Detroit — It was eerily quiet across the NHL on Friday.
Almost too quiet for the longest time in Detroit, a place where “almost” isn’t good enough anymore, what with the Red Wings nearly a full decade removed from their last playoff appearance.
But shortly before the NHL trade deadline at 3 p.m. came arguably the loudest signal yet that Steve Yzerman feels the same way the fans do here. And maybe more importantly, the way players in the Wings’ dressing room have felt for some time now.
So when push came to shove in what was clearly a seller’s market — Yzerman compared this year’s deadline to a high-stakes poker game Friday — the Wings’ general manager finally moved some of his chips into the middle of the table.
He paid a steep price to address his team’s biggest immediate need, sending 2026 first- and third-round picks along with an intriguing prospect in Russian winger Dmitri Buchelnikov (a 2022 second-round pick) to St. Louis in exchange for Justin Faulk, a 33-year-old, right-shot defenseman who likely will join Ben Chiarot on Detroit’s second pairing. And coupled with Thursday’s lesser deal — sending a conditional fourth-round pick to Ottawa to bring back veteran winger David Perron — the message was clear: It’s time.
“You have a long-term plan and each year you kind of have to adjust that plan based on where you are, and today we’re sitting in a playoff spot and we want to stay there,” Yzerman explained late Friday afternoon, before the Wings lost, 3-1, to Florida — the two-time defending Stanley Cup champs — at Little Caesars Arena. “It’s hard to give up a first-round pick, it really is. But at some point, you gotta give up something good. And in today’s market, if you’re not giving up a first, you’re not getting these guys, you know?”
Yeah, we know. And what once was an annual holiday in Detroit had been anything but the last several years, as Yzerman and the Wings either gathered picks like squirrels storing nuts for winter or simply hibernated while Cup contenders around them made their moves.
“And we had had a lot of these discussions,” Yzerman said of the days leading up to Friday’s deadline. “Do we want to give up the prospects? Do we want to give up the picks? Or do we want to do nothing? And we decided this is a time to do something.”
That’s easier said than done at the deadline, and particularly this year as changes with the salary-cap rules and muddled standings — entering Friday’s slate, eight points separated first place from ninth in the Eastern Conference — conspired to drive up the price of doing business. Yet after years of selling rather than buying, or even standing pat the way he essentially did in 2024 and ’25, Yzerman decided the price of inaction at this deadline would prove too costly.
“There’s urgency every deadline to try and accomplish what your goals are, ” he said. “This season, our team has put themselves in a pretty good position. And the players that we acquired for what it cost us to acquire them, we felt it was justified to try and improve our team and give us a better chance of making the playoffs and having any success in the playoffs.”
A better chance was all the Wings’ current captain, Dylan Larkin, was asking of the former “Captain” a year ago when he lamented the lack of any deadline “spark” or “morale boost” for a team that was sitting on the fringe of the playoff picture at the time. Yzerman clapped back at any of that criticism after Detroit missed the postseason again, noting rather pointedly that playoff teams like Montreal and St. Louis hadn’t done anything at the deadline, either.
This team felt like something more substantial than last year’s group, though, even if the 5-on-5 scoring and the negative goal differential raise some doubt. And with the Wings sitting closer to first place in the stacked Atlantic Division than the final wild-card spot in the East at the deadline, everyone felt like the team had earned the right to get some help.
That they did certainly resonated with the players.
“Yeah, absolutely,” said Chiarot, who’d been to the playoffs five straight years before he arrived in Detroit as a free agent in 2022. “He’s showing he believes in the group and what we’ve done thus far. It has been a place here where they’ve really been trying to gather prospects and gather picks, and now to see it going the other way — picks going out the door, and good players coming in the door — it’s a great sign.”
Friday’s losing effort wasn’t, however. And as the only playoff hopeful in the East with a sub-.500 record over the last 10 games, they know what’s at stake here. As James van Riemsdyk put it, “It’s up to the group that we have here now to get the job done.”
That group got a bit stronger Thursday when Yzerman swung the deal with Ottawa to re-acquire Perron, whose vocal leadership was sorely missed last season after two productive years in Detroit before that. The 37-year-old has been out since Jan. 20 after undergoing surgery for a sports hernia, but the Wings expect he’ll be ready to return in a couple weeks. And when he does, the hope is he’ll add some grit and scoring punch to the bottom six, along with all the intangibles he brings.
Meanwhile, with Faulk they got help in the place where they needed it most, adding a puck-moving defenseman with more than 1,000 NHL games under his belt, ample playoff experience and a steady, reliable presence that Yzerman thinks will “solidify” the blue line for head coach Todd McLellan. Beginning with Sunday’s game in New Jersey, you can expect he’ll be logging 20-plus minutes a night and eventually even some time on the No. 2 power-play unit.
It’s an acknowledgement of what became painfully obvious as this season progressed, with rookie Axel Sandin-Pellikka seeing his role reduced to mostly sheltered minutes on the third pair and the coaches asking too much of Jacob Bernard-Docker in his place alongside Chiarot. Whether Sandin-Pellikka stays in the lineup here or ends up back in Grand Rapids for the playoffs remains to be seen — “Performance will ultimately decide that,” Yzerman said — but at least McLellan has more options, now and later.
Yzerman looked at other solutions ahead of the deadline, reportedly putting a deal on the table for Vancouver’s Tyler Myers, who opted instead to waive his no-movement clause to facilitate a trade to Dallas, partly for family reasons. The Wings’ GM said he was weighing another option on Friday — perhaps that was Philadelphia’s Rasmus Ristolainen, who didn’t end up getting traded — but added “we liked what it was going to cost us to get Justin.”
That’s not to suggest he came cheaply, of course. Nothing of consequence did at this year’s deadline, and while Detroit certainly was involved in trade talks for top-six centers like the Blues’ Robert Thomas and the New York Rangers’ Vincent Trocheck, the price tags were so exorbitant that no one had the stomach for it. Maybe Yzerman will this summer, though — the free-agent pool looks to be as shallow as ever this July — and that’s partly why he opted to hang on to the top prospects in a deep farm system for now.
As for the price he did pay, the fact that Faulk is under contract through next season at a reasonable $6.5 million cap hit “makes it a little bit easier to justify giving up a first-round pick,” Yzerman said.
Now comes the hard part, though: Justifying the gesture, if you will. Because as Larkin himself acknowledged during an in-game TV interview Friday night, “The ball is back in our court as players. Time for us to make a statement on why our management made the moves.”
Of course, not long after he said that, Larkin went down awkwardly in the offensive zone with a lower-body injury. He skated gingerly to the bench with a pained look on his face, then was helped down the tunnel to the Wings’ dressing room, a sight no one wanted to see.
McLellan said after the game he didn’t think it would be a “long-term” injury for the Wings’ No. 1 center, which felt like a bit of a relief in the moment. Still, it’s a jarring reminder — not that these Wings needed any more — that nothing is guaranteed in this league, other than the price of admission.
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
@JohnNiyo
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Niyo: Yzerman pays a price, but will Wings make it worth it?
Reporting by John Niyo, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
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