The Free Press’s Mitch Albom discusses the Red Wings’ decision to relieve Steve Yzerman of his duties as the Red Wings’ general manager:
Steve Yzerman is as fine a man as I’ve known in sports, and is as stubborn in his principles as he was in digging a puck out of the corners in his playing days.
So if I had to guess, this stunning development was less about the Wings telling him to go than about Yzerman seeing no happy way out.
Think about the timing. If the Wings were so dissatisfied with Yzerman’s job performance, why not let him go in April, after Detroit missed the playoffs for the 10th straight year, the seventh under Stevie Y? Why leave him on for the draft and free agency – only to dismiss him in the most down time of the hockey season, and just two months from the start of training camp?
Doesn’t make a lot of sense. The only wild card development during that time was Dylan Larkin asking to be traded and offering a tiny list of teams to which he would go. Admittedly, that was a doozy.
If I know Yzerman, and I have known him for 40 years, that rankled him to no end. You can do many things as a captain in Detroit, but you don’t bail on your team. You don’t tell management, “I’m done, send me here, here or here.” That, for Yzerman, had to feel like the bottom coming off the boat.
And maybe in some ways, it was a last straw. Maybe Yzerman saw that he couldn’t get equal talent in a trade. (When you only have three teams to pick from and they know you are desperate, why would they give you a first-line center as good as Larkin just to get Larkin in return?)
And maybe Yzerman didn’t want to accept a package of draft picks or prospects and begin another long rebuild. Surely if that happened, Patrick Kane would want to finish his career elsewhere. With Kane and Larkin gone, who is supposed to score goals for this team?
Maybe, seeing all this, Yzerman realized this was one puck he wasn’t going to be able to dig out. So he skated away.
