Have rebuilding Red Wings already hit their peak?

Detroit’s sports teams are having a moment after a long decade of darkness. The Pistons have clinched a playoff spot for only the third time in the past 16 years, just one year after losing an NBA-record 28 games in a row. The Tigers, led by Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal, snapped a 10-year playoff drought in 2024 and came within one win of reaching the ALCS. And the Lions followed up an NFC championship game appearance in 2023 with a 15-win season the year after.

But the Detroit Red Wings remain in the wilderness, having now missed the playoffs for a franchise-record nine consecutive seasons. Much like last season, when the Wings missed the playoffs by the tiebreaker, they showed flashes of promise in 2024-25, but a dreadful collapse in March was too much to overcome. They’ll finish with fewer points than they did a season ago, taking a measurable step backward in the rebuild. 

As players, coaches and GM Steve Yzerman reflect on this disappointing season, doom is settling in with a fan base that is grappling with the reality that these Red Wings, as constructed, may have already peaked as a group.

And it hasn’t been good enough to even make the playoffs, let alone challenge for the Stanley Cup.

At the root of Detroit’s issues is that the team has struggled to develop prospects, which is a key factor in any rebuild that’s committed to the draft. Detroit has made 50 draft picks in the past six years and only one picked outside of the first-round played a role on this year’s team. They’ve only picked inside the top five once through this time, decreasing the chances they would end up with a franchise-changing superstar.

The worst season Detroit had through this rebuild came in 2019-20 and though the Red Wings came away from that awful year with the best odds of picking first overall, they ended up falling all the way back to fourth overall after the lottery. That landed them Lucas Raymond, where Alexis Lafreniere, Quinton Byfield and Tim Stutzle were taken just before. And while Raymond is an important piece of the team’s young core worthy of moving forward with — the gem of the drafts through the rebuilding years — Detroit just hasn’t had a player in the same class as Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon or Nikita Kucherov since the playoff drought began.

Detroit lacks true elite, superstar power, which often is only something you can address at the draft and a pay off from sinking into a rebuild. But the Wings didn’t have such luck. 

To be sure, there is a core group of players in Detroit who had good seasons and should be part of the leadership for years to come. However, the production the team got from Dylan Larkin, Alex DeBrincat and Raymond paled in comparison to other core groups from contending teams. Raymond leads the Red Wings with 75 points this season, which ranks 28th league-wide. DeBrincat’s 67 points are 48th, while Larkin’s 66 is 54th.

Other rebuilding teams such as Ottawa and Montreal passed Detroit to get into the playoffs this season with young, budding rosters of their own. As a result, the Red Wings’ roster construction is coming into question and the missteps made along the way are catching up to them. 

In recent seasons Yzerman has tried to be aggressive in free agency as a way to seek productive veterans — especially forwards — and provide depth around his younger players. But, more often than not, those acquisitions have failed to deliver even secondary scoring and have been a major reason for why the team is stuck in neutral. 

J.T. Compher (10 goals, 31 points in 73 games), Andrew Copp (10 goals, 23 points in 56 games) and Vladimir Tarasenko (10 goals, 31 points in 77 games) all disappointed this season. Each of these players are over 30 years old, have contracts for next season, and hold some form of no-trade clause. If Yzerman did want to move on from any of them, it won’t be such an easy thing to accomplish.

But the issues here run far deeper than just the forward group.

When the goals dried up, the defence became porous. Detroit ranked 16th in goals allowed at 5-on-5 and had a putrid 69.5 penalty kill percentage that is the worst mark by any team this century. Moritz Seider and first-year defencemen Simon Edvinsson and Albert Johansson performed well, but the blue line is anchored down by veterans Ben Chiarot, Erik Gustafsson, Justin Holl and Jeff Petry. Of that group, only Petry is on an expiring contract so, like with the collection of signed veteran forwards, Yzerman will be challenged to change over his group, let alone upgrade it.

And this defence was not often supported well enough by the crowded crease of netminders that saw Cam Talbot, Alex Lyon, Ville Husso and puzzling trade deadline acquisition Petr Mrazek all make starts. Only Talbot (.905) finished with a save percentage above .900 and he (turning 38 in July) and Mrazek (33) are both under contract and figure to share the crease again next season.

This is the cycle the Wings are stuck in — trying to compete by rounding out a young group with a number of veterans pickups, but finding themselves locked into a position tough to wriggle out of when it’s not working.

So what is the way forward now? 

That is the difficult-to-answer question and why frustration is growing in the fan base. 

This team isn’t bad enough to pick at the top of the draft but also lacks the roster space or trade assets to make significant upgrades.

The Red Wings project to have $22.2 million in cap space to work with this off-season, but 16 of the 23 players on the roster are already signed. One pending free agent is Patrick Kane, who at age 36 finished fourth on the team in scoring and may be one of the veterans worth considering keeping around.

The fact is the Red Wings are now securely caught in the middle, the worst place any team wants to be. There’s no clear path forward, optimism is waning, management’s options are slimmer than you’d like, and other teams in the rebuild phase are passing them by. 

But hey, at least the Lions, Tigers and Pistons are competitive again.

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