The Athletic’s James Mirtle answers league-wide questions in a eclectic mailbag feature this morning, and one of the questions he answers involves the Detroit Red Wings’ rebuild.
I’m only going to post part of his answer as it’s particularly long–ten paragraphs:
Will the Red Wings ever be a free-agent destination? Is the Yzerplan a massive failure? — Derek F.
Here’s the gist of his answer:
Is Detroit as sexy of a UFA landing spot as Vegas or Dallas right now? No. But it’s also not one of the teams that’s going on the top of players’ limited no-trade clauses like some other markets. It’s still an Original Six team, with a strong history and a new building, and it’s also close to home for a lot of NHLers. Patrick Kane certainly likes it there, for example.
The biggest thing working against the Red Wings, and the reason they’re having to overpay lower-tier talent to add free agents, is that they just haven’t been competitive enough. The no-state-tax factor has been talked to death, but the other thing in common between a lot of the teams that most players want to go to (or stay with) is that they win a lot of games. It’s coming up on a decade for Detroit out of the playoffs and they haven’t won a playoff round since that lockout-shortened season in 2013.
Steve Yzerman came back as general manager in 2019, so only six of those seasons are on him — and realistically, given the mess he inherited, this was a pretty long-term project. And they’ve had some bad luck in the draft lottery, dropping more than anyone in recent years and only picking in the top five once (Lucas Raymond at No. 4 in 2020).
But now is about the time you’d want to see real progress in the standings, and the second-half fall-off last season was disappointing.
The big question for the Red Wings is whether they have their elite talent base that can elevate them from wild-card contender to one of the best seven or eight teams in the league. I’m a big fan of Simon Edvinsson. Marco Kasper has flashed potential. And they have other very good prospects coming. We’ll see if their young players will be (a) high-end enough to compete with some of the best star cores in the league and (b) ready when their existing talent like Dylan Larkin isn’t in a downswing.
Adding a marquee free agent right now would be nice, obviously, but the Red Wings are not realistically an Ekblad away from contention anyway. Their biggest hope is a little more patience, as the kids start to hit their stride and some of the other contenders in the Atlantic Division age out. They should be a wild-card team this year, especially with their cap flexibility to work with in-season.
Continued (paywall); Mirtle suggests that this year is going to be a pivotal season for the “Yzerplan,” which is under significant pressure to display some positive results.
Quite frankly, I’ve heard on the grapevine that the Red Wings raised season ticket prices over the summer, and there are fans who are willing to pay a little more for the progress they’ve seen, and there are, of course, fans who are particularly pissed off because the Wings haven’t made the progress that they were hoping for.
The Wings are at a crossroads for sure. I don’t believe that it’s necessary to throw the rebuild in the trash and start over–nor do I believe that Yzerman is going to be fired if the Wings go nowhere this season–but there’s pressure for the Winged Wheel’s rubber to meet the road this year.
