I’m tired of this narrative. The Hockey News’s Jacob Stoller wrote an article titled: “Will this be the year when the Red Wings’ ‘Yzerplan’ leads to a playoff spot? Don’t count on it,” and you can imagine what it’s about:
It’s been five years since Yzerman took over and the ‘Yzerplan’ took shape. Since then, a Red Wings team that last qualified for the playoffs in 2016 has largely resided in the mushy middle.
They’re in an eight-year playoff drought (five years since Yzerman was hired as GM in 2019), yet they’ve only amassed one top-five pick (Lucas Raymond, selected fourth overall in 2020) during that span. Not good enough for the playoffs, they are also not bad enough for a lottery pick. It’s a puzzling strategy. And for Red Wings fans who are still waiting to celebrate a post-season game at the recently built Little Caesars Arena, it has to be frustrating.
Is this what the Yzerplan was supposed to be? If so, the blueprint needs refining.
“We all would love to make the playoffs next year,” Yzerman has said. “We would have loved to have made the playoffs last year, but ultimately we’re still trying to put together that core of young guys that is going to be together and start to creep into the playoffs and hang around the playoffs and maybe eventually win. So again, that is the big picture, the long-term plan and we’ll stick with that.”
Stoller continues, and you know how it goes, even though he does praise the Wings’ prospect pool.
Now I don’t think that Steve Yzerman is some sort of infallible saint, nor a managerial King Midas who turns everything he touches into gold. He’s made some mistakes since taking the helm of the Red Wings, mostly in free agency, and he’s going to make more mistakes, because he and the management team that surrounds him consist of human beings.
They are fallible, and while they are doing their best to improve the team, it’s bloody hard to do so through free agency when you’re still a fall-back plan for most players, and it’s bloody hard to do when you’re too deep into the draft to snag foundational players of the McDavid-or-MacKinnon variety.
But the Red Wings are where they are at, and the team has a difficult road to take in terms of attempting to build itself into a playoff contender.
I am as frustrated as anyone that the so-called “Yzerplan” is probably somewhere just over halfway through what is most likely a 10-12 year rebuild, and I don’t want Dylan Larkin to spend his entire career captaining a rebuilding team…
But I understand that the rebuilding process takes time, and, for better or worse, I have accepted that the Red Wings’ management are doing it the hard way.
I get really, really tired of the critiques of Yzerman as some sort of boob who’s living off a reputation built in Tampa Bay, or some mediocre moron who’s steering Detroit into the weeds. I think that those kinds of critiques are worth the same amount of my time as those of the few who still suggest that we must defer to “Saint Stevie Y.”
The Red Wings are very much so in the middle right now. It’s not where I want them to be–I want the young people today to see this team contend for a Stanley Cup. But the team is not there yet, and while “trusting the process” can really suck some nights, it’s up to both the team, the coaching staff and the management team to prove their legions of doubters wrong.
It’s easy to pick apart the so-called “Yzerplan.” It’s a lot more difficult to look at the team from a realistic perspective, and that’s where I’m trying to come from as a Red Wings partisan.
Put bluntly, the “Yzerplan” isn’t a crutch. It isn’t a name for something worth nothing but ridicule. It’s just a catchphrase for a general manager’s best efforts and moves–some not-so-smart–which are genuinely meant to improve the hockey team.
Steve Yzerman is probably the Red Wings’ GM for life, and that’s okay. He will steer the Red Wings down the right road. But it’s going to take time.
