Daily Faceoff’s Scott Maxwell is ranking every NHL team’s salary cap situation, and while he feels that the Red Wings are kind-of-sort-of trending upward…He’s not a fan of Steve Yzerman’s offseason moves, or two of them, anyway.
As such, he ranks the Red Wings as having the 22nd-best salary cap situation in the NHL:
22. Detroit Red Wings
Good Contract Percentage: 16th
Quality Cheap Deals: 15th
Contracts with No-Trade/No-Move Clauses: 9th
Dead Cap Space: 27th
Quality of Core: 26th
Cap Space to Skill Differential: 9thAs far as teams recovering from terrible cap situations go, I don’t think anyone had it worse than the Red Wings in the late 2010s. We’re starting to see the Yzerplan take action as the Wings slowly work their way up this list, although part of the reason the Wings aren’t higher is because of some of the moves Steve Yzerman has made, even as recently as this offseason.
Where the team really takes a hit is its dead cap space and the quality of its core. The dead cap space isn’t necessarily Yzerman’s fault, as almost $3 million of that is due to him having to clean up Ken Holland’s mess with the buyouts of Justin Abdelkader and Frans Nielsen, although I’d argue that Yzerman could have ridden those deals out a year or two more since he didn’t necessarily need the cap space. But what is his fault is the quality of core. The Wings have just two players locked up to long term deals, and both were 2022 free agent signings in Andrew Copp and Ben Chiarot. Part of that is because their actual young core is in a transition phase with their deals, with only Filip Zadina, Robby Fabbri, and Ville Husso locked up longer than two years. But if anything, that should be a sign that you don’t use cap space to sign players like Chiarot and Copp when you’re going to need that space in the next couple seasons.
Not all of Yzerman’s signings this offseason were bad, though. Husso’s deal complements Alex Nedeljkovic’s for a solid duo in net, Olli Maatta and Mark Pysyk’s deals impress on the back end, and David Perron and Dominik Kubalik look great up front. The Wings also boast some solid cheap deals, although maybe not enough for a team on the up and up. At the end of the day, the biggest issues for the team are the uncertainty of their top players with their contracts up, as well as the fact that they currently have seven replacement level players signed for more than $1 million. There’s no question Yzerman has proven himself to be one of the smartest executives in the business, but he has a few blind spots in his rebuild in Detroit that might get in the team’s way in the future when they really look to be competitive.
I admittedly don’t like the Chiarot deal at all, even if he plays like the Ben Chiarot that was great in Winnipeg, and the Wings admittedly have a LOT of dead cap space thanks to the Abdelkader and Nielsen buy-outs…
And, given that the cap is going to rise significantly in two years, when the NHLPA has repaid its pandemic escrow earnings to the NHL, and the new TV deals’ bucks kick in, I was okay with the Copp signing. I think that he overpaid a bit for a second-line center, but sometimes you have to do those things.
Where we disagree the most is obviously on the “quality of core,” because I believe that the Red Wings are improving. No mention of Larkin, Bertuzzi, Seider or Raymond here, and that’s an eyebrow-raiser for me, but…We’re all free to disagree.
