The Athletic’s Max Bultman remains baffled by the Red Wings front office/ownership’s decision to “punt” naming an interim GM until September, suggesting that the organization still suffers from the indecision made (or not made) over the course of the past summer. Bultman’s “exhibit A” is the lack of a contract for restricted free agent defenseman Simon Edvinsson:
For core players, long-term extensions right out of [Entry-Level Contracts] seem to work out nearly every time. And even for players who fall short of that bar, the rising cap turns even the questionable deals into manageable ones. One contract previously seen as a cautionary tale was the Ottawa Senators’ eight-year, $7.95 million AAV pact with Josh Norris, whose health has kept him from becoming a consistent difference-maker. But that contract was still tradeable enough two seasons ago that the Senators turned Norris into young top-six center Dylan Cozens. Soon, that $7.95 million will be the going rate for a second-line wing. It might already be.
And yet, even with that history (and the cap’s promising future), Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman has reported that the Red Wings prefer a bridge deal with Edvinsson. It’s unfathomable how that could be the case for a team currently more than $20 million under the cap, and with most of its other core players (sans Alex DeBrincat) locked up for the intermediate future. There is no squeeze on the horizon in Detroit.
If a bridge does come to pass, it’ll look like a mistake for Detroit from the moment it’s signed, because of the missed opportunity to sign him for longer. Edvinsson could very well have a breakout season in the next year or two, tapping into more offense just as the cap goes supernova. But even if he doesn’t — even if he just keeps on the trajectory he’s on now — a $10 million or $11 million AAV deal is nothing to be afraid of given the percent of the cap that will soon occupy. He and Moritz Seider would still not combine to make what [Colorado’s Cale] Makar will make a year from now.
But if the Red Wings bridge Edvinsson, they only have that advantage for a year or two, saving short-term money they don’t need and likely can’t use: if you haven’t noticed, teams aren’t letting their free agents make it to July 1 lately. Because of the cap, they don’t have to.
So, barring injuries or a financial-system-altering event such as the pandemic, the Red Wings will almost certainly cost themselves money in the long term if they bridge Edvinsson. But that’s only half the point here.
The other half is that they’ve already cost themselves money by waiting this long. They could have extended Edvinsson before [Vancouver’s Zeev] Buium’s deal. They could have done it before Makar’s, too. But they didn’t, partly because they didn’t have a GM for the second half of the summer — a reality that came to pass because they waited that long to move on from Steve Yzerman — the type of call nearly every other franchise makes in April.
Continued; Bultman duly notes that Horcoff appears to be a capable interim general manager, if only an inexperienced one, but the Red Wings definitely needed to have a decision-maker in place after Steve Yzerman was relieved of his duties…
And the fact that the team chose to not give Horcoff the ability to ink contracts with free agents, both unrestricted and restricted, over the course of the summer, definitely kneecapped Detroit.
We all watched capable free agents who could have bridged the gap in terms of replacing Patrick Kane’s offense sign elsewhere, we all waited and waited for the Simon Edvinsson situation to resolve itself, and we all expected the Wings to do something decisive instead of, to use Bultman’s word, “punting” the decision down the line.
More than anything else, the team’s inability to replace Yzerman with an interim general manager granted the power necessary to sign contracts damaged the franchise’s ability to compete this upcoming season, and that’s truly an indictment of the team’s management and ownership.
