Daily Faceoff’s Anthony Trudeau has posted an in-depth 2025-2026 season preview of the Detroit Red Wings, with a projected lineup, 2024-2025 season recap, analysis of the team’s offense, defense, goaltending and coaching, a mention of the team’s potential rookies, and the following:
BURNING QUESTIONS
1. Is help on the way? Yzerman won’t dip into his draft and prospect assets unless he’s confident such a move will make the Wings an upper-echelon contender. His draft-centric “Yzerplan” was always going to take a little patience, but even captain Dylan Larkin has become frustrated by Yzerman’s unwillingness to help out the roster in the short term. For a team with more talented young players than there are lineup slots, would it be the worst idea to speed things up just a bit? The Red Wings will never win enough to “earn” a deadline buy-in from Yzerman while Seider and Edvinsson are stuck dragging around a blueline full of Yzerman’s free agency mistakes.
2. Are Raymond and Seider Cup-winning players? The Red Wings might be moving forward at the speed of a dreadnought, but they have improved. That means the bulk of Yzerman’s most high-leverage draft selections have already been made. There’s no question he’s an excellent amateur scout, but does it rattle some nerves in Hockeytown that Raymond and Seider are so far ahead of every other young player in the organization save, perhaps, for Edvinsson? Both are great young players, but they could stand to take another jump if they’re to be the principal stars of the Red Wings’ next winner.
3. Anyone have a playoff spot? It couldn’t have felt good for the Wings to watch the Montreal Canadiens, whose rebuild started around five seasons later than theirs, snag the last Wild Card. Montreal’s core players are younger than Larkin and DeBrincat (if not Seider and Raymond), and the team has shown a willingness to add name-brand talent like Noah Dobson and Patrik Laine to expedite their growth. The Ottawa Senators’ rebuild ran concurrently with Detroit’s for a while, but they’re also pulling away now that they have stable leadership in place; Ottawa finished seventh in the East, just a point adrift of the Stanley Cup champion Florida Panthers. With Montreal and Ottawa on the rise, and Florida and Tampa Bay entrenched in the top three, where exactly is Detroit supposed to sneak into the postseason in a crowded Atlantic Division?
PREDICTION
The Red Wings have reasons for optimism. Their forward group could end up outkicking expectations, especially if Kasper thrives at 2C. McLellan was the best, most proven coach on the market when Yzerman hired him. The same could be said of Gibson among the goalies available this summer. Still, it’s tough to pick a Detroit team that’s waiting on at least one more proven NHL defenseman ahead of clubs that already look fairly complete on paper. Yzerman could still swoop in for Rasmus Andersson or Mario Ferraro before Christmas, but it would be out of character. If he doesn’t, the Red Wings will end up with another ~90-point finish as the drought drags on.
Continued at length; I truly believe in McLellan’s abilities as a coach over the course of his first full season behind the bench, I fully believe that Gibson can rebound from a rough couple of seasons, and I desperately hope that the Red Wings will add a top-four defenseman and/or a top-six forward over the course of the 2025-2026 regular season, leading up to the 2026 trade deadline…
But I do feel that the odds are stacked against the Wings, both in terms of the current roster’s ability to push through the Senators and Canadiens to earn a Wild Card spot, and in terms of the “experts” suggesting that there’s no way in hell that the Wings can make the playoff cut.
We shall see. I’m optimistic but trying to be realistic as well.
