Category: Uncategorized

Yardbarker’s Chris Morgan posted a list of each and every NHL team’s best “greatest all-time goalie,” and while there’s no doubt that Terry Sawchuk was the franchise-defining netminder for Detroit, the author’s dig at Chris Osgood stirred me up a bit:

Detroit Red Wings: Terry Sawchuk

Chris Osgood has something of a cult following in Detroit, but “Ozzie” has no case to surpass Sawchuk here. The Hall of Famer won three Cups and three Vezinas with the Red Wings. His number hangs in the rafters in Detroit, and that says “franchise icon.”

Chris Osgood’s cult following involves the fact that he won 401 NHL games, 3 Stanley Cups, and, during his two stints with Detroit, he was one of the Red Wings’ most consistent performers, playing over 500 games in goal, and he’s been one modern franchise’s best personalities. He’s beloved for a reason…

But Terry Sawchuk, the “King of Pain,” was no doubt an all-time All-Star among goaltenders for every franchise, and the well-traveled Sawchuk helped define the position. We can’t quite say that for “Ozzie.”

Daily Faceoff’s Steven Ellis offers a top 10 list which ranks the Red Wings’ top prospects this morning:

When the Detroit Red Wings stopped being a playoff team more than half a decade ago, they had a rough pipeline, to say the least.

I was at the 2019 Traverse City tournament, an event that saw the likes of Adam Fox, Igor Shesterkin, Kaapo Kakko, Jake Oettinger, Philipp Kurashev, Thomas Harley, Kirby Dach and Brandon Hagel, among others. Looking back, it was seriously one of the deeper fields.

Detroit won the tournament, boasting a lineup that included Mortiz Seider, Joe Veleno, Filip Zadina and Taro Hirose, among others. Seider is a big piece of Detroit’s future, while Veleno hasn’t lived up to expectations and has mainly played a bit deeper in the lineup. Hirose has played some NHL games but has mostly stayed in the AHL with Grand Rapids, while Zadina was bought out and most recently played with San Jose.

In that time, Lucas Raymond has become a big-time threat up front, but they still lacked in the prospect department for a few years. Now? They boast one of the most impressive pipelines in all of hockey, with some serious depth at every position.

For starters, Simon Edvinsson and Axel Sandin-Pellikka are two of the best defensive prospects in hockey right now. Then you throw in recent first-rounders Michael Brandsegg-Nygard and Marco Kasper up front, and two of the best goaltending prospects in the game in Sebastian Cossa and Trey Augustine, and you’ve got a group that’s primed for a bright future.

Of course, it’s all fine and dandy, on paper, but they need these guys to produce. But it truly feels like the Red Wings aren’t too far away from being playoff-bound again.

Continued; this is a good, comprehensive list.

Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff discusses the potential impact of free agent signing Cam Talbot, who joins a crowded Red Wings crease with the hopes of sorting out Detroit’s up-and-down goaltending:

Certainly, Cam Talbot could be of great help to the Detroit Red Wings next season. He’s coming off an all-star campaign with the Los Angeles Kings. Talbot’s numbers suggest he’ll be more consistent and reliable between the pipes than any of the netminders the team used last season.

Secondly, there’s the second year on Talbot’s two-year contract that the UFA signed with Detroit. His role in 2025-26 could very well be to introduce 2021 first-round draftee Sebastian Cossa to the show and educate him on the rigors of NHL puckstopping.

Last season with the Kings, Talbot saw action in 54 games, going 27-20-6 and earning the nod as a Pacific Division selection for the NHL All-Star Game. His save percentage was .913 and GAA 2.50. By contrast, the Red Wings were posting a team save percentage of .897 and a GAA of 3.33.

“I think he’ll be an important part,” Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman said of his expectations for Talbot. “I can’t tell you how many starts they’re all going to get but he had a very good year in Los Angeles. Two years ago in Ottawa he had some injuries but his numbers are really consistent.”

Continued, with more from Yzerman and Talbot…

MLive’s Ansar Khan discusses Red Wings free agent signing Erik Gustafsson this morning, noting that the Wings’ players and management believe that Gustafsson will assuage the loss of Shayne Gostisbehere:

“I have been playing power play ever since I came over (to the NHL),” Gustafsson said. “It’s something I like to do and something my game is. I like to run it and try to give the puck to the forwards to shoot, create lanes. I feel very confident playing on the power play. Hopefully, I can get an opportunity.”

Gustafsson gives the team a left-shot option at the point to complement the right-shooting Moritz Seider on the other power-play unit.

Patrick Kane, Gustafsson’s teammate in Chicago for five seasons, including 2018-19, when Gustavsson produced a career-best 17 goals and 60 points, said the now 32-year-old was a key component of their power play.

“He was so deceptive up top, really knows how to run the top, maybe as good as anyone I played with,” Kane said. “Obviously, (Adam) Fox (of the New York Rangers) is special, and I think Mo (Seider) does a good job as well.”

Kane added, “(Gustafsson) is a really, really good hockey player, great offensively, makes a lot of good passes, a lot of good plays, and I know he’s been really working on his defensive game, and he’s strong in that area, too.”

Continued; as Khan notes, Gustafsson is very well-traveled, and he may be a little less prolific than Gostisbehere…

But the Red Wings worked very hard to re-sign “Ghost” because there wasn’t anybody on the market who would replace him, Brandon Montour exempted.

For whatever reason, Gostisbehere left for Carolina, and Gustfsson won’t post the same numbers, but he may be better defensively, and that’s going to help the Wings’ cause.

On Thursday afternoon, Inside the Rink’s Andrew Walsh discussed the Red Wings’ prospect pool as its rise will (hopefully) mirror its franchise’s slow but steady ascent:

The Detroit Red Wings drafted forward Michael Brandsegg-Nygård with the fifteenth overall pick in the first round of the 2024 NHL entry draft. The Oslo, Norway native has signed his entry-level contract with the Red Wings. MBN is the best wing prospect currently in the Red Wings’ prospect pool. I recently wrote that Brandsegg-Nygård was the latest in a long line of draft picks made by Red Wings’ general manager, Steve Yzerman, who all fit the same mold.

The Red Wings are widely regarded as having one of the best prospect systems currently in the NHL. The fact that the team has not made the Stanley Cup playoffs since the 2016-17 season is one of the main reasons for this. Drafting higher up in the draft allows teams to conceivably draft better players. However, this does not guarantee that the players that the team drafts will eventually make it to the NHL.

This ranking does not consider players that have made the Red Wings’ roster. Defenseman Simon Edvinsson is one example of this. After being drafted by the Red Wings with the sixth overall pick in the 2021 NHL draft, Edvinsson spent two seasons going back and forth from the Grand Rapids Griffins to the Red Wings. During the 2023-24 season, Edvinsson seems to have found his place on the Red Wings’ roster permanently. In 16 games played for the Red Wings Edvinsson was consistently deployed in high leverage situations on the Red Wings blueline.

Continued;

Just because your team is making high draft picks doesn’t mean that you’re going to witness all of those players succeed in making the NHL, and that’s why I believe that the Red Wings’ scouts have chosen to draft a certain “type” of strong two-way center, power winger, or skating defenseman with their first-round picks.

Out of Lucas Raymond, Simon Edvinsson, Marco Kasper, Nate Danielson, Axel Sandin Pellikka and Michael Brandsegg-Nygard, you’re not going to see seven superstars, but you may see the foundation for the Red Wings franchise captained by 27-year-old Dylan Larkin into his 30’s. That’s the idea here.

Two “list stories” in which article authors utilize the NHL’s 32 teams to make points appeared earlier this afternoon, with EP Rinkside’s J.D. Burke discussing the offseason storylines which have yet to materialize for NHL teams…

Detroit Red Wings: What’s next?

This one isn’t a matter of whether they’ll do something but what exactly they’ll do. Because we know GM Steve Yzerman isn’t done tinkering with his roster yet. He’s got just more than $20 million in available cap space, and while pricey contract extensions loom for Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond, they’re not getting all of that money.

We know the Red Wings have been linked to Gibson this offseason. We’ve also heard a lot about their efforts to acquire Jacob Trouba from the New York Rangers, though that seems to have quieted down a bit of late because of his reluctance to waive his no-trade clause.

Will Yzerman be able to reel in either of these big fish? And if not, then what? Failure to meaningfully improve on last year’s roster could make for a ninth season on the outside looking in at the playoffs.

The Red Wings definitely need to add a right-shooting defenseman of the shut-down variety to their blueline to spell Moritz Seider, but I’m not certain whether Steve Yzerman will dip into his deep pool of prospects to acquire that player this summer. It may take until next year’s trade deadline for the team to address this glaring need.

Also: Daily Faceoff’s Scott Maxwell discussed the “suffering level” of the NHL’s 32 fan bases, and the Wings’ fans don’t get any slack:

21. Detroit Red Wings

Colton’s rank: 19th
Hunter’s rank: 13th
Matt’s rank: 21st
Scott’s rank: 19th
Shane’s rank: 21st
Tyler’s rank: 25th

Matt [Larkin]: It would be a stretch to say we feel sympathy for the Detroit Red Wings fan base in the modern era. This group enjoyed Stanley Cups in 1997, 1998, 2002 and 2008, after all, not to mention a 25-year streak of playoff berths. But that streak has given way to an eight-year playoff drought, the second longest active one in the NHL. It feels like a twisted nightmare to see one of your franchise’s all-time heroes, Steve Yzerman, driving the bus and coming closer to taking it off a cliff than to the promised land. Something feels wrong when an Original Six franchise seems so irrelevant. Will that change soon? I’m not totally convinced. Yzerman blinked too early in the rebuild and has spent several summers weighing down his roster with mid-tier veteran signings.

I’m not delighted that the Red Wings signed Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot and traded for Ville Husso two summers ago, and this summer’s free agency take wasn’t overwhelming, but I don’t believe that those signings are “weighing down” the Red Wings’ roster, and I don’t believe that the organization is being driven off a cliff.

There’s no doubt that the Red Wings are still in the middle-to-end of what is probably a 10-12-year-long rebuild, but that’s the reality of the situation for most NHL franchises in terms of building a prospect base and seeing returns in terms of bolstering the roster with meaningful free agent signings.

The Patrick Kane signing was supposed to turn the tide, but as it happens, the Red Wings are not yet a “destination,” and when other teams sign the “Grade A” free agents, you can’t simply stand still and pretend that you’ve improved.

The organization has done the best it can with the assets it has been able to accrue, and it’s still in progress in terms of turning a very big ship slowly around.

The NHL Network is going to air an original program called “Welcome to the NHL” this Saturday, and it will mostly focus on several prospects who were drafted within the top 10 of this past June’s NHL Draft in Las Vegas, but one Red Wings prospect will be featured in the program:

The show will premiere on Saturday at 7 p.m. ET on NHL Network and ESPN+ in the U.S. Sportsnet 360 will carry the program on Sunday at 8 p.m. ET for fans in Canada. View the trailer here.

The program provides an unprecedented inside look as the prospects are welcomed to Las Vegas by fans on the red carpet and even a robot, introducing them by name, as they await selection inside Sphere and meet with media, executives and team staff moments after their names are announced by those respective NHL teams.

“This couldn’t be a better time for you to be coming into the game,” NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman said at the start of the program and during the ‘NHL Prospects Welcome Breakfast’. “Take a deep breath, enjoy the process and create the memories that are going to last a lifetime.”

Cameras followed six of the top prospects during the first round: forward Macklin Celebrini (No. 1, San Jose Sharks), forward Cayden Lindstrom (No. 4, Columbus Blue Jackets), defenseman Zayne Parekh (No. 9, Calgary Flames), defenseman Zeev Buium (No. 12, Minnesota Wild), forward Cole Eiserman (No. 20, New York Islanders) and forward Michael Hage (No. 21, Montreal Canadiens). The program captures their anxiety and exhilaration of the NHL draft with their families, friends and advisors.

…

On the second day of the draft, which included rounds 2-7, three players were highlighted: forward Max Plante (Detroit Red Wings), goalie Carter George (Los Angeles Kings) and forward Kevin He (Winnipeg Jets).

Continued; here’s the trailer:

The Hockey News’s Connor Eargood wonders whether Red Wings restricted free agent forward Joe Veleno can break through to the Wings’ “top nine” after playing mostly a fourth-line role for the majority of his NHL career thus far:

Veleno had chances to prove he could score more last season, playing in the top six when Dylan Larkin was out with injuries at times last season. But in those stints, he didn’t prove all that effective. His scoring actually decreased in an elevated role in December, and when he played between Alex DeBrincat and Patrick Kane during some games in March, Veleno still finished the month without a single point. As an indication of the organization’s trust in Veleno’s scoring ability, by the end of the season the Red Wings were quicker to plug AHL depth player Austin Czarnik into the second line rather than promote Veleno. He remains a player that Detroit can lean on in a defensive bottom six role, but there isn’t much evidence 232 games into Veleno’s career that he’ll ever amount to anything larger. Any plans for Veleno’s future shouldn’t bank on a scoring renaissance.

So where does this defensive version of Veleno fit in the long term version of the Red Wings? Maybe that’s what he can answer with his eventual extension. Projected by AFP Analytics to earn a two-year, $2 million extension, any contract within arm’s reach of that would be relatively cheap for a player from whom Detroit knows what it’s getting. 

Continued; as Eargood suggests, with an assortment of young prospect forwards vying for spots on the Red Wings’ roster over the next 2-3 years, it appears that Veleno’s tenure with the Red Wings will be short unless he’s able to break through at the NHL Level.

3 minutes’ worth of highlights:

Bleacher Report’s Adam Gretz posted a set of “Bold Predictions” for every one of the NHL’s 32 teams, and he offers the conventional take on Detroit’s hit-and-miss offseason:

Detroit Red Wings: They Miss the Playoffs Again: At some point there are going to have start being some tough questions asked about whether or not Steve Yzerman is going to get the Red Wings to where they want to be and need to be.

Missing the playoffs for an eighth straight season would probably be the time when those questions really start getting seriously asked.

It is not hard to envision that scenario playing out, either. Mainly because the Red Wings have ignored the single biggest flaw that held them back last season — defense.

In fact, they arguably made it worse by trading Jake Walman to San Jose in a salary dump move. The Red Wings could already score goals and spent the offseason focussing on that aspect of their game, re-signing Patrick Kane and bringing in Vladimir Tarasenko. In a vacuum, there is really nothing wrong with either move. Kane will help the power play. Tarasenko will score some goals. But neither player is going to do anything to help prevent goals, and that looks to be the aspect of the team that will once again hold them back.

Continued; at least under Chris Ilitch, Yzerman doesn’t have to worry about his job as playing the “long game” in terms of rebuilding the organization. Derek Lalonde, on the other hand, might be on the “hot seat”…

And the Wings at least ended up stemming losses on defense via bringing in Erik Gustafsson to replace Shayne Gostisbehere, and they’re expecting improvement from within as Simon Edvinsson and Albert Johansson turn pro.

I believe that the Walman move was a mistake made with the intention of adding a d-man through a trade or free agency signing that probably fell through, but he wasn’t a defensive stalwart, and yes, the Wings need to add a shut-down, right-shooting defenseman to help bolster the blueline…

But in the interim, their “bottom six” is better- equipped to keep pucks out of their own net, their “top six” is going to score more and it’s faster this year, their “D” is treading water at least, and Cam Talbot may be old, but he’s an upgrade on Husso and Lyon in my opinion.

Marginal improvements for sure, but sometimes you swing and miss (and my gut feeling is that the Red Wings wanted Marchessault, not Stamkos) in free agency, and end up losing guys to teams offering more money and term (in David Perron’s case) or a better chance to win (in Shayne Gostisbehere’s case).

Yzerman did the best he could do with the cards he was dealt, and now the Wings need to get this roster sorted out so that they can address any post-Raymond-and-Seider-contract trades to shore up the D or up-front checking.

That, and getting as close to the playoffs as they did will hopefully light a fire under the team’s collective ass, giving the team even more impetus to grind out a spot this upcoming season.

All in all, it’s been an OK offseason for a team that still has some flaws to address, but that doesn’t make its GM or pro scouts incompetent.