-strapped Oilers team. How about giving it a shot to give second-chances to young guys who haven’t quite worked out at their old teams like Kirby Dach, Alex Newhook, or Patrik Laine? I’m not saying all of those moves referenced, made by other teams, worked out (or are going to work), but it’s the process I care about. Trying things, thinking outside the box, taking swings. Assuming some risk for the possibility of broader payoff. There’s very little risk in making JT Compher and Andrew Copp two of your highest paid forwards. There’s also very little pay-off in doing so either.

Even when Yzerman has broken the mold of the boring, two-way forward, he’s still strayed from risk. The all-offense, no-defense scorers he’s targeted (basically since things went wrong with Jakub Vrána) are as safe as you can get, the fading images of once-great stars of the NHL, like Kane and Tarasenko. You know what you’re getting in guys like that, again lowering the assumed risk.

There’s just not enough creativity in order to win for a team that isn’t promoting much draft talent to the NHL ranks yet. The one way you can get around it is by hiring a coach who can elevate the talent and I decisively think they do not have that in Derek Lalonde. I don’t know if Lalonde is a bad coach, as he’s been given a difficult hand to play. But he’s also shown little to make me think he’s an above replacement level coach.

A major coaching-related thread with this 2024-25 Red Wings team is their offensive underlying numbers. Evolving Hockey has the Red Wings as the worst team in the NHL at generating expected goals at 5v5, 2.13 xGF/60. I certainly don’t feel that this should be a good offensive team, but that feels system-related more than personnel-related. My hunch is Lalonde looked at the defensemen on his roster and decided that the team needed to pack it in to keep goals out of the net, at the expense of neutering the offense.

I don’t think it’s a good trade-off but I get why he got there. I referenced earlier that I don’t think the talent on the roster should be producing worse underlying metrics than Chicago. That feels like some coaching-related underachievement. Perhaps the most damning is the PK, as special teams are certainly coaching-influenced. While Lalonde deserves credit for a good PP, it’s completely wiped away by Detroit having one of the worst PKs I’ve ever seen in the NHL, despite Yzerman having compiled all those two-way, defensively oriented forwards who (in theory) should be good PKers.

I also don’t see any evidence Lalonde is a motivator of any kind, something that seemed apparent during the March losing streak last season. He seems to be more of a bookish, X’s and O’s coach, but I haven’t seen enough from that X’s and O’s side. I have nothing against Lalonde personally, but I don’t see him as the coach of the future and he hasn’t been able to do what John Tortorella has in Philly, rinsing every last ounce of production out of the roster while elevating and developing players.

So in the end you have a roster that doesn’t have many young players with upside, instead being filled by big clunky defensemen who can’t play anymore and hard-working but unskilled forwards who can’t score being led by a first-time head coach who doesn’t have any answers on how to elevate the group. I was deeply concerned about the defense group in my summer piece and the combo of major decline in Kane and general shooting% regression have nuked the team. I am surprised it’s this bad (coaching erosion another factor, more than likely), but I’m not surprised this team is bad. The roster, for all the reasons we’ve mentioned, isn’t nearly good enough.

[Justin Berl/Getty Images]

Why the Yzerplan still has hope

Despite all of these negative indicators, I don’t think the long-term future of the Red Wings is horrid *if management can improve moving forward*. We’ll address that “if” at the end, but my point is that if I were ranking all the NHL teams based on how attractive of a GM vacancy they’d be to me if all 32 GMs were fired tomorrow, the Red Wings would be fairly high up the list. They have some really promising young building blocks, no killer long term contracts, and a pretty good prospect pool. There’s plenty for a skilled GM to work with.

That starts, ironically, with the blue line, the very place that pro scouting has failed. Moritz Seider and Simon Edvinsson were two of the three most important players coming into the season, two of the first three first round picks Yzerman made as general manager. The two have played together on a pair this season, prior to Edvinsson’s injury the other day, and they have been superb.

They are playing like one of the best defensive D pairings in the league on a team that is not good. Oh, and they play the toughest minutes. Per HockeyStatCards.com, Seider faces the second-toughest workload in the NHL behind only Ryan McDonagh (a 15 year veteran), and Edvinsson has the third-toughest workload, right behind Seider. Lalonde puts them on the ice against the other team’s best offensive players and they consistently break even, having won their 5v5 expected goals and shot shares. It’s unusual to see young defensemen get thrown to the wolves like that (Max Bultman’s recent piece discussed how much harder Edvinsson’s workload is than his 2021 Draft piers) and even rarer to see the pair be able to tread water, let alone win their minutes. But Seider and Edvinsson are doing it. They don’t generate a ton of offense while on the ice, but even less is generated against them.

Seider is 23, playing the most minutes of his career (nearly 25 a night) while Edvinsson is just 21. I don’t know if either will ever reach the rarified air of being able to seriously challenge for a Norris Trophy, but the returns right now suggest to me that both are top pairing performers in the future, if not already. To have two young defensemen looking like that, one on the left side and one on the right side, is a great place to be in as you begin to build a team for the future.

Lucas Raymond, only 22 years old, continues to play very good hockey. He’s on pace for an 80+ point season, which would be excellent on a team that isn’t creating any offense. Yes, he plays with the team’s best players (usually Larkin and DeBrincat). That trio has been a legitimately good top six NHL line, the only one the Red Wings have had. I think Raymond is going to be a top line scorer in the NHL, the degree to which I’m not sure of. Yes, there’s a huge gap between “Matt Boldy top line winger” and “Nikita Kucherov” top line winger. Whether Raymond becomes merely a very good top line winger or a superstar matters in terms of degrees, but I’ll take a very good top line winger every day. To see Raymond continue to look like one after netting 30 goals for the first time last season is nice.

I also think the Red Wings have a strong prospect pool, albeit one missing that blue chip scoring stud. They still look good in net, as I discussed in the summer, with Sebastian Cossa and Trey Augustine succeeding for their respective teams. Their defenseman pool has some players I’m intrigued by as possible bottom-of-the-lineup players (Shai Buium, the aforementioned Wallinder), but is led by Axel Sandin-Pelikka, who is on pace to shatter SHL scoring records for a defenseman in his age cohort, continuing to track towards being a top four, PP QB sort of guy of the future.

At forward they have a trio of “safer” picks who I think will be solid NHL players. Marco Kasper has been getting his feet wet in the NHL this season, while Nate Danielson is settling into Grand Rapids. I think they are probably both 2nd/3rd line centers rather than top of the lineup guys, but I think both will be good in their roles and will be very tough for opposition players to play against. Michael Brandsegg-Nygård is a long way away but the safest bet is a 2nd liner of some sort (if not, bottom six, as his hard-working, defensive focus will translate). Carter Mazur, Jackson, MI, native, has been down in Grand Rapids and I think will have a role in the NHL as a 3rd line gritty SOB with a bit of offense.

I like that the Red Wings have tried to contrast their tendency to pick safe, two-way forwards in the first round with bigger upside swings throughout the rest of the draft beginning in 2021. Dmitri Buchelnikov is the most interesting prospect in the system, excelling in the KHL, the second-best league in the world, at 21. His scoring rates are on pace to rival some of the best U21 KHL seasons due to his skill and creativity. Buchelnikov’s smaller size and iffy skating are the reasons for his boom-or-bust profile; he’s either going to be a legitimate Dude who changes the Red Wings and gives them a major draft steal, or he will not play in the NHL at all (a la Nikita Gusev).

But it’s a lottery ticket I like having. I’m also intrigued by Jesse Kiiskinen, a Finnish kid with a big shot they got from Nashville who’s having a very nice season in the SM-Liiga. Max Plante, Emmett Finnie, and Amadeus Lombardi are three more offensively minded prospects I’m interested in following who could have the sort of scoring/skill upside that this team badly needs more of at the NHL level. If one hits, that’s a big deal too. I don’t think it’s a best-of-the-best prospect pool, but it’s a pretty good one, and that portends well for the future too.

As I mentioned, for all the follies I’ve complained about at the pro level, Yzerman hasn’t wrecked the salary cap books. Chiarot and Holl have only one more year on their deals, while Petry is up after this one. Copp has two more after this and Compher three more, but with a rising cap those $5.6 and $5.1 M cap hits aren’t a huge concern anyway. There’s no Jonathan Huberdeau or Chandler Stephenson anchors. They aren’t eating any substantial dead money long term like the Minnesota Wild the last few years, or Nashville/Buffalo now.

And for those who are concerned about a lack of “star” upside in the prospect pool, that the rebuild is doomed because there isn’t a Bedard or Celebrini, I will revisit what I said two summers ago: you don’t have to draft your entire core. Build a good hockey team and then use your pro scouting to be aggressive in continuing to add talent through UFA/trades. The Florida Panthers and Vegas Golden Knights both added two star forwards through the trade market (Tkachuk/Reinhart; Stone/Eichel) and then won the Stanley Cup. Winning through defense, goaltending, and two-way centers is how the St. Louis Blues and LA Kings won their Cups. It’s a totally valid model and all the building doesn’t have to be done through the draft.

In summation, we’ve seen very positive returns from Yzerman’s first three first rounders to reach the NHL, legitimately big time building blocks who you can begin to move pieces around. There could be a good bit more on the way as his 2nd/3rd/4th round drafting looks a bit better the last few drafts than his first couple. And even the acquisitions and contracts that we complain about aren’t very long term and they aren’t large hinderances to building the team moving forward. They have assets, they have some young pieces, this isn’t a totally dark outlook even if 2024-25 is an objective disaster from a “making the playoffs” lens.

So, what now?

Having looked at both sides of the coin, it’s time to tie the loose threads together and give a bit of a diagnosis at this moment about the “Yzerplan”. At this moment in time, I don’t think that the Yzerplan has failed, but for the rebuild to go where it needs to, some alteration in a change of course is going to be necessary. As in, if the Red Wings’ front office continues to operate as they have to this point, I do not believe they will produce a contending team. So some shift, be it in FO personnel or thought process, is going to be needed to get from Point A to Point B .

They have not yet demonstrated an ability to hire a high-level coach and their error rate in pro acquisitions has been far too high. Amateur scouting has been better, but not dramatically so (yet), with a still missing element of offensive pop in the farm system. Which, if it persists, puts even more pressure on the pro scouting to find it, which isn’t a promising statement.

The approach to building the team hasn’t been fully rotten, as I have argued, but it also hasn’t been good enough. So changes will be needed, not just things like “hiring a new coach and getting new players” but improving in the talent identification, acquisition, and cap management when it comes time to add those players.

The most obvious path to me is for Yzerman to do a Jim Harbaugh 2020-21 offseason move, where you keep the CEO head of the organization but do a staffing shakeup underneath him. I wrote in the summer about my fears with the personnel in the front office, particularly that it is a collection of former Red Wings players, ostensibly hired because of their years of service to the organization as players. I likened the Old Boys Club collection of former players to that of Montreal, Edmonton, and Philadelphia in their post-glory years, teams that also stocked up on former players to assemble and coach their teams. That model of front office building brought very little success to those franchises and I have grave concerns about it and the Red Wings.

I would like to see fresh voices join the organization, perhaps people who could audition for the gig by saying “I would not sign Ben Chiarot or trade for Jacob Trouba”. I don’t think Steve Yzerman is a bozo; he had far too much success in Tampa and has had a decent process in Detroit overall.⁶ But it seems evident to me that the organization Yzerman had beneath him in Tampa was miles better than the organization he has beneath him in Detroit. Pro scouting, amateur scouting, player development, all of it. It’s on Yzerman to improve the organization, to fix the process that has led to glaring mistakes resulting in a cellar dweller team in year #6.

On which note I suppose we should mention the rest of this season, because personnel/staffing changes likely won’t be until the offseason. The Red Wings currently have the 6th-worst Pts% in the NHL. They won’t be able to out-tank San Jose or Chicago, or likely Anaheim (though maybe). But Nashville on paper has more talent and isn’t too far off. Buffalo, in theory, should break their eternal losing streak at some point. If the Red Wings realize the season is lost and put it in the tank, they would have a decent shot at getting a top six draft pick (and a real crack at top five).

Should they tank? I would try to lean into it. I don’t want to outright tank. I don’t want players like Seider and Edvinsson to suddenly play poorly, so the team loses. That said I wouldn’t complain if in February they both are ruled out for the year with toe soreness *wink wink*. I think this rebuild would benefit heavily from one more high pick, to snag a high-end, high skill forward. The lottery balls will never reward the Red Wings, but it would be extremely cool if they did for once in our lives. Get a Michael Misa or James Hagens or Porter Martone, etc. in this prospect pool and okay, we’re cooking. Someone who can raise the ceiling and push your Danielsons and Kaspers down the future lineup.

If you want to keep Lalonde around to help the tank, I’m here for it. Sell off Kane, Talbot and whoever else you can. Be cautious with injuries, snatch another pick as high in the top 10 as you can, and then go into a bit of an organizational reset in the offseason. It’s not so dire that we need to blow it up, but perturbed fans are rightfully angry at Yzerman at the results to this point. He wasn’t left much of anything from Holland, but the results should be better than this unwatchable, lifeless carcass. There’s an element of truth in both despair and hope but to make Detroit truly Hockeytown, USA again, some amount of shift in decision-making will be needed. Let’s hope Yzerman delivers it.

1. The teams who played for the Cup last year were #1 and #5 in xG at 5v5 that season

2. The league now has 32 teams so if that draft were today, Wallinder would be a first rounder

3. Kronwall, Tatar, Nyquist, etc

4. The trade remains pretty indefensible. Walman struggled last season, yes, but he was asked to do way too much. This current Red Wings team, with Seider/Edvinsson taking the hard minutes allowing Walman to get a lighter workload, would’ve been perfect for him. Acknowledging that cap dumping Petry/Chiarot would’ve been much more difficult (if not impossible), if my options were dumping Walman at the cost of a 2nd round pick(!!!) and not dumping him and abstaining from signing mostly cooked Vlad Tarasenko in UFA, I’d gladly pick the latter. They moved out a decent 28 year old defenseman for a very high cost and then used the cap space to sign a 33 year old forward with 4 goals in 32 games. Good lord.

5. Thank the good lord the cap space couldn’t make it work

6. He clears the Jim Benning bar for me