Red Wings prospect Charlie Forslund, a 6’4,” 218-pound forward, thought he was going to make his SHL debut for Brynas IF this upcoming season…

But Brynas signed former Red Wings draft pick and long time Toronto Maple Leafs forward Calle Jarnkrok, so Forslund was bumped down to Almtuna IS of the Hockeyallsvenskan.

Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff reports that Forslund’s already going up and down from Sweden’s top pro league to its second division:

It’s been a big week for Detroit Red Wings draftee Charlie Forslund.

Wednesday, Forslund scored his first goal of the season for Almtuna IS. The goal came in a 3-2 shootout victory over Östersunds IK in HockeyAllsvenskan action. That’s the Swedish second division.

Forslund’s second-period power-play goal gave Almtuna a 2-0 lead. The 20-year-old winger has 1-1-2 totals in three games for Almtuna this season.

One day earlier, Forslund made his SHL debut with Brynas. He collected his first SHL point, an assist, in a 9-2 drubbing of Linkoping.

Forslund skated 10:49 of ice time on the fourth line in his first taste of game action in Sweden’s top division. He drew the primary assist on a goal by Linus Olund that gave Brynas a 6-1 lead.

Continued; Red Wings prospects posted clips of Forslund’s goal with Almtuna and assist with Brynas:

According to Detroit Hockey Now’s Max Smith, the Red Wings’ first significant injury suffered over the course of the exhibition came from prospect Carter Bear, who’s suffered an “upper-body” ailment:

The Red Wings took their first big hit of the preseason, as 2025 first round pick Carter Bear sustained an injury during their preseason game against the Pittsburgh Penguins. Bear was a long shot to make the Red Wings roster, but should be a top six contributor for the Grand Rapids Griffins this year in the AHL.

“Bear has an upper body injury, which is probably day-to-day or a week, is what we think. Obviously Larkin is still hurt, said McLellan, “[Chase] Stillman, who came into training camp with an off-season injury, still
hasn’t been cleared.”

Both [Dylan] Larkin and Stillman have returned to practice, however, neither has taken part in heavy contact drills.

Continued; with two games to be played over the course of the next three nights, I’m crossing my fingers that the Wings don’t suffer any significant dings or bangs.

As Smith indicates, we’re going to see the Wings play more and more game-one-ready rosters as Saturday’s game approaches, so there’s going to be an element of risk tonight vs. Buffalo and Saturday vs. the Blue Jackets. Both games happen to air on Detroit SportsNet and WWJ 950.

The Buffalo Sabres have Tweeted out their roster for tonight’s exhibition game between the Sabres and Detroit Red Wings (7 PM EDT start on Detroit SportsNet/950 WWJ):

The Buffalo Sabres have released the team's roster for tonight's game at Detroit. pic.twitter.com/8p2779c5BY

— Buffalo Sabres PR (@SabresPR) September 24, 2026

The #Sabres roster tonight for a preseason game at Detroit. The forwards are a mix of NHL/AHLers, including Konsta Helenius, Jiri Kulich and Noah Ostlund. ⬇️ https://t.co/mVI4KDY3B6

— Rachel Lenzi 💁🏻‍♀️😎💥 (@rachelmlenzi) September 24, 2026

Two of Buffalo’s defensemen, Mattias Samuelsson and Olen Zellweger, are out with a lower-body injury and a concussion, respectively.

BuffaloSabres.com’s Jourdon LaBarber posted a set of storylines for tonight’s game, which airs on MSG-B and WGR 550 in New York:

Daily Faceoff’s Matt Larkin ranks the NHL’s 32 goaltending tandems this morning, and while the Red Wings do not rank highly, Larkin offers some praise to John Gibson and Daniil Tarasov:

22. DETROIT RED WINGS: John Gibson & Daniil Tarasov

Gibson is seemingly doomed to spend almost his entire career laboring on subpar teams, overachieving and trying to keep them in the playoff hunt. Last season was among his strongest in years; it wasn’t a competition at all between him and [Cam] Talbot in the end. The Wings will eventually hand the keys to prospect Trey Augustine, but he needs significant AHL seasoning first, and Gibson should stay very busy. Tarasov is a serviceable backup with great size; he quietly started a career-best 31 games for Florida last season and outplayed Bobrovsky.

Continued; Talbot was awful last year, honestly, and not having a solid back-up yielded over-work for Gibson and a bit of a burnout, in my opinion. If Tarasov can step up, and/or if Michal Postava or Augustine can step in and earn the Wings a couple of wins here and there, the team will benefit.

Sportsnet is ranking its top 50 NHL players heading into the 2026-2027 season, and their panel ranked Red Wings defenseman Moritz Seider as the 37th-best player in the entire league:

#37: Moritz Seider, D, Detroit Red Wings

Last Year: Unranked

It was much the same situation for defender Moritz Seider, who jumps to No. 37 on this year’s list after going unranked last time out. While 2025-26 saw the Red Wings finish sixth in the Atlantic and extend their post-season drought to a decade, Seider managed a career year from the back end. The 2019 sixth-overall pick collected a career-best 60 points in his fifth campaign in Detroit, while averaging more than 25 minutes of ice per night — third-most in the league, behind only Quinn Hughes and Zach Werenski. Earning the first Norris votes of his career last season, Seider’s future remains bright, despite the growing tumult around him.

Continued; in August, the NHL Network named Seider its 30th-best player and 9th-best defenseman…

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.

Hockeysvergige.se’s Ronnie Ronnqvist spoke with Red Wings prospect defenseman Anton Johansson in the wake of Anton’s 4-point preseason game against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday.

What follows is roughly translated from Swedish:

Swedish talent for the fight with Crosby: “Became a little pissed off”

Anton Johansson showed his front foot during Detroit’s pre-season.

Overnight on Wednesday, the talented prospect scored four points in the big victory against Pittsburgh – and ended up in a fight with superstar Sidney Crosby.

“He just got a little grumpy because I boxed him out,” Johansson told Hockeysverige.se.

Bleacher Report posted two NHL articles this morning, with Lyle Richardson discussing “1 player for every NHL team to get excited about” ahead of the 2026-2027 season, and Yerdon discussing “pending unrestricted free agents [2027] who could be traded” this season if their contract extension talks go south.

First, we’ll talk about the Red Wings’ stalwart defenseman and arguable face of the post-Dylan Larkin franchise…

Detroit Red Wings: Moritz Seider

The Detroit Red Wings have endured inconsistency over the past three seasons, which stretched their playoff drought to 10 years. While that’s resulted in front-office turmoil and uncertainty about the future of former captain Dylan Larkin, a bright spot remains star defenseman Moritz Seider.

Since being chosen sixth overall by the Red Wings in the 2019 NHL Draft, Seider has steadily developed into an elite all-around defenseman. He won the Calder Memorial Trophy in 2021-22 and has become the anchor of the Red Wings’ blue line.

Seider, 25, is a workhorse who logs big minutes in all situations. He had a league-leading 2104:39 of total time on ice per game last season and a career-high 60 points. The young German is entering his prime and remains crucial to the Wings’ hopes of ending their long postseason drought.

And you’ll be familiar with the Red Wings’ trade candidate in Yerdon’s column as well:

The Athletic’s Max Bultman spoke with 4 different sports’ executives about the data-driven world that the Red Wings are delving into as the team searches for a full-time general manager.

Bultman duly notes that the NHL and hockey in general are going through an information revolution, in which streams of new data are being incorporated through the NHL’s EDGE stats, high-speed video, skills coaching tailored to individual players and a whole lot of sorting through all the data and translating it into decisive decision-making.

This article is very wordy and a little technical, but Bultman’s conversation with Florida Panthers GM Bill Zito is particularly enlightening:

While Zito’s Cup-winning front offices, for example, notably included Sunny Mehta — now the GM of the New Jersey Devils — with a background in data science, they also featured multiple former NHL players, with Gregory Campbell and Roberto Luongo in high-level roles, NCAA champion player-turned-agent Brett Peterson as an assistant GM, and a long-tenured coach in Paul Maurice behind the bench.

It wasn’t necessarily any one of those skill sets that elevated the Panthers. But it may well have been the combination.

“It’s that buy-in where everybody is respected for their role,” Zito said. “And they, in turn, by being good at what they do, help everybody else be better and fill voids so that the puzzle comes together as a whole. And I don’t think that’s any different than other businesses or other collaborative efforts.”

MLive’s Ansar Khan discusses Red Wings prospect defenseman Anton Johansson this morning, noting that Detroit coach Todd McLellan is bullish on the 22-year-old right-shooting Swede.

Johansson posted 4 assists in Tuesday night’s win over Pittsburgh (though he was on the ice for 3 goals against), and Anton skates well, handles the puck professionally, and is quite physical and scrappy:

“This might be an unfair comparison, but Brent Burns used to be like that. Burns could shoot the puck from out far, he could pull it in tight, and as a result, he got a lot of pucks through. I sometimes equate the shot at the top like a quarterback throwing the football. There’s no sense throwing the football into the end zone if there’s no receivers there. So the net presence combined with his willingness to shoot the puck is a good combination.”

The former fourth-round pick (104^th overall in 2022) made a favorable impression during a brief stint late last season with the Griffins, picking up five assists in 11 regular season games and one assist in three playoff games after being on loan to r Leksands during the Swedish Hockey League season.

“I feel like it suits my game pretty well to play on the smaller sheet,” Johansson, 22, said. “I’m tall, I’m a good skater, I can handle the puck. I’ve learned you got to be quicker; you got to be faster to everything because (the ice) is smaller. I want to be a two-way defender, reliable in the defensive zone, and they know what I can do in the offensive zone.”

Continued (paywall); to me, Anton is more of a Brad Stuart 2.0 in the making, someone who can be reliably utilized in all situations while pissing off the opposition.

I fully believe that the younger Johansson will grow into an NHL defender within the next year or two.