Somewhat ironically (in the, “Surprise! Isn’t that a coincidence!” sense of the term, not the Alanis Morrissette definition thereof as “darkly funny”), both Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff and the Hockey News’s Connor Eargood discuss the Red Wings’ depth this afternoon.
Duff offers an article which focuses on the concept that the depth chart is better-equipped to give coach Derek Lalonde and GM Steve Yzerman a substantial team to work with–up front, on defense, and in goal…
Depth is a popular talking point among NHL teams and the Detroit Red Wings are no different. However, when the Red Wings discuss the depth of their roster, it isn’t merely talk. It’s a fact of life that should prove beneficial to the club over the course of the 2024-25 NHL season.
“I look at our group and our team today, the roster today and compare it to last year’s group,” Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman said. “It’s a little bit different, might be a little bit better fit as far as roles for players with where they where they play.”
No matter where you look, there is an abundance of NHL-caliber players to fill roles. For instance, among the club’s top-six forwards, there are five players who’ve posted 30-goal campaigns in the league – Dylan Larkin, Patrick Kane, Alex DeBrincat, Vladimir Tarasenko and Lucas Raymond. Kane, DeBrincat and Tarasenko all show 40-goal seasons on their NHL resumes.
And Eargood suggests that the Red Wings’ attempt to push for a playoff spot cannot come at the expense of the Wings’ usage of their younger players, using Albert Johansson as an example of a rookie whose waiver-exempt status expires this season, without an NHL game played on his resume:
No matter how much a player can light up the AHL, playing in the NHL is a different beast. To tame it, players benefit from getting call-ups where they can compare their progress to where they need to be. [Simon] Edvinsson did it, playing 23 games across two late-season call-ups that have him primed for his upcoming rookie season. Out of the three young forwards competing for spots, only Kasper has played in the NHL with a single game at the end of 2022-23.
Players can be effective without having played prior call-ups. Defenseman Moritz Seider and winger Lucas Raymond, the most successful prospects of the Yzerman tenure, made the team out of training camp. However, such a scenario happened with a far less competitive Red Wings team that really wasn’t a playoff hopeful. They weren’t unseating competitive NHL regulars like today’s rookies will have to do.
So if players like [Carter] Mazur, Kasper and [Nate] Danielson could benefit from call-ups, then how does Detroit accomplish this? The Red Wings can’t just throw them wantonly into the fire if they want to be a playoff team. Last season’s playoff push ended one point shy of the postseason, showing how razor-thin playoff margins can be. Any one mistake can have major implications on a season on a larger scale, and rookies have a propensity to make mistakes due to their inexperience.
But when there is an opportunity to play prospects — that is, when NHL regulars get injured, or if the Red Wings underperform and find themselves well outside the playoff picture — then it would do Detroit good to get its youth into some games. Not only would this give its players the chance to grow in full-scale reps, but it would also give Detroit a chance to see what it has and inform future decisions about the lineup with knowledge of how effective its future core might be.
Bluntly: The Red Wings definitely have a lot of depth going into 2024-2025, especially in terms of their top six and bottom six forwards slotting into their respective roster spots, having enough defensemen (though they could use a two-way defender to spell Moritz Seider on the right-hand side) and having enough goaltenders…
But while the Red Wings must develop young players over time in order to succeed, the AHL is a developmental league. At the NHL level, you’re expected to carry your own weight, or you are heading back to the AHL to develop. I can’t quite explain why the coaching staff and management have been so hesitant to recall young players during the tenure of Derek Lalonde, but that’s the way things have played out.
You can’t keep recalling Zach Aston-Reese and expect Marco Kasper to turn heads, of course, but you can’t give up goals against for Kasper’s sake, either.
There’s no “must” here. As Eargood states later in his article, there’s something to be said for “finding a balance,” or finding that happy medium between bolstering the roster with veteran presences when injuries or illnesses strike, and occasionally giving a younger player who’s shined in Grand Rapids a chance to “steal a job” at the NHL level, even over the course of limited minutes of play.
I want to see the team play lean and fast and give “the kids” more opportunities than they’ve received under coach Lalonde, but that’s a discussion that the Red Wings’ management, the Grand Rapids Griffins’ coaches and coach Lalonde end up having when establishing the team’s depth chart–and when assessing in-season changes to said depth chart based upon on-ice performances.
There’s got to be an evolution there, don’t get me wrong–in that sense, I see Eargood’s point and I hear it and I know that it’s the perspective of the fan in all of us, the Red Wings partisan who wants to see these promising prospects succeed.
The problem is that, on occasion, some of these guys don’t necessarily perform, and sometimes you need to bring up an over-ripe veteran to give the roster a kick in the ass in terms of desire and grit and work ethic.
This is an inexact science, and I don’t think that the Lalonde or Yzerman regimes have figured out how to work the margins yet. I hope that this season, something changes, and there isn’t such a hard, fast line between the young players who skate in Grand Rapids and the veterans who are called up to Detroit when injuries strike.
But that’s not up to us. It’s up to the coaches and GM to change their perspective a bit–and players, too, to make themselves indispensable and un-bury-able.
