‘Foggy window’

Daily Faceoff’s Matt Larkin attempts to discern the “Stanley Cup windows” of the Eastern Conference’s teams today, and he suggests that the Red Wings, Buffalo Sabres and Ottawa Senators are rebuilding teams with a “foggy window” ahead:

Detroit Red Wings: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Wings GM Steve Yzerman made his move too early in the rebuild, before he’d assembled enough true star-grade prospects, and has painted himself into a corner now. It started in summer 2022 when he signed Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot and David Perron. It continued the next summer with the big contract for J.T. Compher. All those moves made Detroit better – but only enough to push them to the playoff bubble while taking them out of the running for Draft lottery picks.

Now you have a strange hybrid operation in which the Wings have built around Dylan Larkin, Lucas Raymond, Alex DeBrincat and Moritz Seider but are supported by a brigade of modest-ceiling veterans, including Kane, Compher, Copp and new additions Vladimir Tarasenko, Erik Gustafsson and Cam Talbot. If you look at Detroit’s incoming prospects, there are plenty of good ones, from Marco Kasper to Nate Danielson up front to to Simon Edvinsson on defense to goaltenders Sebastian Cossa and Trey Augustine. But there is no future scoring champion in that group. Detroit became a middle of the road team a bit too early, and I’m not convinced it’s good enough to escape that tier.

Continued; I would like to see the Wings play with a younger and leaner roster, but I just don’t think that the Wings are as screwed as Larkin suggests.

I understand that the Wings have had to rebuild their prospect pool as well as their roster, and while yes, Yzerman has been too aggressive in signing veterans in 2022 and 2023, this summer’s signings were more judicious, despite the players’ ages, and I think that the Red Wings are indeed in the “mushy middle”…

But it’s up to the team to get out of it by incorporating younger players and continuing to improve the roster via trades and free agency as the team slowly builds its way back to playoff contention.

In the interim, it’s going to take the Red Wings proving a lot of people wrong, as they did in 2023-2024, to make progress in the eyes of pundits.