Turning Steve Yzerman into a pinata isn’t beneficial to Wings hockey discussion

The Toronto Sun’s Steve Simmons suggests that Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman isn’t getting the job done in Detroit:

Not long after he won an Olympic gold medal in Sochi as architect of the most dominant any Canadian hockey team has been at a modern Winter Games, Steve Yzerman and his Tampa Bay Lightning played for the Stanley Cup for the first time.

Stevie Y seemed on top of the world then — the great player turned great hockey executive. He had done the pressure-filled thankless work to bring Team Canada to gold and put together the best team in the NHL.

That was then. Now we wonder: Where did that Steve Yzerman go? How did he lose his way after returning home to run the Detroit Red Wings, the only NHL team he ever played for?

This is five seasons now of Yzerman in Detroit and nothing much to show for it. The Wings missed the playoffs the three years before he was named general manager and other fancy titles, and have missed the playoffs five straight years under his direction. They have one great draft pick — defenceman Moritz Seider — who was selected just days after Yzerman was hired in 2019, which meant he really had little to do with the pick.

Since then, they’ve added Lucas Raymond with the fourth pick overall, Simon Edvinsson with a sixth pick, Marco Kasper with an eighth pick and Nate Danielson at ninth in the draft.

Chopped liver, I guess..

This year in free agency, Yzerman added some unusual choices such as goalie Jack Campbell, diminishing forward Vladimir Tarasenko and defenceman Erik Gustafsson, who has played for seven teams the past five seasons.

The Red Wings might be the 12th best team in the Eastern Conference this season. Might be. It’s a long road back for what used to be the brightest operator in hockey. He used to be Steve Yzerman.

Continued; that’s a pretty flerbing lame critique if you ask me.

The rebuild in Detroit clearly hasn’t gone along as planned, but that’s not a surprise. Yzerman had to tear down what Ken Holland had built (or not built) before working on rebuilding the team, and the Red Wings’ management team is just getting to a point where they’ve developed a pool of prospects that should start to vie for NHL jobs over the next couple of seasons–a pool of prospects that many analysts say is one of the best in the NHL.

After a middling free agency performance, sure, this is the perfect time for the Steve Simmonses and Mike Valentis of the world to bag on Yzerman for having “lost his golden touch.” But the reality is that he’s a human being and a general manager who makes mistakes like everyone else.

Yes, the Red Wings are probably in year seven of a ten-year rebuild. That sucks for sure. But Yzerman has admitted that Detroit’s behind its organizational developmental curve a bit, he’s admitted that he feels pressure to win, and he’s stated bluntly that he’s going to stick with a patient, methodical approach.

Moreover, the amateur scouts are drafting well (overall), the Wings are holding their own in free agency while simply not being a destination for A-level players yet, and the management team is slowly and surely rebuilding a core of young players which doesn’t need to rush along the “next wave” of talent in order to develop into a team that can make playoff runs on a consistent basis.

Detroit’s not there yet, mostly because no GM has a magic touch except those who craft Stanley Cup-winning teams–and even Bill Zito’s having a hell of a hard time keeping his Stanley Cup-champion Florida Panthers together this summer.

Steve Yzerman is human, not some sort of magical hockey savant. He has a front office that he’s built which happens to have a Red Wings greats around him in Nicklas Lidstrom and Kris Draper, glue guys like Shawn Horcoff, Dan Cleary and Kirk Maltby, Niklas Kronwall and Jiri Fischer running the Griffins, player development department and are sprinkled among the Wings’ pro scouts.

Together, they’ve made some mistakes, definitely. And this year’s free agency performance was risk-averse to the point that it was fair-to-middling.

But Detroit is still attracting players to the franchise with one hand tied behind its back, it’s still rebuilding its prospect pool, and its coaching staff is looking to take the team’s flashes of dominance and terrifying, dramatic comeback wins this past season and harvest the best thereof over the course of a more consistent and less heart attack-inducing season this year.

The team’s still building itself up. There’s no reason to tear down the GM or anybody else in the organization for clicks’ sake. Bagging on a guy for being a human being is pretty boring if you ask me.

Critique Steve Yzerman as you will. That’s fine and dandy. I’m not gonna be an Yzerman apologist here. And everybody in the organization is responsible for their actions and their screw-ups. But “the Yzerplan” is still in progress, and there’s no reason to freak the hell out about the GM supposedly “losing his golden touch” simply because he’s still rebuilding a team from the ground upward.