Another Detroit Red Wings season, another mid-April postmortem.
Actually, it felt even worse than that Friday, April 17, as player after player filed into the interview room at Little Caesars Arena to discuss another late-season collapse that led to the team missing the playoffs for a 10th straight season.
It felt less like an examination and more like a funeral, where everyone kept asking why Grandpa didn’t take better care of himself. And folks, it’s getting bad, because Grandpa keeps dying every spring.
And no one seems to know why.
There were symptoms, of course. The Wings were terrible at scoring this season, especially five-on-five. So general manager Steve Yzerman, who’s been in charge seven seasons, went out and got a 34-year-old defenseman and a 37-year-old grinder forward at the trade deadline.
Didn’t help – Grandpa still croaked.
Coach Todd McLellan has tried to get the team to play tougher, physically and mentally. It worked through late January, when the Wings shared the points lead in the Eastern Conference.
But when it mattered most, during crunch time in March, it failed. Much of that falls on McLellan, but there’s plenty blame left over for the the players – specifically, their leaders – and Yzerman, who put this team together and has presided over this mess for nearly a decade.
The most common word players kept using Friday was “embarrassed.”
“Because obviously, you know, the end of the year wasn’t good enough by anyone, by any means,” Patrick Kane said. “So it’s important to take responsibility for that and I think everyone’s somewhat embarrassed by it, too.”
Yes, the end was excruciatingly ignominious for the Wings this season. They went 5-7-2 in March, won just one of their final seven, were booed off the ice in their home finale and ended it all with an 8-1 loss to the already eliminated Florida Panthers that drew a scathing rebuke from McLellan, who was visibly upset and said the entire team should have been embarrassed.
Soon enough, Yzerman will address the media in his season’s-end availability. No doubt he’ll want to point to positives, like the Wings finishing with 92 points (their most in 10 years of the playoff drought) and having a 40-goal scorer for the first time in 17 seasons (back when they were Stanley Cup contenders).
But the truth is that for the third straight season the Wings have been just good enough to look like a playoff team until it mattered down the stretch, when they’ve folded under pressure.
“This is the best team I’ve been on, record-wise,” captain Dylan Larkin said. “And it’s stressful because we’re pushing for more. And we pushed and pushed, and it was never – guys do the right things here.
“Guys work hard. Guys are out there 30 minutes before practice, you know? We do the right things. … We just got tight as a group and allowed teams to get back into it.”
There could be a multitude of reasons for that. But one issue that was mentioned by players during the season was the effort to eliminate the distraction of outside criticism. Center Andrew Copp admitted Friday it was a challenge to block out “any of those types of thoughts, memories from the past couple [of years].”
It obviously didn’t work and has led to yet more frustration among veterans such as Mortiz Seider, who publicly pushed for playoffs expectations as far back as 2022 after he won the Calder Trophy as the NHL’s top rookie.
“Obviously, frustration is big, rightfully so,” he said. “I think we’re once again close and kind of sit here and talk about the same stuff, I feel like every year.
“In the end, I think the answer is pretty simple. We just got to be better as a team, as individuals, and we got to put in the work in the summer.”
Seider’s defensive partner, Simon Edvinsson, also voiced his frustration. Edvinsson is just 23, with only two full seasons on the team. But even he’s sick of this level of failure.
“I feel like everybody’s done being here,” he said. “It’s the worst feeling you have, not going to the playoffs. And you know, you’re so close. Everybody works so hard and we still [didn’t] get it done.
“And we really need to figure that out. We need to. I don’t know really what to tell you. I know that everyone is so tired of being here.”
Yes, everyone is certainly tired of being here.
Because no one wants to attend the same funeral every year.
Contact Carlos Monarrez at cmonarrez@freepress.com and follow him on X @cmonarrez.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Another April, another end-of-season requiem for Detroit Red Wings
Reporting by Carlos Monarrez, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
