The Detroit Free Press posted a column from Matthew Horn of the Fremont News-Messenger, a rather small newspaper covering Sandusky, Ohio, this morning.
It’s a good column which discusses the Red Wings’ depth chart after the team’s free agency moves and the Klim Kostin and Alex DeBrincat trades, and its conclusion regarding the “State of the Yzerplan” (as it were) is an honest one, if optimistic:
Ken Holland waited too long to start the rebuild and Yzerman was left with bare cupboards.
The Red Wings were tied for the second playoff wild card in the Eastern Conference on February 25 last season. They were shut out by Tampa Bay and lost twice to DeBrincat’s Senators in demoralizing fashion.
Detroit suffered after trading defenseman Filip Hronek, Jakub Vrana and [Tyler] Bertuzzi. It missed the playoffs the last seven seasons.
[Alex] DeBrincat’s arrival can only mean Yzerman thinks Detroit is ready for a player with a paycheck to help it win. It’s the type of step you take with the postseason in mind.
Finally, the Yzer Plan includes such a venture. There are no guarantees the team wins more games.
Fans hope Yzerman knows who to trust to make it happen in Detroit again.
Continued; if I may be blunt, Yzerman surrounds himself with the best hockey minds that he can possibly find in people like Shawn Horcoff, Dan Cleary, Nicklas Lidstrom, Niklas Kronwall, Kris Draper, Kirk Maltby, Jiri Fischer and the pro and amateur scouts…
But the person he trusts the most to make moves is himself, and that’s important. As I said almost a week ago, the “Yzer-timeline” works at its own pace, patience of the fans and especially the press be damned.
He definitely had to tear down what was left of Ken Holland’s team to start from scratch prior to last season, too, so I’d argue that we are really only in year two of the “Yzerplan” as is fully visualized, despite the fact that Yzerman is in his fourth year as the Red Wings’ general manager.
It’s hard to be patient at this point, with the Wings having missed the playoffs for seven straight seasons…
But the “Yzer-timeline” is still in its early stages, in terms of the GM having both the coach behind the bench and player personnel on the ice, so we Red Wings partisans have to remember that it takes time to both tear down and to rebuild.
I’m not saying that the concept that Yzerman’s rebuild is still “nascent,” i.e. just beginning in terms of realizing its full potential, makes it any easier to wait for the team to be competitive, but it at least makes what Steve is doing more understandable.
Hollands absolutely buried this franchise so deep that it was gonna take Yzerman at least 3 years to dig out of just the bad contracts. How long did it take to get rid of Weiss, Nielsen and Abdelkader’s contracts?
Not to mention his last five 1st round picks were awful. Only two are left on the team and only one (Rasmussen) is real contributor. That type of drafting would set back any franchise, especially one that had zero superstar talent once Datsyuk and Zetterberg were gone. I honestly believe that Yzerman took over the worst roster in the NHL back in 2019 and Holland would’ve been fired if not for his past success with the team.