The Malik Report

From The Athletic’s Mark Lazerus, Scott Powers and Max Bultman:

Kane spent most of his career with the Blackhawks, but Detroit had become home to his second act after first signing with the Red Wings in 2023. Last season, he hit a pair of major milestones for the Red Wings, tallying his 500th goal and becoming the highest-scoring U.S.-born player ever.

Losing Kane will sting the Red Wings’ offensive attack, as he was one of their top scorers, even at age 37. His 16 goals and 57 points in 67 games trailed only Alex DeBrincat, Dylan Larkin and Lucas Raymond, and perhaps even more importantly, he remained one of the team’s most essential contributors down the stretch. His 24 points in 22 games since March 1 trailed only DeBrincat, his linemate.

Perhaps most importantly, Kane was the Red Wings’ third-leading five-on-five scorer last season with 31 points and is a key driver on Detroit’s power play, which ranks fourth in the NHL (24.2 percent) since his first game with Detroit in December 2023. Even in a down year last season — the Red Wings power play ranked 12th at 22.6 percent — that unit has been one of the few reliable ways they’ve scored, with five-on-five offense in particular a key issue for the team.

Now, they’ll take another blow there, as his departure comes at a time of major change for the franchise. Larkin, their captain and top-line center, has requested a trade and while he currently remains on Detroit’s roster, losing both him and Kane in one offseason would subtract 50 goals from the lineup. That’s hard to replace. So, too, is his stature in the locker room, as one of the game’s all-time greats and a player with substantial big-game experience whom most of the Red Wings’ young players grew up admiring.

It also raises questions about the future of DeBrincat, Detroit’s leading scorer and a close friend of Kane’s dating back to their time in Chicago. DeBrincat grew up in Metro Detroit, but with Kane now gone and Larkin on the way out, will DeBrincat — who has one year left on his contract — commit to staying long term?

Continued (paywall)

ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski reexamines his 2025-2026 season previews for each and every one of the NHL’s 32 teams, and he called the Red Wings’ situation perfectly:

Detroit Red Wings

Steve Yzerman fails upward

There were moments last season when it appeared this prediction was toast, as the Red Wings were contending for a playoff spot. But they missed the cut again, as they did in all seven seasons Yzerman was at the helm for the franchise. Yzerman swung and missed on big trades. His deteriorating relationship with captain Dylan Larkin led to the center asking for a trade. The “Yzerplan” failed to build a foundation for Stanley Cup contention.

As of July 15, Yzerman was no longer general manager of the Red Wings. As predicted, he failed upward: Yzerman is “transitioning from his role as executive vice president and GM but will continue serving the organization as senior adviser to governor and CEO Chris Ilitch.” Because there was no way the Red Wings were ever going to fire a franchise icon, even if the time had arrived.

Continued; Greg’s been around the block a time or two…He makes some wise predictions…

The Athletic’s Max Bultman and Shayna Goldman examine what the Red Wings’ organization presents the Red Wings’ next hockey executive in terms of franchise assets, tradeable assets, its timeline and “fit” for the next big GM in Detroit sports.

So “What’s in place?”

A top-five finisher for the Norris Trophy last season, [Moritz] Seider is just entering the prime of his career as a do-it-all defenseman — something every team covets. That’s a great place to start, especially when paired with another big, mobile pillar in Simon Edvinsson, who is already logging huge minutes and has even more runway ahead of him at age 23.

Add in another young first-rounder in puck-mover Axel Sandin-Pellikka (21), the steady Albert Johansson and intriguing big right-shot prospect Anton Johansson and the Red Wings’ blue line has a strong young core to build upon.

Up front is a little murkier, owing to both the Larkin uncertainty and the future of Alex DeBrincat, who has one year left on his contract. Last season, DeBrincat was Detroit’s best and most consistent forward, scoring 41 goals and 85 points and playing all 82 games.

At age 28, DeBrincat still has many productive years in front of him, and if the Red Wings can extend him, the combination of him and Raymond gives Detroit a strong duo of wingers atop the lineup. Both were among the top 20 NHL wings in points last season, and Raymond still has a higher gear in him than his 76 points a year ago (down from 80 a year prior). At 24, he is just entering his prime, and there is 90-point upside in his game.

If they can’t extend DeBrincat, it gets much more complicated. Detroit has some notable scoring prospects on the wing — Michael Brandsegg-Nygård, Carter Bear, Max Plante and J.P. Hurlbert — but 40-goal scorers such as DeBrincat are rare and hard to replace. That makes his future a key domino for the Red Wings’ direction.

The biggest questions, though, are still down the middle. If Larkin doesn’t walk back his trade request, Detroit will have a major need there in both the short- and long-term. Certainly the Red Wings would love to get a young top-six center back in a potential Larkin deal. But typically, there’s only one real way to land those players: by drafting them, usually early.

The Red Wings have a pair of young recent top-10 picks down the middle in Marco Kasper and Nate Danielson, plus veterans Andrew Copp and J.T. Compher in the short-term. And Kasper in particular has a lot of winning elements, making him an important piece going forward for Detroit. He’s an up-tempo, hard-edged player who can score at the net and do a lot of dirty work. But the offensive ceiling for both him and Danielson is a question, and likely will prevent either from being a first-line center on a contender.

Continued (paywall) at length…excellent reading.

File this one under, “From one Detroit hockey legend to another?”

I didn’t know what to make of this one, but Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff confirms the veracity of this Tweet in which the ABC show “Family Feud” posted a picture of teams competing in tonight’s episode–including Team USA legend and incoming Detroit PWHL forward Hilary Knight, as well as one Team USA forward and outgoing Detroit Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin:

Team USA vs. Team USA 🇺🇸

Don’t miss our Olympic and Paralympic gold medalists on Celebrity Family Feud this Thursday, July 23, at 8 p.m. ET on ABC! pic.twitter.com/plZAqm5krg

— USA Hockey (@usahockey) July 21, 2026

Per Duff:

It will be a USA Hockey showdown in this week’s edition of Celebrity Family Feud, the popular game show hosted by Steve Harvey.

USA Hockey’s three gold-medal winners from Milano Cortina will all be represented on the show. It was a clean sweep for the Americans, winning the men’s, women’s and sledge hockey titles.

The Family Feud will be a gender showdown, with USA Hockey women tangling with the men. Representing the distaff side of the USA Hockey champions are three members of the Detroit PWHL franchise – Hilary Knight, Cayla Barnes, and Hannah Bilka. Also on the team are Laila Edwards and Caroline Harvey.

On the men’s team with Larkin is Winnipeg Jets goalie Connor Hellebuyck. They’ll be joined by Paralympians Griffin LaMarre, Jack Wallace, and Declan Farmer.

The show is airing tonight at 8 p.m. EDT on ABC. The gold medalists will face off against each other to raise money for the USA Hockey Foundation.

Yay, charity?

In all honesty, this strikes me as…awkward. I know that there are three U.S. male Olympians of Michigan vintage in Larkin, Werenski and Hellebuyck, and three members of the just-established Detroit PWHL franchise, but this just feels…off?

About a week ago, I spotted a translated interview that Red Wings 2026 draft pick Michal Orsulak gave to Denik Sport, and, this evening, iDnes.cz’s Petr Panek also posted an interview with the Prince Albert Raiders goaltender.

Orsulak spoke with Panek about being drafted by the Red Wings, meeting now-former GM Steve Yzerman, and Orsulak discusses his future plans after having helmed Prince Albert to the WHL Final this past spring.

What follows is roughly translated from Czech:

Before last season, Orsulak headed from Energie Karlovy Vary to the Canadian WHL, where he collected valuable experience with overseas hockey playing for the Prince Albert Raiders’ jersey. At the turn of the year, Orsulak helped the Czech World Junior team win Silver at the Under-20 championship. A few weeks ago, the talented goalie took the next step of his career when he was picked by the Detroit Red Wings in the 3rd round of the draft.

“I think that silver at the World Juniors was very important for the draft. Representatives of the teams may have noticed that I can hold teams at key moments,” said the eighteen-year-old native of Tremosa, near Plsen.

Did you have any signals before the draft that it could turn out that the Red Wings would be the team that selected you?

“Maybe I did. I had an interview with their representatives at the combine in Buffalo, and then I saw a goaltending coach at the Miami camp organized by my agent. That’s where they told me that they were interested in me, and that we’d see if it worked out. In the end, it turned out that way, for which I’m glad, of course.”

Continue reading Roughly translated: Michal Orsulak speaks with iDnes.cz

The Detroit News’s Connor Eargood headed down to Little Caesars Arena’s BELFOR Training Center on Wednesday, where Team USA’s World Junior Summer Showcase team is holding two practices and a scrimmage ahead of this upcoming week’s World Junior Summer Showcase in Windsor, Ontario.

Prior to heading across the Detroit River to Windsor, Eargood spoke with Michigan State University coach Adam Nightingale, who is helming the Americans’ bench for both the WJSS and the upcoming 2027 World Junior Championship, too:

“There’s a lot of excitement. These guys, give them a ton of credit,” Nightingale said after practice as sweat-soaked players shuffled past for more workouts. “You earn an opportunity to come try out for the team, and I thought they did really well today. I think we worked on some things that we gotta be great at, but it was fun being out there.”

Nightingale and Team USA are holding two practices and a Friday night intrasquad scrimmage to prepare for the World Junior Summer Showcase in Windsor, which starts Sunday and will pit the Americans against the top prospects from Sweden, Finland and Canada over the course of the week. 

This is only part of the evaluation process, but it’s still an important one. The goals for Nightingale and his staff are twofold: establish an identity as a team, then find who fits.

“Our job as the coaching staff is to make that identity clear, and then the player’s job is to play to that identity,” Nightingale said. “And this is one part of the evaluation process. The start of the season will be part of it. There might be some kids that aren’t even at the camp that make the team.”

Detroit prospects JP Hurlbert (an incoming freshman for the University of Michigan), Victor Plante (an incoming freshman for the University of Minnesota-Duluth) and Brent Solomon (an incoming freshman for the University of Wisconsin) will all represent the Red Wings at the WJSS, but they don’t have the kind of history at LCA that coach Nightingale does.

Nightingale worked for the Red Wings as both a video coach and then an assistant coach under Jeff Blashill, so he’s quite familiar with his surroundings:

“It’s great to be back,” Nightingale said. “Thankful that they opened it up to us and really gave us full access to the building. I’m super appreciative.”

Eargood continues (paywall), and this is more of a, “These hockey-related activities are going on around us” sort of article as opposed to any sort of attempt to drop a midsummer Red Wings bombshell, but I hope that you give Eargood’s article a read.

It’s very good real, actual hockey stuff taking place here in late July.

Detroit Hockey Now’s Kevin Allen posted a subscriber-only article discussing several changes which Allen believes that Steve Yzerman’s successor must incorporate into the next building/rebuilding plan. Among Allen’s points are the following:

2. A Different Plan to Infuse Prospects

Defenseman William Wallinder is no longer waiver exempt and he’s coming to training camp with no NHL experience. Antti Tourmisto signed with Las Vegas without getting an NHL shot from Detroit. Eduards Tralmaks didn’t get an NHL game and he signed with Edmonton. You hear other general managers talk about opening roster spots for their younger players. But the Red Wings have been conservative when it comes to development of young players. They want to know their youngsters are ready before promoting them. But that’s no longer the way it’s done in the NHL.

The Red Wings cannot utilize the Grand Rapids Griffins as an impermeable membrane by which Detroit’s top prospects cannot graduate from until they’re out of waiver options any more. It’s fair and right to afford Detroit’s prospects the opportunities to “steal jobs” and earn short call-ups simply to see what the organization has in terms of self-developed depth players.

3. A Goaltending Ascension Plan

The Red Wings have done a quality job of building a strong stable of young goalies, but haven’t done a good job of making their goalies NHL-ready. Sebastian Cossa had 45 minutes of NHL experience when the Red Wings traded him to Utah this summer.

If the Red Wings send Michal Postava to Grand Rapids at the start of the season, it would make sense for the team to schedule some NHL games early for him to see if he is ready to be the team’s next goalie up.

Maybe more importantly, The Yzerman replacement should have a plan in place for Trey Augustine to experience NHL time even as early as this season. If he is now the goalie of the future, it makes sense for him to have NHL experience before he gets a spot on the roster. They can’t treat him the same way they treated Cossa.

Continued (paywall); agreed regarding Postava and Augustine (and Michal Pradel, Michal Orsulak, Rudy Guimond, etc. etc.). The Wings’ crease isn’t going to be best-served by forcing Postava and Augustine to watch John Gibson and Daniil Tarasov split the next 82 starts.

None of Allen’s other plans are exactly jaw-droppingly shocking, but witnessing the Red Wings more aggressively engage players at market-value salaries instead of incorporating a roster player salary cap, and actually trading draft picks from time to time make sense…

And offering more internal competition for roster spots, instead of, for example, ensuring that grinding players like, say, Michael Rasmussen, J.T. Compher, etc. become “too important to fail” seems logical as well.

All of that being said, the whole point of why Allen’s saying what he’s saying is not to stir up revolutionary roster-building changes, but instead, to encourage the organization to re-engage the rest of the league’s best practices.

There are more than a couple of Red Wings bloggers and blogs who are at their, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it any more!” moment this morning.

That’s understandable. And it’s okay.

It’s July 21st, and the Red Wings do not have a general manager, their captain was last seen going “tarps off” at the FIFA World Cup final, and it’s getting to be painful receiving those marketing emails from the Red Wings that try to not show pictures of Patrick Kane or Dylan Larkin celebrating with Moritz Seider or Lucas Raymond.

To their credit, the Red Wings did score some goals in which Emmitt Finnnie or other players were celebrating with Seider and Raymond, so we see some decent crop-outs, but I hear ya. It feels like the S.S. Detroit Red Wings has run aground and sits rudderless on a shoal, and that’s an all-too-familiar feeling for those of us battling our way through the long, painful rebuild.

This is that kind of morning here in the hospital. Aunt Annie is in tremendous pain this morning, not because of anything in particular, but just because it is a high pain day, and I believe that, as a caregiver, there is nothing worse than watching someone you love go through pain when you are unable to help them alleviate said discomfort, even after she’s taken her pain medications and has received assistance from her nurses.

She’s just in so much pain that she’s nauseous, and I would rather be in pain myself than watch her suffer like this.*

We’re having a “high pain day” kind of summer right now, folks. And I don’t know many Red Wings fans who aren’t feeling more than a bit nauseous at present, with the team’s future dangling at the end of a rope like a dead yo-yo, dangling lifelessly.

It’s a bitch to go through, and we’re experiencing this on a collective as well as individual bases.

Continue reading Now is the summer of our discontent (don’t forget to breathe)

It’s hard to get a positive word from The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn when it comes to the intersection of things statistically-inclined and Red Wings-related.

This morning, however, Luszczyszyn sings the praises of Moritz Seider’s “team-friendly” contract:

5. Moritz Seider

Contract: $8.6M x five years
Surplus Value: $41M
Positive Value Probability: 100 percent

Another new franchise defenseman on the scene courtesy of a seismic breakout, another deal in the neighbourhood of $8 million that’s aging beautifully.

When the Red Wings signed Mortiz Seider to this contract, his impacts in brutally tough minutes weren’t yet lining up with his reputation. Account for that and he was good, but not truly great. Not yet. All of that changed two seasons ago, and last year he took his game to new heights with a two-way season for the ages. While he didn’t ultimately end up with a plus-10 Offensive and Defensive Rating thanks to a tough final game, Seider came the closest any defenseman ever has.

His two-way ability is monstrous, and that’s what powers this valuation. Seider would be worth his deal if he were only a little bit above average offensively or defensively. That he’s this elite at both makes him worth nearly double his AAV.

Continued (paywall); I’m not even going to quibble with the “seismic breakout” part. Sometimes you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

You don’t expect to post these kinds of blog posts, but here we are.

The goal was to avoid taking Aunt Annie to the hospital entirely, but she’s been unable to stave off repeated UTI’s, which are not good to struggle with when one is 84, so we shifted the goalposts and decided that it made the most sense–per our primary care physician’s advice–to take AA to the hospital for some intravenous courses of treatment…

And when we tried to get her out to the hospital via car today, she tore up her right arm and left ankle because her skin is just so incredibly, incredibly fragile, so we ended up having to call 911 and have AA transported to hospital via ambulance.

Continue reading Holding our own at Providence Hospital…