I’ve continued to battle significant depression and anxiety while attempting to at least show up on Twitter over the past half-dozen games. I suppose that, given the Red Wings’ loss to Montreal on Tuesday, we’re looking at the last 5 games of the team’s 2024-2025 season here.
Another playoff-less spring means another postmortem examination, and, ultimately, another autopsy conducted upon the Red Wings’ personnel, coaching staff and management.
I’ve found that, on social media, the mainstream media, the blogosphere, sports talk radio and the podcast universe, there’s a significant desire to want to find a single person to blame for the mess–be it Steve Yzerman, Dylan Larkin, coach Derek Lalonde, etc. etc.
I believe that it’s just unlikely that one person is at fault here.
There’s more than enough blame to go around between the Red Wings’ players, coaches and management.
As the regular season concludes and we listen to the post-season media availabilities, we may receive some further clues as to what the locker-room dynamic might have been, we may find out how well coach Todd McLellan felt he and his coaching staff felt that they did in attempting to salvage the Red Wings’ season from about its halfway point, and we should glean some clues as to what Steve Yzerman and the management team are considering going forward.
And we should address the elephant in the room here:
Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman is not going to lose his job. He is not on the “hot seat” for the team’s under-performance, though there is clearly pressure upon him to deliver a playoff-worthy product next season after being passed by the Senators and Canadiens in the rebuilding process.
Continue reading Assigning blame when we don’t have all the answers (yet)