Of Red Wings-related note from The Athletic this morning:
- Sean Gentille posted an article which discusses whether 9 coaches are on the “hot seat,” including Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde (based upon Vegas odds of coaches being fired):
Derek Lalonde, Detroit Red Wings
Why he’s here: For the first time in a long time, there seems to be actual restlessness among the Wings fan base, and there’s some reason to question the direction of the “Yzerplan.”
Why he shouldn’t be: Internal expectations tend to matter more than anything else, and there’s no reason to believe Detroit’s are high enough to dictate a change, let alone one that’d send out a good coach just starting his second season. The better question is probably what it would take for Lalonde to lose his job at all, even in the offseason. Team-wide defensive regression and a point total below last season’s 80? Maybe. In Max Bultman’s list of realistically bold predictions for the Wings, though, he’s got them at 88 points.
2. The Athletic’s “Down Goes Brown,” a.k.a. Sean McIndoe, offers “oddly specific” predictions for all of the NHL’s 32 teams:
Detroit Red Wings: Last season, Moritz Seider was a trendy Norris pick, with a lot of us tagging him as the next blue-line star who’d follow in the footsteps of Cale Makar and Adam Fox by pushing into the very top tier of defensemen. It didn’t happen; he didn’t even get a vote. Is this the season? Yes, but only sort of, as Seider finishes sixth in Norris balloting.
3. And Max Bultman wonders aloud whether the Red Wings have the right to call themselves a rebuilding team any more, given their imports of veteran players during the offseason:
[Alex] DeBrincat’s first observation of his new surroundings last month was still correct: Despite being a rebuilding club, the Red Wings’ average age of 27.7 is much more similar to last year’s Stanley Cup Final participants, Vegas and Florida (27.6 and 27.7, respectively), than to fellow Atlantic Division rebuilders Ottawa (26.5), Montreal (25.7) or Buffalo (25.5).
After a flurry of veteran signings and acquisitions this offseason, Detroit’s opening-night roster is set to include zero first- or second-year NHL players.
And yet, most would agree, they still find themselves behind the Sabres and Senators in that rebuilding process. That’s created a bit of dissonance between the slow, methodical plan Yzerman set out to execute, and the more ready-made roster he has recently assembled.
“Obviously with the trade deadline last year, it seemed like we were going to continue to get younger,” Larkin said this week. “But we brought in — I wouldn’t say really old guys — but we brought in a lot of guys that are late 20s and guys that have been around, and played a lot of hockey games.”
Continued (paywall); if a team is rebuilding until its “next generation” is taking a leading role, then the Red Wings will be rebuilding for a couple of seasons to come. The fact that Detroit’s blended in some “old guys” doesn’t stop the rebuilding process–it merely alters its trajectory.