The Athletic’s ‘model’ predicts an 80.9-point performance from the Wings this season

Bleh. The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn, Sean Gentille and Shayna Goldman preview the Red Wings this morning, and they’re predicting that a team that earned 91 points this past season will earn 80.9 points…As well as predicting that the Red Wings are going to be an “also-ran” for some time to come:

Here’s what they say about Luszczyszyn’s “model,” which predicts that the Wings have an 8% chance of making the playoffs…

We admit, this does feel low for the Red Wings. Detroit had a respectable 91 points last season and looks poised to finally take the next step — but the model isn’t quite convinced this team is legit. At least not as currently constructed.

At 80.9 points, the team’s forecast is actually below where they were to start last season (85 points) which may surprise some. That’s a byproduct of uninspiring underlying numbers last season (weaker overall than the year prior when Detroit earned just 80 points) and a tepid offseason that saw the team arguably get worse.

Perhaps the core can take a massive leap or a prospect will surprise, but the Red Wings still have a lot of holes that have been filled rather poorly via free agency — especially on defense. With the rest of the East looking a lot better, this may be a season primed for disappointment.

Then there’s some bagging on Raymond and Seider’s statuses as ranked by the Luszczyszyn/Gentille/Goldman player tiers, which were quite hard on a “fringe star player” and a middling defenseman given his hard minutes, respectively…

So their bottom line comes down to defense, and Seider, specifically:

When it comes to the Red Wings’ playoff hopes, the biggest issue is the team’s top four, which enters the season with a combined minus-10 Net Rating. The league average is plus-nine and the average among projected playoff teams is plus-14. That deficit is almost the exact difference between Detroit being a near 50-50 playoff bet and where the Red Wings land instead.

It starts with Seider, Detroit’s only notably above-average defender who currently grades out as a decent No. 2. The burden Seider faces in his role is extreme, but even with that in mind, his results haven’t screamed franchise defenseman since his rookie season. Or elite defenseman. Or even No. 1 defenseman.

This season the burden stands to grow based on the talent around him, with Jake Walman out of the picture. Walman wasn’t ideally slotted on the top pair, but he was at the very least a better option than Ben Chiarot or Määttä. Putting Chiarot next to Seider feels like taking the tires off a Mustang and hoping it still drives. Few players have been a consistently bigger drag on results over the last few seasons than Chiarot, which is no surprise given he can’t defend his blue line, can’t retrieve pucks well and can’t get pucks out.

A lot of Detroit’s forecast hinges on just how good Seider can be. The tools are obviously there for him to be very good, he just hasn’t put it all together yet — with his environment being a major factor in that. If Seider gets there this season, it would go a long way toward pushing Detroit toward the playoffs — it just doesn’t seem to be the likeliest path based on what he’s shown recently.

Edvinsson has the potential to change all that, especially if he has a season as impactful as Seider’s rookie year. At the very least Edvinsson enters the season with top-four upside. That’s a major step up from what’s around him, and he may be the team’s second best defender on Day 1. The Red Wings will need even more from him to get to where they need to go.

Continued (paywall)…

All I can say is a very Midwestern, “Yup.” We knew that the media was going to suggest that the Red Wings remain irrelevant and that Steve Yzerman’s management group hasn’t done enough to improve the team, but The Athletic seems to have a particular statistical “in” for Detroit.

Just as last year’s ranking predicted something like 83 points for the Wings, and just as they suggested that Raymond and Seider weren’t impactful enough, never mind the supporting cast around them, last year, the same lines are being utilized this season. Raymond is a fringe star, Seider isn’t a #1 defenseman, the team has no prospects (if you recall, the Wings finished 9th in The Athletic’s prospect rankings, far below where they rank on other websites’ publications…

I dunno, the easy thing to suggest is that, among mainstream hockey media websites, The Athletic just “has it in” for the Red Wings. The harder thing to do is to suggest that there may be slivers of truth in their analysis, flawed as it might be, and that they’re not wrong on two fronts.

1. I would agree that the Wings need to continue upgrading the blueline, be it by continuing to develop prospects, and/or by bringing in another strong two-way defender via trade this upcoming season, to help Seider out…
2. And the Wings definitely don’t have a superstar in their prospect system, so they need several players to out-perform their predicted “upside” in order for the team to succeed in the future. I’m a biased observer here, so I believe that the Wings’ prospects can deliver.

But this morning, it sure feels like these tropes are becoming predictably harsh on the Red Wings’ rebuilding plan, or the supposed lack thereof. Slow and meticulous isn’t an easy thing to deal with as a fan for certain, but slow and meticulous seems to equal slow and incompetent in The Athletic’s eyes, and that’s frustrating.

Speaking of which, The Athletic’s Arthur Staple picked “one emo or punk song” for every NHL team, and here come those tropes:

Detroit Red Wings

‘Keep On Knocking’ by Death

The Wings’ big turnaround always seems to be a year away. General manager Steve Yzerman spent his summer grinding every dollar in talks with Detroit’s most important young forward, Lucas Raymond, and its most important young defenseman, Moritz Seider — Yzerman also spent making salary-dump moves to sign Vladimir Tarasenko and bring back Patrick Kane. There’s a ton coming in their pipeline, but this year doesn’t look promising. The greatest decade in the Detroit punk scene was the 1970s, and Death was one of the best punk bands out there all those years ago. It’s not lost on me that the 1970s was the worst era of Wings hockey and the current playoff drought, eight seasons and counting, is slowly starting to match those bad old days.

“You know we tried
Baby, we just missed
Keep on knockin’, keep on knockin’ on the door”

Continued (paywall); Detroit’s done a lot more than just establish itself as a punk archipelago, from Motown to Iggy Pop to techno, and it’s really effing easy to suggest that this is another “Dead Wings” era under a “Dead Things” GM.

It seems to have become “hip” and “in” to suggest as much, honestly, and I think that we’re seeing the message that the vast majority of NHL previews are going to say about the Wings over the next week.

As I’ve said for a while now, it’s up to the team to prove the naysayers wrong. It will be an uphill climb in the difficult Atlantic Division…

And no, it isn’t easy to have faith in this organization after Ken Holland’s tear-down had to be torn down to the bare bones by Yzerman, whose management group finds itself going “uphill both ways” in terms of free agency and drafting, but there is something to be said for having a little faith, even if it is a skeptical, questioning brand of faith.

Being a sports team’s fan is like a marriage in a lot of ways. It takes work to maintain, from both sides, and it’s just a time where the team’s going to have to over-perform its media expectations to fulfill fans’ hopes for a brighter future.