Are the Detroit Red Wings hindering their long-term success this season?

I’m sure if you asked most NHL players whether they’d want to make the playoffs or miss but get better in the long run by doing so, most players would take the playoffs. They’re competitive machines, so as such, it’s in their nature to always want to win.

In fact, I’m sure if you asked most people at any level of an NHL team, they’d take the playoffs. For the coaches, who are also competitive, making the big dance looks a lot more favorable to their bosses. For the owners, it means free revenue. Heck, even for arena staff, it’s at least a couple more guaranteed shifts.

The only position that may waver on that question is the general manager. While they obviously like to see their team succeed, they do have to keep the long-term perspective of the team in mind. I’m sure Philadelphia Flyers’ GM Daniel Briere is happy that his team is competing for a playoff spot, but considering his initial plans for a rebuild, he probably wouldn’t be upset at losses to help their draft position either.

Based on the moves that Detroit Red Wings GM Steve Yzerman has made these past couple of years, it’s quite clear that his answer would be that he wants to make the playoffs. The problem is that, right now, it’s the wrong answer for the Wings.

Now, to a certain extent, I understand why Yzerman wants to. The Red Wings were once the model of consistency, particularly amidst their 25 straight postseason appearances that went from 1991 to 2016. Since then, they haven’t made the playoffs again, with their current seven-season drought being the second-longest active one in the league after the Buffalo Sabres’ 12 seasons. Detroit is an Original Six team known for being competitive, so they want to be competitive again. Considering that the core of the team has had almost no playoff experience because of that drought, getting in just to give them a taste could be very valuable to their development.

On top of that, Yzerman has been with the Red Wings since the conclusion of the 2018-19 season. That’s almost five years with the team, and he’s the 10th-longest tenured general manager in the league. While someone with the legacy he has in Detroit is probably safe, you do have to wonder when ownership might get impatient, want to see success, and think that a new man at the helm of the team will make that happen.

Now, you might also argue it’s good to make the playoffs no matter how bad you are, because anything can happen once you get in and any team can go on a deep run. After all, we’ve seen it in recent seasons with the 2020 Dallas Stars and 2021 Montreal Canadiens making surprise runs to the Stanley Cup Finals. Even the Florida Panthers last year were a No. 8 seed who made the playoffs by one point. Hockey loves to present itself as a league with parity and that all 16 teams have a decent chance at winning the Cup.

Except that’s not entirely true. Sure, teams like those Stars and Canadiens have made runs to the Finals, but usually they meet a true Stanley Cup contending team there and suffer defeat, which in the case both of those teams was to the team that Yzerman built in the Tampa Bay Lightning.

When’s the last time a team barely snuck into the playoffs and won the Stanley Cup? You could make arguments for the 2012 Los Angeles Kings and 2019 St. Louis Blues, but you could also argue those teams had genuine Cup-contending rosters and dealt with bad luck during the regular season, allowing everything to go their way come playoff time. Maybe the 2006 Carolina Hurricanes were one in the chaos that was the post-lockout season, but even then that was a strong team. The parity that the NHL boasts hasn’t exactly existed in the salary cap era.

So realistically, you should be making the playoffs for one of two reasons: to win the Stanley Cup or to take that next step as a rebuilding team and get experience. Considering the work the Red Wings have put in to rebuild their team after their former stars in Nicklas Lidstrom, Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg retired, you would imagine that they fall in to the latter umbrella. But based on how the team has played and been deployed this season, it’s not going to give them the development or experience that Yzerman probably wants.

Let’s get the low-hanging fruit out of the way: this team is very much a paper tiger. No other team in the league that either holds a playoff spot or is within five points of one has a lower 5v5 expected goal share than the Red Wings’ 46.08%, and of the five teams worse than Detroit, only the Blues are even remotely in the playoff conversation. Not just that, but only the 2010-11 Anaheim Ducks, 2012-13 Toronto Maple Leafs, 2019-20 Winnipeg Jets and 2020-21 Blues have made the playoffs with a worse expected goal share than the Wings since the stat has been tracked. Three of those four teams came in shortened seasons, while all four were eliminated in the first round. It’s not a recipe for success, especially in the postseason.

It’s a topic that’s been beaten to death about this team, and for good reason. But why is this bad for the future of the team? It’s not nearly as bad as the other reasons that I’ll get into, but it’s still not ideal.

For starters, it teaches a lot of bad habits among the players on the team, especially the younger ones who are still developing their games. It rewards them for poor on-ice play, and makes them think that they can get away with it down the road. On top of that, it usually tricks the management and coaching staff into thinking that the team is better than it actually is, and they double down on the parts of the team that are causing the problems.

Now, you could still argue that it is helpful for a young team like the Red Wings to make the playoffs in spite of that so that they can get experience. But the problem is that this team’s success hasn’t been due to their young players, but instead because of the plethora of older players who are getting in the way of their prospects.

Only seven players under the age of 25 have played games for the Red Wings this season, and only four of them have played at least 40 games this season: Moritz Seider, Lucas Raymond, Joe Veleno, and Michael Rasmussen. Raymond ranks fourth among skaters in goals above replacement, but after that, you have to go all the way to Rasmussen in 11th to find a player in that age range on that list, and Veleno and Seider either sit at replacement level or below it. With an average age of 26.85 that ranks 16th in the league, make no mistake, this team isn’t young, and it certainly isn’t relying on their supposedly deep prospect pool to make that happen.

Which brings me to my second point: this Wings team is falling into the same trap its previous management did. In their final seasons of their 25-straight playoff streak, then-GM Ken Holland constantly strived for mediocrity. He would pull from the team’s future to improve what was a bubble playoff team at best to the point that they just made the playoffs but didn’t really make any noise once they did. Draft picks and prospects went out the window for middling veterans who were in their final years, and it also meant that the few good prospects they did have were stuck in the AHL, often with the reasoning that they were overdeveloping them to make sure they were good enough to be difference-makers when they finally arrived.

Well for the past couple seasons, Yzerman has done the same thing, except without the excuse of the playoff streak. Of the 23 non-extension signings with NHL roster players he’s made in the past two seasons, only Gustav Lindstrom and Klim Kostin were under the age of 25 at the time of signing, and both players are no longer on the team. Of the other 21 signings over the age of 24, 10 of them were to multi-year contracts, and six were to 3+ years, with the only player of high stature of that bunch being Alex DeBrincat.

That’s created a huge clog of mediocre players taking up minutes for Detroit’s NHL squad, and as a result, outside of Raymond and Seider, none of their elite young talent is playing consistently, and even then, only Raymond is performing well this season. When looking at who Daily Faceoff’s prospects expert Steven Ellis considered to be their best prospects going into the season, three have gotten NHL time in their career, only one of them has gotten NHL time this season, and it’s combined for only 37 games of total experience. Sure, some of them are fresh off last year’s draft and not NHL-ready, but seven of them are currently in the AHL, and six of them have been there for multiple seasons.

When you have so much depth that even injuries aren’t giving your top prospects a chance of some NHL ice time, you have too much depth as a rebuilding team, especially when that depth is very mediocre. Only five players have given the Wings at least a win’s worth of value above replacement this season: DeBrincat, Raymond, Dylan Larkin, Patrick Kane and Olli Maatta. Three are players considered to be part of their core and two certainly fall more into the veteran depth signing category, although Kane is a bit of a unique case here.

Otherwise, it’s just middling veteran group providing little value and taking up opportunities for the Wings’ young core to actually develop at the NHL level. Of the remaining 23 players to play at least a game for the Red Wings this season, 19 have given them positive value but not enough to be worth a win, and four have provided negative value this season: Kostin, J.T. Compher, Austin Czarnik, and Seider. The middle two players also fall into that category of veteran depth players that Detroit certainly doesn’t need, but perhaps the most concerning is Seider.

Seider took the league by storm in 2021-22 when he not only established himself as an excellent rookie defenseman by capturing the Calder trophy, but he also established himself as one of the league’s better defensemen with a 12.7 GAR that season that tied with Jared Spurgeon for 26th in the league.

Since then though, Seider’s seen his game take a step back, at least in terms of how much he contributes to their wins. In 2022-23, he had just 1.2 GAR, and as mentioned before, this season he sees himself with the worst mark on the Wings at -2.3.

Now, there is a reason for this to not be a huge concern. The main reason for this is: because Seider’s already emerged as the Red Wings’ best defenseman, they’ve entrusted him with tougher minutes. In fact, according to Patrick Bacon’s WAR and player data over the last three seasons, Seider ranks in the 100th percentile of defensemen in terms of the quality of competition that he faces. Translation: he gets some of most challenging minutes in the league.

That role has also meant playing with names that don’t exactly jump off the page either. 2022-23 saw Seider spend a majority of his ice time with either Jake Walman or Ben Chiarot, and this season it’s mostly been with Walman, along with some time with Chiarot and Shayne Gostisbehere. Of those three players, only his time with Gostisbehere has seen him have a positive 5v5 expected goal share.

Oh, and Seider’s special teams duties also slightly fit this new role for him as well. He’s led the Red Wings blueline in shorthanded ice time in 2022-23 and 2023-24, but he’s only led the blueline in power play ice time in 2022-23, losing his top power play unit duties to Gostisbehere.

On one hand, it’s a good sign for the Wings that they’ve thrown Seider to the wolves and he’s managing the minutes well enough to contain the other team’s top competition and let the rest of the blueline thrive in easier roles. A 45.05% 5v5 expected goal share over the past two seasons isn’t ideal from your top blueliner, but when every other defenseman with at least 60 games played in that time (except for Chiarot) has a higher expected goal share because of it, you can swallow that pill a little bit easier.

The problem is that Seider is in his most important seasons for development, so this is the time where you’d want your young two-way defenseman to add more skills to his toolbox. He already established that he has a strong NHL-level defensive game in his rookie season, so why not use these early seasons in his career to give him the opportunity to add more skills to his offensive game and allow him to develop into a more dynamic player? Instead, he’s spending most of his ice time hemmed in his own zone, and considering that he turns 23 next Saturday, he’s already starting to run out of runway in his developmental years.

In comparison, look at what the Colorado Avalanche did with Cale Makar. Sure, they put him in a top-end role right out of the gate, but they didn’t drown him, and they allowed him to continue to grow his skill set. As a result, he’s already established himself as one of the best, if not the best defenseman in the game with only two more seasons and two years and a bit over five months of age on Seider. And it didn’t come at the cost of the team’s success either.

If this is what you have to do to your best defenseman to get your team to a point where they can maybe squeak into a playoff spot, is it even worth it? I don’t think so, especially when we’ve seen what Seider is capable of.

So while it is true that the Wings getting into the playoffs is good for the opportunity for experience and the possibility of a Cup run, it’s come at the expense of what the Yzerplan was supposed to originally be about. Instead of developing their young core to the point where they can all be a consistent playoff team (and maybe even a Cup-contending one), they’ve boggled down their depth with mediocre veterans who don’t have a lot of long-term importance to the team, all to barely sneak into the playoffs playing terrible hockey.

Sure, the long-term impact may not be an outright negative one, but it certainly isn’t a positive one, and it’s essentially wasted a couple years for that window of potential with that group to be hit. Don’t get me wrong, Detroit is certainly one of the more fun options to make the playoffs out of the Eastern Conference teams in the bubble, but that doesn’t mean it’s good for them.