When Steve Yzerman rejoined the Red Wings in 2019 and began a rebuild in the Motor City, many wondered how long it would take the NHL Hall-of-Famer to build a powerhouse like the one he’d built for the Lightning. Some seven years into that tenure, the questions within the organization have shifted, and one narrative has become clear. Yzerman’s plan has been a colossal disaster thus far, raising the question of how much more time he will get to turn around a Red Wings team that hasn’t been in the playoffs in a decade.
It’s not as though Yzerman hasn’t built decent teams. The Red Wings have been competitive in the Eastern Conference over the past handful of seasons but haven’t made the postseason, despite being in a position to secure a playoff spot. This year, the Red Wings spent most of the season in a playoff spot, only to fall apart at the end and miss by just a few points. This pattern repeated in previous years as well. So, what happened, and what needs to happen next?
When Yzerman took over, he did a terrific job pivoting to a rebuild and trading roster players for future assets. The Anthony Mantha trade with Washington in 2021 was a home run, acquiring Jakub Vrána, a first-round pick, and a second-round pick. He also made the 2023 Tyler Bertuzzi trade, which brought in another first-round pick, and the Filip Hronek trade with Vancouver, which brought in an additional first- and second-round pick.
The Hronek trade didn’t work out well for Detroit, but it was an okay move given where the team was. Not long after, Detroit acquired forward Alex DeBrincat from the Ottawa Senators, a move that suggested Yzerman felt the team was ready to move from rebuilding to trying to win now.
He also did well to identify core players to build around through trades and the draft, before locking them into reasonable long-term deals. Dylan Larkin, Moritz Seider, and Lucas Raymond are all signed to solid long-term contracts, with Seider and Raymond being Yzerman draft picks. Overall, it’s hard to find fault with Yzerman’s early work, as he laid a solid foundation to build on.
Where Yzerman has gone wrong is in his pursuit of veteran talent to insulate his younger stars; and to say he’s gone wrong is putting it very kindly. Yzerman has failed at almost every turn in his attempts to acquire veteran players, both in trades and in free agency.
The summer of 2022 was an especially egregious period for the Red Wings’ salary-cap structure, as Yzerman signed defenseman Ben Chiarot and forward Andrew Copp to bloated multi-year deals that have been awful value for Detroit. Chiarot received a four-year deal worth $4.75MM per year, which was a lot of money for a defenseman who generally makes his defense partners worse and is constantly on the wrong end of the possession game. Chiarot had his strengths, too, but given how he’d fared in his career when asked to do too much, it was inevitable that the results wouldn’t be good in Detroit.
Copp, on the other hand, signed a five-year deal worth $5.625MM annually and came to Detroit with a lot of promise and versatility. However, he had only one season with over 20 goals and 50 points, so expecting him to be a consistent offensive contributor was too high a bar for Copp, which is part of why his run has been disappointing for Red Wings fans. The issue was ultimately that Copp was paid to be a top-six forward, but he slots better as a middle-six option.
Yzerman’s poor work in free agency continued in 2023 when he signed UFA defenseman Justin Holl to a three-year deal worth $10.2MM, which proved disastrous for Detroit. Holl recorded two goals and 11 assists in 111 games as a member of the Red Wings and had to be dealt to St. Louis at the deadline as part of the Justin Faulk trade.
The Holl signing, and even the Faulk trade to a lesser degree, highlight a major flaw in Yzerman’s building strategy, as he has consistently tried to patch together his defense core with veteran players who don’t move particularly well and are on the backside of their careers. Chiarot, Faulk, Holl, and especially Jeff Petry all highlight this issue. In fact, Yzerman’s moves on his backend could be the ultimate undoing of his tenure in Detroit, as he has sent Jake Walman and Hronek out the door and essentially replaced them with Chiarot and company.
The Walman sequence was an especially curious error. Walman was dealt to San Jose along with a second-round pick, only to be traded less than a year later by the Sharks to Edmonton for a first-round pick. The move gift-wrapped two premium draft picks for the Sharks, who paid 50 games’ worth of Walman’s $3.4MM contract in exchange for them. Edmonton eventually signed Walman to a regrettable seven-year extension, but the real loser in the sequence of events was Detroit, which traded Walman along with an asset only to see him traded for an asset. The Walman trade tree is a real indictment of Yzerman and company’s pro scouting, which has failed Detroit in free agency too often.
The defensive contraction and the free agency failures have been Yzerman’s downfall thus far in Detroit, and even though he has won many of the trades he’s made, he hasn’t been able to undo some of the damage he’s done in the summertime and now the Red Wings are at a crossroads where many teams who never rebuilt (Washington and Pittsburgh) have lapped them, even though Detroit went through a long painful rebuild.
Meh, that is what Detroit gets for hero worship. One more year is coming!
Either that or Kris Draper! 😣
I really think that the gang of ex-Red Wings in the scouting, development and managerial staff are to blame for the dead end on this team advancing to the next level. Sure, Grand Rapids is having success, but it doesn’t translate to NHL caliber players. The players called up are 3rd – 4th liners at best. Detroit’s systems are easy to defend against & score against. I think a big change must be made in this area and possibly a small change on the bench as well
The answer to this is very simple. They have not drafted any elite talent. They have not realized that sometimes, to get elite talent, you have to take a swing in the draft. They always play it safe.
Seider is elite, and picked way ahead of projections.
As far as Detroit goes, your take basically 180 degrees wrong. Please avoid commenting in future.
He’s not though. Is he a top defenseman? Sure. He is nowhere near a Makar or Hughes though. This team needs a guy like that. Someone who can generate offense completely alone.
This might be subjective, but when I watch the Wings they don’t seem to play like a TEAM. They play like a collection of spare parts thrown together who still aren’t used to each other. This makes sense, given the patchwork nature of this rebuild, but I’ve seen worse teams with a better degree of cohesion.
Going by Stevie Y’s track record you have to think he’ll get it figured out at some point. I mean you love it when a plan comes together, But sometimes it takes Plan B or even C. Guy’s been right too often and I’m a Hawks fan.
It seems to me from the outside, being a NYR fan, that all I hear around deadline time is that Yzerman loses out on deals because he refuses to part with the most coveted prospects. I understand not sending out all your top guys and making sure you are not leaving the cupboard bare (trust me, I really understand it…F’N Drury) but sometimes you have to take that swing if it gets you to that next level.
I know they love Crossa but they also have Augustine…Imagine if they did not make that trade with Dallas and instead used that Mantha draft pick from WAs (#23) on Wyatt Johnston instead….
I also remember how they picked Cossa over Wallstedt in that draft and look where the two of them are currently. I know Cossa has been great in GR but they could already have their franchise goalie playing for them if they had picked Wallstedt instead.
I wouldn’t call it a failure.
Ya I feel like they got stuck in the middle too much.
Like they never bottomed out, I’m too lazy to look:
They’ve been rebuilding since 2016 how many top 3 picks have they had in the time— I feel like they draft 6 – 10th a lop.
It’s very Sacramento kings-ish, or am I just imagining things here?
And how many top 3?
When they did bottom out, the lottery sent them from 1st to fourth place. But Laffy still has not lived up to a #1OA, whereas Raymond at #4OA is great! 👍
He got credit for the amazing job the staff did in Tampa.
Yeah, we know. His fault when the team loses and the staff gets credit when the team wins. Nice try.
Let’s see…
Goalie is obvious. Tried a million, has yet to find one.
Larkin is probably better now than I decided he was years ago, but still…mediocre top line center.
Raymond is nice but not really a winning player.
Seider is OK. His best pick is still only OK.
The rest are nondescript and soft.
Thanks for Elmer, though. He’s intriguing.
And there’s something Josh is muffing here. He’s tossing flowers in the air over All Those Nifty Picks Yzerman got trading existing talent. See, but there’s a crucial thing about draft picks: draft picks don’t win games. Good hockey players win games. If you’re going to trade a good hockey player for a future choice, you’d better get at LEAST as good a player for him.
The Anthony Mantha trade was a “home run?” What the hell? Jakub Vrana played 42 games for Detroit before they dumped him for almost nothing. That first round pick was dealt to Dallas (and turned into Wyatt Johnson), and what they got for it was Sebastian Cossa. The second rounder was a guy named Dmitri Buchelnikov who’s shown no signs of budging from the KHL. Meanwhile, while Mantha’s been injury-prone, he’s been chugging along at a rate of 25 goals per 82.
Or the Tyler Bertuzzi deal. Think Detroit might have made the playoffs the last couple years if they had Bertuzzi scoring for them the way he’s been scoring for Chicago? Now that pick wasn’t entirely wasted, since it was part of the large package sent to Ottawa for DeBrincat. Meanwhile, yeah, Hronek remains a top-drawer defenseman. Think that having Axel Sandin-Pellikka to replace him is a bonus of any sort?
I can tell you put some time into this post but you quite literally hand picked the trades that anyone that watches hockey would agree Yzerman has won. There’s a reason Mantha has bounced around from team to team since he was traded. Same goes for Bertuzzi who, as you stated, we got the pick used in the Debrincat deal. Debrincat is far and away better than Bertuzzi. ASP and Cossa are two of the prospects that actually have high end promise. I’m willing to wait for them to develop. Yes, this team has major issues but you’re looking in the wrong place.
Bertuzzi is a bad example as he was going to be a UFA so they moved him at the deadline for whatever they could get I’m sure and Bertuzzi ended signing with the Hawks as a FA. I get what he’s saying that they could have re signed Bertuzzi, He just made it sound worse by making it look like they traded him to the Hawks. But every GM has whiffs. Nobody hits all the time. But Stevie Y is pretty smart and I figure he’ll eventually get it turned around.
“High end promise” is all very well and good, but it doesn’t seem to be getting Detroit into the playoffs. Tell me that Mantha’s 33 goals and Hronek’s ongoing strong play could not possibly have gotten the Wings over the hump this year.
However much maligned, Don Sweeney in Boston seems to have managed a teardown and rebuild in a matter of *months.* Now as a Bruins fan I continue to have a vested interest in Detroit being mediocre, but seven years in, I’d expect Wings fans to be growling long since. If your GM wasn’t a franchise legend, the screams for his head would have been deafening well before now.
Not Yzerman’s fault Wings dropped in the draft multiple times and there were no generational talents like Celebrini to select. Prospects inherited from Holland were all busts. FA signings were mostly bad but I assume few players want to sign with a losing team. Recent first round picks haven’t contributed much. They need a real offensive player but I don’t care for Petersen. If they could pry Thomas from the Blues they could then slot Larkin at 2C.
Copp/Compher/Appleton…..Yzerman seems to fixate on forwards who duplicate each other. They need a power forward with scoring ability.
Good article well written.
No draft in the ”dig deep” zone, only in no man’s land
Very bad strategy to use so much veterans, he’s done, just a matter of time.
But it has not been a “colossal disaster”.
Raymond 23
Seider 24
Edvinsson 22
Kasper 21
This group will enter their prime in 3-4 years. That’s when we can start making judgement on Yzerman’s tenure.
By that time, Copp and Chiarot will be gone. They are just placeholders waiting for the young group to mature. Yzerman could afford slightly overpaying them because his cap management is excellent. Note that he has 11M+ of space that he chose to leave unused because he knows that this is not the right time yet to go for it.
But his record of trading / free agency has been poor, that is correct and well documented.
LOL, after 11 years in charge Yzerman’s prospects might be in their prime? Its time to be objective about the Red Wings Icon ——— he is not getting the job done.
That’s how long it should take. Players typically enter their prime at 26-27 which is 8-9 years after being drafted.
The Red Wings will either have a new head coach or several new players by the time next season rolls around. And the GM who created the mess has to fix it…(see McLellan’s comments after the 8-1 Florida disaster)
This author is an idiot. Go back 7 years to when Yzerman took over from Ken Holland, what kind of a team did Holland leave him? Larkin Bertuzzi and Hronek, the rest were has beens and a bunch fill in players with not much to offer plus a bunch of bad contracts. Here is a fact NOBODY WANTS TO ACCEPT, YOU CAN NOT BUY A TEAM WITH THE SALARY CAP! You have to draft a good core and once they establish themselves you can start luring in some players to fill any holes. We have to also remember Detroit got screwed by the draft lottory more than once with the highest being 4th overall. If you look at the players Yzerman drafted, just about everyone one of them has performed better than those drafted after Detroits pick. Considering where Detroit has drafted Yzerman has done a pretty good job. Where I do feel Yzerman has screwed up a little is listening the the instant gratification fans and hockey writers and trying to speed thecrebuild up by bringing Chiarot, Cobb, and Compher. Instead he should have stuck with past tgeir prime good players who had lits of playoff experience to help mentor the young players while the Wings toiled along near the bottom accumilating higher drafted players for 3 or 4 more years. Hockey is different from all other sports in that it takes players a few years to become NHL players. Even the top drafted players usually need at 1 year in the AHL with the majority of players needing a couple of years. According to Google, less than 4% of all players drafted are regularly playing within 2 years of being drafted with the majority taking 3 to 5 years. Of those that do end up playing within 2 years they are taken within the top 5 picks of which Yzerman has picked once maybe twice since taking over as the Red Wings GM. Yzerman was 100% correct when he told fans to be patient because you have to draft a team core and it was going to take a while. To those that critize Yzerman for not doing more at the trade deadline this year, from everything I’ve read, he tried to but he wasn’t going to trade away Edvinson or Pellika plas Plante and/or Bear along with a first round draft pick plus another prospect. I agree the cost to bring in a player was too high. The one area where Yzerman has failed is getting another high quality center but then the free agent market hasn’t been that good either. The last couple of years the top free agents have had their minds set on going to Stanley Cup contenders. Yzerman isn’t trying to build a team that just makes the playoffs, he’s trying to build a legitimate Stanly Cup Contender and the Wings are still a few pieces from being there. Along with that Detroit still has one of the best prosepect pools in the NHL despite having moved a lot of them up to play in the NHL. Even when players get to the NHL, it takes most players at least 3 years to become solid contributors. In 7 years Yzerman has taken the Wings from a trainwreck that he inherited from Holland to a team that finished in the top 16 that plays in the toughest division, a division the Wings were near the top most of the year, a division that sent 5 teams to the playoffs and toughest conference in the NHL. That means the see the toughest competition on most nights. I’ve been a Red Wings fan for 50 years now, long enough I remember the DeadWings era. I remember back when you could buy a NHL team because of no salary cap, which the Wings did. The Wings had teams full of future Hall of Fame players, who easily made the playoffs only to fall in the 1st or 2nd round. Yzerman experienced that as a player and as such discovered what kind of players it takes TO CONTEND FOR THR STANLEY CUP, not just make the playoffs as Yzerman has stated what he plans to build. Everyone has been going on about it’s been 10 years without the playoffsfor the Wings but tge 1st 3 years of that was Ken Holland who picked Rassmusen as a first round pick who I hope Yzerman sends packing this year Comparing Holland’s drafting record compared to Yzerman’s makes Yzerman look like a draft guru. Yes Yzerman has some work to do this offseason but to call Yzerman’s era a disaster is idiotic at best and more of an ignorant writer putting drama filled drivel on paper in hopes he can sell it.
Amen Brother!!! I haven’t been a fan quite as long as you but it has been 38 years for me. You are a voice of reason!
You’ve didn’t quite hit the nail on the head. Here’s the thing: it’s not a mystery what happened, and it’s not hard to pinpoint exactly where Yzerman went wrong. For whatever reason, whether it was pressure from ownership or he listened to the fans or he and his staff just made a mistake and misjudged how close they were, he tried to turn the corner a year too early, then lost confidence at the 2023 deadline, tried to go back to rebuilding and got stuck in the middle. It happens all the time.
2022-23: sign Copp, Chiarot, Perron, Maata, Kubalik as FA in summer, re-sign Walman and Zadina, and hand the net to Ville Husso. This shows he thought they were ready but the team sucks. He’s already ended the burn it down rebuild, but decides he still needs young talent. So he deals Bertuzzi and Hronek, gives Larkin an 8 year extension, and everything that’s happened since flows from this half-measure. The next summer he signs Kane and Holl and Gostisbehere trades for Debrincat and Petry, and boom, suddenly you’re a middling team of Raymond, Larkin, Seider, and a bunch of third liners with crap goaltending and an old defense.
You gotta go one way or the other. You either:
1) Don’t do the turnaround in the summer of 2022, don’t sign those vets, deal Larkin by the 2023 deadline along with Hronek and Bertuzzi, and you get a couple more high picks and you got a real wave of youth coming now. Or:
2) Double down. Keep Hronek and Bertuzzi. That way they don’t sign Compher and either Holl or Petry in the summer of 2023. You still trade for Debrincat and your top six is then Larkin, Raymond, Bertuzzi, Copp, Debrincat, and you probably still sign Kane that fall. Your defense going into 23-24 is then Seider, Hronek, Gostisbehere, Walman, Chiarot and either Holl or Petry. The goaltending still sucks, you need a second line centre and your bottom six is so-so but there’s stuff there to build with, Edvinsson and Kasper are on the way next season, and the defense is good.
He got trapped halfway between these two paths and now they’re boned.
They have ZERO grit, that’s one problem, and the captain isn’t really a captain either. You have to look at these high caliber teams and what you realize is that it looks nothing like the current Detroit Red Wings. On the bright side there are a lot of very high caliber players that appear to be somewhat available this offseason as potential trade candidates the Red Wings could acquire. They have the cap space and the prospects to make it happen. Should be a HUGE offseason for the front office, and if not, they’re just going to be pretty milk toast average.
Yeah, I was going to mention the first thing you said; the team lacks toughness and grit.
For all the credit Yzerman gets for Tampa Bay, it wasn’t until Yzerman left and new management decided to add that toughness by bringing in players known for their physical style of play which is what ultimately enabled the Lightning win back-to-back Stanley Cups. His last year as GM was when the tougher Blue Jackets swept the Lightning out of the playoffs, wasn’t it? IIRC, the TBL got manhandled in that series.
I think Yzerman believes teams don’t need grit and tough, physical players to win and it’s a huge blind spot for him. He didn’t learn this lesson by seeing what happened with the Lightning after he left and has built a team in Detroit with the same deficits on top of some of the other mistakes he’s made and having a less skilled team that what he had in Tampa.
IIRC, he was one of the few people in hockey to speak out about how he thinks fighting needs to be taken out of the game like a decade ago. This is his mentality, he doesn’t value toughness despite his Red Wings teams having plenty of it when he was a player and wouldn’t have been great teams without it. He thinks all you need is skilled, finesse players. They help, but he acts like this isn’t a physical game.
Agree with all the other points laid out in this thread.