Both the Free Press’s Helene St. James and the Hockey News’s Adam Proteau suggest that the Red Wings’ underwhelming free agency performance has already doomed the team to another season without playoff hockey.
It’s way too early to make that determination in my books, but St. James believes that the Atlantic Division is too stacked for the Wings to make a meaningful move up the standings…
Consider the competition within the Atlantic Division: The Florida Panthers look like they’ll be a playoff lock for years to come. The Toronto Maple Leafs lost Mitch Marner, but are still a playoff team. The Montreal Canadiens have added defenseman Noah Dobson to their rebuild. The Tampa Bay Lightning still have an elite players and Andrei Vasilevskiy in goal. The Ottawa Senators are a team on the rise.
That’s five teams just within the division who project to finish ahead of the Wings in the 2025-26 standings. In the Eastern Conference’s other division, the Metropolitan, the Carolina Hurricanes, Washington Capitals, New Jersey Devils and New York Rangers all look like they’re capable of making the playoffs.
Things change, of course, and there’s often a team that looks playoff bound only to drop out (like the Rangers last season). But almost everything would have to go right for the Wings to make it: Both Gibson and Cam Talbot stay healthy – in fact, everybody stays healthy – and there’s more growth in the performances of the younger players, like Seider, Kasper, Raymond, Johansson, Söderblom and Berggren.
The harsh reality is that it’s incredibly hard to build a winning team. The Panthers were forged around Aleksander Barkov (second overall pick in 2013) and Aaron Ekblad (first overall pick in 2014) and it wasn’t until 2023 they had enough surrounding pieces to win the Cup. The Wings haven’t drafted that high since their playoff streak ended in 2016, and suffered severe setbacks by the previous administration flubbing on first-round picks in 2015 (Evgeny Svechnikov), 2016 (Dennis Cholowski) and 2018 (Filip Zadina) – all of whom washed out of the organization without any return.
it is a sad outlook for the franchise, but unless Yzerman finds a way to swing a trade for at least one elite player, the playoff drought appears headed for a 10th year.
And the Hockey News’s Adam Proteau feels that the Wings’ personnel is simply deficient as manged by GM Steve Yzerman:
There are definitely some NHL GMs out there who are feeling the pressure to have their team produce positive results in 2025-26, but Yzerman is probably right at the top of the list of the GMs facing the most pressure. He’s been on the job running things in the Motor City since April of 2019, and he has nothing tangible to show for it.
Yzerman’s incredible playing career has given him a long runway to try and stick the landing as Wings GM, but even hockey icons only get so much time to turn things around before they are added to the list of people who couldn’t get the job done as managers. And that’s where Yzerman is now in Detroit.
Yzerman can point to youngsters in the organization who he believes will step up and help the Red Wings make it to the playoffs next year, but here’s a better metric of sorts – which Detroit youngster is truly a generational talent? Defenseman Moritz Seider qualifies in the minds of some observers, so let’s be generous and say Seider makes the cut. After that, what current Wings talent is top-10 in the league in any regard? Detroit doesn’t have those truly elite, high-end players. And when you miss the playoffs for that many years, you should’ve been able to draft and develop a couple of top talents.
That may be Yzerman’s biggest sin as Wings GM – not tanking for top players, which is the most proven way to land the foundational talent needed to compete for Cups over the long haul. Yzerman might’ve drafted Chicago Blackhawks center Connor Bedard if he’d done that. He may have wound up with San Jose Sharks center Macklin Celebrini if he’d done that. He might’ve landed New York Islanders defenseman Matthew Schaefer if he’d done that. Instead, it’s been nothing but mediocrity for the Red Wings,
From this writer’s perspective, if you’re not good enough to be a playoff team, you should be doing everything in your power to land a top draft spot. And it has never felt like Yzerman and Co. have been willing to do that. There have been excuses left and right, and as things have unfolded not in Detroit’s favor, Yzerman has grown testy with the media and unable to lay out a specific plan Wings fans can look to for comfort. And he also can’t point to season-after-season improvement in the win column.
And now, the Red Wings are entering a season in which no one will be projecting them to make the playoffs. The defending Cup champion Florida Panthers will be a playoff team next year. The regular-season Atlantic champion Toronto Maple Leafs will also be a playoff team, as will the Tampa Bay Lightning. And after that, the Ottawa Senators, Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins will be in a ferocious battle for one of the final playoff spots in the Eastern Conference. You can lump the Wings into that latter group, but the reality remains – making the playoffs will be an extremely tall order for Detroit.
I still believe that the Red Wings have the young talent to take a step this season, especially if the team’s management group is able to add to the core with a meaningful trade addition or two, but perhaps that’s just me.
