What other rebuilding teams can learn from Red Wings’ failures

The Detroit Red Wings have gone from the longest playoff streak to the longest active playoff drought.

That drought hit 10 seasons this weekend when the Red Wings were mathematically eliminated following a massive collapse in which they went 8-11-4 after the Olympic break. This is the fourth season in a row in which a poor showing in March and April cost the team a chance at the playoffs.

More concerning for Red Wings fans is that it has now been seven seasons since franchise icon Steve Yzerman took over as general manager and initiated a deep rebuild. In Yzerman’s first year in charge, the Red Wings won only 17 of 71 games before the pandemic ended the 2019-20 season early. They then won only 19 times in the 56-game 2020-21 season. It’s a strategy many other teams have taken, but the rewards for those years of pain have not come to Detroit.

Why has it not worked? The answer isn’t just one obvious thing, but instead a series of mistakes and misfortunes that, over time, accumulated into a team that has no clear path to winning a Stanley Cup.

As Yzerman heads back to the drawing board this summer, let’s look back at how the Red Wings got here and some lessons other rebuilding teams can learn from their failures.

The first lesson to be learned is that delaying the inevitable only prolongs the problem.

The Red Wings had already missed the playoffs in four straight seasons under previous GM Ken Holland when Yzerman initiated a full rebuild in 2019-20. But you could argue that the team had been struggling even longer than that, as from 2012-13 through to 2015-16, the Red Wings made the playoffs four times despite winning more than half of their games only once. Add it all together and that’s eight seasons when the team could have entered into a rebuild but didn’t before Yzerman took over.

The decision to try and remain competitive would have been more successful if the team had still been able to add another wave of young talent over that time. A soft retool, similar to the way the Boston Bruins, Washington Capitals and Minnesota Wild operate now, was certainly possible with the right draft picks.

But the Red Wings weren’t able to do that. While future captain Dylan Larkin was drafted in 2014, from 2015 to ‘18 the team consistently missed the mark at the draft, which set them back years. 

In those four drafts, the team made five first-round picks who all failed to live up to their draft slot: Evgeny Svechnikov (19th, 2015), Dennis Cholowski (20th, 2016), Michael Rasmussen (ninth, 2017), Filip Zadina (sixth, 2018) and Joe Veleno (30th, 2018). 

The other rounds in those drafts didn’t go much better, with Filip Hronek (second-round, 2016) being the only high-impact player selected by Detroit during that time.

The decision to wait eight years before admitting the team needed to rebuild is still impacting the roster today. So, other teams debating whether to go down the rebuild path should look at the Red Wings and realize waiting isn’t worth it.

Committing to a full rebuild requires putting a lot of faith in the NHL Draft Lottery, which leads to the second lesson: luck is not a guarantee.

Simply being bad isn’t enough; rebuilding teams also have to be lucky to land a generational talent at the top of the draft.

Luck has not been on the Red Wings’ side during their playoff drought.

In the nine drafts since the playoff drought began, the Red Wings have picked in the top five only once, and they have fallen down the board after the lottery five times. One of those times was in 2020, the lowest point in the rebuild, when the Red Wings dropped from first to fourth after the lottery. Detroit selected Lucas Raymond with that pick, and he remains an impact player for them, but Yzerman vented his frustrations with the process at GM meetings, and his complaints led to changes in how the lottery is conducted.

But luck can be applied to the quality of the draft class, too. In 2020, when the Red Wings had their best chance to pick No. 1, Alexis Lafreniere was the consensus top pick, and he went to the Rangers after they won the lottery. So far, Raymond has been a more productive player than Lafreniere, so winning the lottery that year might not have changed Detroit’s fortunes too much.

Detroit isn’t the only team with bad lottery luck, which is why there is always risk betting too much of the future on where the ping pong balls land. In the 10 years since the lottery was expanded beyond just the first pick, the team with the best odds to win the top selection has actually won it only five times. And only once in that time has there been no change to the draft order after the draws. Just last year, the Islanders moved up 10 slots to take Matthew Schaefer first overall, and even though they are going to finish this season in a similarly disappointing fashion to the Red Wings, the optimism around that team is much higher because Schaefer looks like a star.

Luck isn’t an excuse in a rebuild, but if you don’t have any, it becomes much harder to land the top talent that can push a team from being good to being great.

The draft is the best way to accumulate superstars but a roster is 23 players deep. So when it’s time for a team to move past the rebuild into contention again, the general manager needs to surround his young core with other great players acquired in signings and trades.

This is another area where the Red Wings have fallen short.

This season, the Red Wings were exposed in March when Larkin and second-line centre Andrew Copp both went down with injuries at the same time. The lack of centre depth was a major contributor to the losing streak that doomed their season, but that depth has been an issue for multiple years. Larkin was also injured in March of 2024 and the Red Wings ultimately missed the playoffs that season on a tiebreaker.

The Red Wings have never been able to find a suitable second centre to pair with Larkin for a formidable one-two punch down the middle. They’ve dipped into the free agent market many times over the years, signing Copp, J.T. Compher, Frans Nielsen, Vladislav Namestnikov, Sam Gagner and Pius Suter. Of that group, Copp has performed the best, but he’s never scored more than 42 points in a season.

The same can be said about the defence. Moritz Seider has emerged as a star, and Simon Edvinsson is developing into one, but they have been surrounded by a rotating cast of veterans to mixed results. Ben Chiarot was the most notable free-agent addition, signed in the summer of 2022 and awarded a new three-year deal in January. In his four seasons with Detroit, Chiarot is a minus-57, which is the worst among all Red Wings skaters in that time and tied for sixth-worst among defencemen league-wide. Other veteran defencemen who joined the Red Wings and under-performed include Justin Holl, Erik Gustafsson, Travis Hamonic, Jeff Petry and Olli Maatta.

That’s not to say the Red Wings haven’t made any good additions. Yzerman’s trades for Alex DeBrincat and John Gibson have both been successes, as has the signing of Patrick Kane. But the misses outnumber the hits, and the lack of quality depth hurt the Red Wings at the most important time again this season.

Good players don’t want to play for bad teams

Former Sabres general manager Kevyn Adams made headlines when he said “we don’t have palm trees” in December of 2024 as Buffalo was headed for a 14th year out of the playoffs.

Well, Detroit doesn’t have palm trees either, and while he hasn’t gone viral in the same way Adams did, Yzerman has mentioned twice now that it has been difficult to acquire star players.

After free-agency in July of 2025, when the Red Wings were rumoured to be interested in impact forwards Mitch Marner and Nikolaj Ehlers but instead only signed Mason Appleton and James van Riemsdyk, Yzerman said: “It seems like the guys had really targeted where they want to go, and out of respect to the teams, we knew pretty early that we weren’t going to be involved in much.”

Then, after last month’s trade deadline, when the Red Wings acquired defenceman Justin Faulk but didn’t add another centre despite being connected to many of them, Yzerman said: “We knew going back a few days that we were probably not going to get any of the big names out there.”

That’s the challenge facing the Red Wings right now. How do they become a destination for the best players in the world? Because the direction the team has been going in isn’t working.