Steve Yzerman returned to Detroit in 2019 as a homecoming king, the architect who built Tampa Bay’s core into a perennial contender. Seven years later, the Red Wings are searching for their next general manager, and the playoff drought that predated him never broke. The Athletic’s postmortem identifies two structural failures: Yzerman never committed to a direction, and the drafting that defined his Tampa reputation didn’t travel with him to Michigan.
The numbers tell the first story plainly. Detroit’s point total never cratered — the team dropped in the standings only once across Yzerman’s seven seasons — but it never climbed high enough, either. That incremental crawl is the signature of a franchise that wouldn’t commit to bottoming out and wouldn’t commit to pushing in. The 2022 offseason is the clearest inflection point. Yzerman signed Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot, David Perron, Dominik Kubalik, and Olli Määttä to multiyear deals, pushing chips in on a roster coming off a 74-point season. The Red Wings improved to 80 points and picked ninth — just outside the range where Matvei Michkov (seventh) and Ryan Leonard (eighth) came off the board. Detroit’s pick, Nate Danielson, has yet to become a full-time NHL player.
Then the direction reversed. At the 2023 trade deadline, Yzerman dealt Tyler Bertuzzi and Filip Hronek. That summer he signed J.T. Compher and Justin Holl, traded for Alex DeBrincat and Jeff Petry, and brought Patrick Kane aboard early in 2023-24. The following offseason, Perron and Shayne Gostisbehere walked in free agency, replaced by Vladimir Tarasenko and Erik Gustafsson — for a net savings of less than $500,000. The moves didn’t cohere into a contention window or a teardown. They cohered into 82 games of .500 hockey, year after year.
Yzerman’s own words from his 2022 year-end press conference now read like an epitaph for the strategy: “The danger becomes you start to get a little impatient, desperate … Any time I’ve tried to force something — force a trade, force a signing — I’ve kind of regretted it.” He was warning against the exact impulse that the 2022 free-agent class would come to represent.
The second failure cuts deeper, because it’s the one nobody saw coming. Yzerman’s Tampa teams built their foundation outside the first round — Nikita Kucherov in the late second, Ondrej Palat in the seventh, Brayden Point and Anthony Cirelli in the third. Two-thirds of the top-six forward group from Tampa’s 2021 Stanley Cup roster came from rounds 2 through 7. In Detroit, that pipeline ran dry. Outside of Albert Johansson (2019 second-rounder) and Emmitt Finnie (2023 seventh-rounder), no Red Wings pick outside the first round under Yzerman has played more than 50 NHL games. Elmer Söderblom, the one other late-round contributor, was traded at the deadline.
The early first-round hits were real. Moritz Seider went sixth overall in 2019 — a pick widely panned at the time that produced a Calder Trophy winner and a top-pair defenseman. Lucas Raymond is nearly a point-per-game player. Simon Edvinsson looks like a legitimate top-pairing piece. Marco Kasper, the 2022 top pick, battled through a sophomore slump but projects as a meaningful middle-six forward. The problem wasn’t the top of the board. It was everything below it, and the gap between what Yzerman’s draft machine produced in Florida and what it produced in Michigan is the difference between a contender and a team that finishes ninth in its conference.
The Red Wings now begin a general manager search with a roster that is neither bad enough to draft franchise talent nor good enough to play in May. That is the cost of seven years without a lane.
Sources:
- The Athletic — “Where it went wrong for Steve Yzerman as Detroit Red Wings general manager”
- r/hockey discussion thread