The Athletic’s Murat Ates discusses “7 NHL teams [which] are likely to take a step back” this upcoming season, and you’ll be shocked–shocked, I tell you, shocked!– to find out that the Detroit Red Wings made Ates’ cut:
Detroit Red Wings
2025-26 record: 41-31-10, 92 points
The best case for a decline: Detroit’s offence is in trouble if Dylan Larkin is a part of it and in peril if he isn’t.
Patrick Kane’s departure hurts the Red Wings’ 12th-ranked power play, which helped Detroit make up for the NHL’s third-worst five-on-five offence. Meanwhile, James van Riemsdyk’s departure hurts Detroit’s depth scoring. The Red Wings will hope summer signing Viktor Arvidsson and rising young player Michael Brandsegg-Nygård make up for those losses, but Arvidsson’s injury history and Brandsegg-Nygård’s youth allow room for doubt.
The challenge isn’t about a lack of players to be excited about. Moritz Seider was dominant in so many facets of the game last season that he finished 11th in Hart Trophy voting and fifth in Norris Trophy voting. Lucas Raymond is an electric offensive player whose defensive commitment is solid for a 24-year-old star in the making. It’s about what happens when the Red Wings’ top line and top pairing aren’t playing — it’s hard to look at veterans such as Andrew Copp, J.T. Compher and Mason Appleton and find Detroit’s missing depth scoring.
Detroit does have a next wave of young talent and it’s possible that Simon Edvinsson (23) or Marco Kasper (22) goes off in 2026-27. The other route to avoiding a decline would involve John Gibson turning back the clock to his early career dominance, while Daniil Tarasov may make a few more saves than last season’s edition of Cam Talbot.
Continued (paywall); I have mixed feelings about the Red Wings’ possibilities this upcoming season.
The Wings could do very well and piss some people off and/or prove some folks wrong, or the Wings could go south in a big way, especially if an inevitable Dylan Larkin trade yields a return of future assets.
Depending on injuries, shaky performances and plain old luck, Ates is right in suggesting that the Wings don’t have a whole lot of depth scoring, and as such, they’re going to have to get their shit together in a hurry and play as well as possible from the first drop of the puck next Friday onward.
