DETROIT — Of all the people to stumble upon the Rorschach Test that is the 2023-24 Detroit Red Wings, leave it to the freshest set of eyes in the building.
Alex DeBrincat has yet to play an official game for the Red Wings, after his hometown team acquired him in a trade this summer from Ottawa — from a team that, for the last five years, has been on a parallel rebuilding track to Detroit’s. But after his first week formally practicing with the Red Wings, DeBrincat was asked the obvious question: What similarities and differences had he noticed between his old club and his new one?
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“It’s pretty similar,” DeBrincat began, before delivering a line not heard much around the Red Wings for the past few seasons. “I think the team here is a little bit older. (The Senators) have a young core, and here it’s just a touch older.”
Ever since Steve Yzerman arrived as general manager in 2019, the narrative emphasis in Detroit has been on the team’s youth.
It started with one “young core” — made up of Dylan Larkin, Tyler Bertuzzi, Anthony Mantha and Andreas Athanasiou — but even as Yzerman moved on from all of them except Larkin, getting younger was always front of mind.
Today, Larkin, DeBrincat and Yzerman’s first two first-round picks, Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond, are the pieces at the center of Detroit’s future. And in fairness, most of them are still considered young, even by NHL standards.
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But DeBrincat’s first observation of his new surroundings last month was still correct: Despite being a rebuilding club, the Red Wings’ average age of 27.7 is much more similar to last year’s Stanley Cup Final participants, Vegas and Florida (27.6 and 27.7, respectively), than to fellow Atlantic Division rebuilders Ottawa (26.5), Montreal (25.7) or Buffalo (25.5).
After a flurry of veteran signings and acquisitions this offseason, Detroit’s opening-night roster is set to include zero first- or second-year NHL players.
And yet, most would agree, they still find themselves behind the Sabres and Senators in that rebuilding process. That’s created a bit of dissonance between the slow, methodical plan Yzerman set out to execute, and the more ready-made roster he has recently assembled.
“Obviously with the trade deadline last year, it seemed like we were going to continue to get younger,” Larkin said this week. “But we brought in — I wouldn’t say really old guys — but we brought in a lot of guys that are late 20s and guys that have been around, and played a lot of hockey games.”
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For Larkin, who is 27, those additions might mean his first finish outside the NHL’s bottom 10 for the first time since he was a rookie. They’ve created exciting depth.
But from the outside, it’s enough to make you wonder: What exactly are the 2023-24 Red Wings? A rebuilding organization still biding its time? Or a club ready to get on with the next phase of its life cycle?
On the eve of last month’s training camp, Yzerman didn’t even wait for the question to finish before beginning his answer to whether Detroit was still in its rebuild.
“Yep,” he said, before taking a bit more time on the second part of the question: Whether they were coming out of it.
“I don’t know when to, I guess, literally announce what stage of the rebuild we’re at,” Yzerman said. “Each year, we’ve tried to add draft picks, we’ve tried to sign any of our unrestricted free agents that we could, or chose (to), or wanted to. And the players that we couldn’t, or weren’t going to … we traded at the deadline.
“I guess you’re out of your rebuild when you’re not doing that at the deadline. So we’ll see, but again I think we’re still being patient. We’re waiting for our younger players to develop. I intend to hold onto our draft picks for the foreseeable future and be patient and let them develop, and try to add to that small core that we have and (make) us a competitive team for a long stretch of time.”
In that answer, there is no ambiguity. It’s the gospel of rebuilding, chapter and verse.
But at least to some, the course Yzerman has charted with his actions has muddied those waters.
The past two offseasons, the Red Wings have been among the league’s most active teams in free agency, signing veterans such as Andrew Copp, J.T. Compher, David Perron, Ben Chiarot and Justin Holl to help them raise the level of their NHL team. They traded for 35-year-old Jeff Petry late this summer, suddenly making their blue line so deep that, despite a strong camp from 2021 No. 6 pick Simon Edvinsson, Detroit’s top prospect ended up back in Grand Rapids to start the season.
Ben Chiarot, center, Andrew Copp (18) and Jeff Petry (46) have added age and experience to the Red Wings since arriving in Detroit. (Paul Sancya / Associated Press)NHL rosters are fluid, and Edvinsson’s camp showing still put him in position to get meaningful NHL minutes later on this season. The same should be true for second-year forwards Jonatan Berggren and Elmer Söderblom, both of whom will also be in Grand Rapids to start the year. But their opening assignments, combined with the influx of veterans, has led some fans and outsiders to wonder if the Red Wings are really trying to speed up their rebuild, finishing the process early.
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The Athletic’s Dom Luszczyszyn even wondered if this might be a “make-or-break” year for the team’s plan — not in terms of making the playoffs, per se, but in showing that Detroit can succeed without having the kind of elite talent the league’s top teams enjoy, and that the Red Wings still seem to lack.
To hear Yzerman tell it, though, his stated patience wasn’t at odds with those signings. It was driving them.
“You dress 20 players every night, and my feeling is I would rather go to the free agent market instead of hoping or forcing any of our young guys in,” Yzerman said in September. “Really, filling our roster, completing our roster not only this year but over the last couple years, with some of the free agents, is to be patient and allow these younger players to develop and play at a reasonable pace, instead of just throwing them into the NHL and hoping they’re OK and hoping we’re going to win games that way. When we’re 100 percent certain that they’re ready to play, or that they should be in the NHL and help us win games, they’ll be in the NHL. But until then, one, they have to earn it, and two, they have to be ready, in our judgment — be ready to play.”
To that end, there is little doubt that the Red Wings are better positioned to win games in 2023-24 because of their signings the last two summers. They have gotten deeper. They have gotten bigger. They have added more talent and experience at forward, defense and in goal.
And inside their locker room, the buzz generated by their most recent flurry of signings and trades has been noticeable.
“I think it excites a lot of guys, to be honest with you,” said Copp, now beginning his second year with the team. “I think there’s something to be said for youth and influx (of that), but I mean, you look around the room, there’s no one I’d rather have than a lot of these guys.”
After rattling off the past experience each of his new teammates has had playing on winning teams, Copp added: “(I) look around the room, I’m kind of pumped up by seeing every name on the sheet.”
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Head coach Derek Lalonde, meanwhile, noted the ways veteran experience can help players avoid the day-to-day emotional highs and lows that can plague younger players.
“A little thing (like) just being posted on the lineup as a fourth-line wing — sometimes a young guy, that breaks them for the day,” Lalonde said. “Or just going through a game, only getting six minutes just because of the way the game played out, and not letting that bother you.”
Those things are real, as is the difference in knowing what works and doesn’t work in the NHL, and the physical maturation needed to accomplish it.
But to many, the question entering 2023-24 isn’t whether the Red Wings will win more this season as a result of their signings. Rather, it’s whether getting better in the short term and spending future cap space to do it was the right priority for a team that still lacks the type of star power that links the league’s true contenders.
That’s a question that cannot, frankly, be answered this season.
It may become clearer if players like Edvinsson get extended opportunities later on. Instead, the reality is, so many of Detroit’s most important young pieces — Edvinsson, 2022 and 2023 first-round picks Marco Kasper and Nate Danielson, and 2021 third-round find Carter Mazur — are still too young to cap their ceilings, just as they’re too young for Yzerman to pencil them in as contributors. Even Raymond and Seider, now in year three, still have more helium within them.
That only furthers the uncertainty about what to make of Detroit.
If the Red Wings can succeed this year, even to the tune of 90 or so points, and those three recent top-10 picks develop well and join the team over the next two seasons, it could very well be a recipe to become a 100-point team in the near future. That, it seems, is the hope — and not an unfounded one.
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But if Detroit’s prospects don’t reach their potential, and the older players helping to prop up the team in the short-term age out or move on, an equal fear is emerging that the Red Wings could get stuck in the dreaded middle — not quite good enough to contend and not quite bad enough to acquire more talent on the level of Raymond or Seider.
Neither outcome is off the table.
To the more ardent advocates for building exclusively via the draft lottery, the hope of one day becoming a juggernaut would have been worth the pain of continuing to lose at the rate Detroit had been before last season.
That, after all, is the premise fans were sold on in the early years of the rebuild, when no other avenue even seemed viable. Bottoming out was inevitable.
It’s worth noting, though, that the Red Wings did go that route, finishing as a bottom-six team for five straight years from 2017 to 2021. They picked in the top five just once and never higher than fourth. Some of the high picks supposed to make that misery worth it have already come and gone. It turns out, not everything can be planned for.
There was a logic in what Detroit did at the time, of course. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the calculus today is the same.
“If you just get 60 points every year as a team, what’s that gonna do?” Perron said. “You might get first-round picks, but the first-round pick from five years ago didn’t learn the right culture, or maybe stepped into the league too soon, or whatever. I do believe it’s critical for any organization to have those moments where you do feel at certain points, that this is a critical time of the year for your team. You grow from (those) moments.”
The moments Perron is referring to are ones where something meaningful, like playoff contention, is still within reach. A team may be ready to seize that opportunity, or it may not. But for players like Raymond and Seider — and eventually, Edvinsson — situations like the Red Wings faced last season, with two games in Ottawa to determine if their playoff hopes would remain legitimate, are hard to replicate in seasons that are doomed from the beginning.
Will Daniel Sprong help the Red Wings contend for the playoffs? (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press)With the upgrades the Red Wings made this summer, they stand to be in those kinds of moments again this season. Even as the Atlantic Division improves around them, adding players like DeBrincat, Petry, Compher and Daniel Sprong means Detroit could be in the hunt even later this time around.
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But the fact remains that young players can only be in those moments if they’re on the team for them. And as the season begins, most of Detroit’s roster won’t actually be all that young.
That dissonance between two coherent points of view exists in multiple areas for Detroit, making the Red Wings quietly one of the league’s most interesting teams.
Their NHL roster doesn’t really look like a rebuilder’s, but their prospect pool does. Most still expect them to finish like a rebuilder, but they don’t plan to play like one.
The truth is, as the season begins, you can see anything you want to in these Red Wings.
And you might see something else the very next day.
(Top photos of Alex DeBrincat and Steve Yzerman: Paul Sancya / Associated Press; Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
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