As far as I’m concerned, the Yzerplan or the lack thereof just ran its natural course.
The GM did his best to build a set of players and young prospects who could compete at a high level–after first having to tear down the remnants of Ken Holland’s late-tenure rebuild.
To some extent, the Wings succeeded in building a big prospect pool. To some extent, the Wings got “close” to the playoffs a couple of times.
They needed better coaching, and it took a few times to get their coaches right.
They needed better players, and the team worked on it, at least, with some successes and some failures.
And the team needed better performances as a collective, and that’s where they struggled, for whatever reason.
I believe that they’ve got the right coaching staff, they’re getting to having the right players thanks to the prospect pool, and that, should they trade Dylan Larkin for good assets, they’re going to at least be building toward a strong roster.
But Yzerman’s managerial style was getting stale, between his stubbornness in terms of hanging onto players and his stubbornness in terms of not being able to sign free agents or re-sign exiting players (the loss of Shayne Gostisbehere strikes me as particularly crippling), so it was just time to make a change.
The Hockey News’s Ryan Lambert is a long-time critic of everything Red Wings-related, so he’s gloating today, and blaming the Wings’ decision to build around a Dylan Larkin that Lambert feels just wasn’t a building block = why the “Yzerplan” failed.
This was all forced, in many ways, by the Dylan Larkin situation. It is rarely a sign that things are going well when the team’s captain, who has five years left on his now-extremely cheap deal, comes to you and says he would like to be traded. It’s made worse by the fact that he’s a hometown boy who grew up cheering for the very GM who has failed him these last seven years.
All the losing, the lack of enough elite talent to build around Larkin (who was never himself all that elite), going through three coaches in a four-year stretch and the late-season meltdowns suffered by all three meant the Yzerplan was doomed basically from the start.
You can say that bad lottery luck contributed to that, which is certainly true, but the end result is the same: the Red Wings were never good enough under Yzerman, who is only being allowed to “transition” to a different role, instead of being tossed out into the street with a big boot print on his back, because of what he did for the franchise as a player. It’s face-saving, but everyone sees it clearly for what it really is.
Detroit fans don’t have to like how Larkin went about his business — it’s certainly a little déclassé — but it was his right under the contract negotiated by… ah, it says here “Steve Yzerman.” And if he wants to say, “I’m so sick of losing that I will only go to a team I believe can win,” well, he certainly knows what a loser looks like by experience.
One of the things you can criticize the Red Wings for is trying to build around Larkin, who has proven himself more of a “great No. 2 center on a good team” than a “No. 1 center on a team that can barely make the playoffs.” But one can easily imagine that this decision signals that all involved on the team side of things recognize that Yzerman’s approach with his captain wasn’t working.
Continued; there’s a lot of blame to go around here, and that’s okay. Today is a day for pointing fingers. But this?
[The Larkin trade], in turn, probably signals the 10-year playoff drought stretching into its teenage years and even more difficult decisions about who stays and who goes from the roster in the interim.
Why, for example, keep the many fine-to-good veterans Yzerman signed or traded for with the express goal of being just good enough to get into the playoffs? His successor’s first job will be moving Larkin, and the second will be testing the market for guys like Alex DeBrincat, Andrew Copp, Mason Appleton and Justin Faulk, all of whom have just one year left on their contracts.
It wasn’t necessarily always going to end this way, but it was a fait accompli even a few years before the Larkin demand came in. The current captain had a clearer vision of the Red Wings’ future than the one from the 1990s, and that was the problem all along.
I’m not buying into the whole, “UNLESS DETROIT BLOWS IT ALL UP AND ONLY KEEPS SEIDER AND RAYMOND, THEN NONE OF THIS IS GONNA WORK” bullshit–and that’s what it is to me, bullshit.
The Wings have some good building blocks here. Larkin is not one of them, but he can be a #1B center on a good team, and the Wings can get a good return for him, even if it’s “futures.”
Rebuilding all over again, especially given that the franchise has raised ticket prices several times over the past couple of seasons, is not feasible.
Detroit may have to “reset” for a year, presuming that they can’t meaningfully replace Larkin by the trade deadline, but I wouldn’t give up and curl up into an ever-rebuilding ball.
I’d lean heavily on McLellan, lean on the players who buy into his system, jettison the rest, even if that takes some time, and build around Seider, Raymond, and the prospect pool.
Maybe that takes a couple of years, but it’s sure as f*** better than indulging Lambert with another 5-to-10-year rebuild from the foundations up.
