Daily Faceoff’s Matt Larkin examines the five teams with the longest playoff droughts, including the Red Wings:
- Detroit Red Wings, eight seasons
Last playoff appearance: 2015-16
By summer 2016, GM Ken Holland’s Red Wings had made the playoffs 25 consecutive seasons but were no longer any kind of threat once they got in, limping along as a veteran-laden club loaded with questionable contracts. I asked him whether the 25-year streak had actually become a curse, because it created a pressure to keep winning and handing out veteran deals when it might have been wiser to take a step backward. His response was that he couldn’t bring himself to make a determination about the team five years in the future and that he had to keep trying to win as long as he had a roster constructed to be competitive. He felt a true rebuild would require missing the playoffs five, six, seven years in a row.
Yikes, did those words ever prove prophetic. It took Detroit so long to get out from under the Justin Abdelkaders and Frans Nielsens of the world that the 25-year run indeed set them back badly, to the point Detroit has now gone eight years without making it. It’s debatable whether GM Steve Yzerman acted too rashly in free agency in the past few summers and built a veteran-heavy roster before assembling a strong enough young talent pool, but he has undeniably made the Wings more competitive. They missed the playoffs on a tiebreaker this past season, so even the tiniest amount of progression could halt the drought.
Continued; as we all know by now, a real rebuild takes something like 10-12 years, and the Red Wings are doing it the hard way, without any draft lottery luck. It’s obvious that there’s enough shine off the “Yzerplan” to conclude that the GM is in fact human and not a god-like figure, but other than that, Mr. Yzerman’s methodical rebuild is going about as well as we can expect.
