There was none of the defiance from general manager Steve Yzerman that marked last year’s end-of-season media availability, but rather a tone of disappointment and recognition of this fact: The Detroit Red Wings need change.
Yzerman and coach Todd McLellan met with reporters at Little Caesars Arena for around 45 minutes on Thursday, April 23, a little more than a week after the the team had been eliminated from participating in the Stanley Cup playoffs for a 10th straight years.
“There’s a lot of things I’m pleased about within the organization, and areas that I’m not happy with, disappointed, things that we need to have done better,” Yzerman said. “We sit here today, a week after the end of the regular season, and see how the season unfolded.
“I think we’re all kind of emotional about this, and need to take a little time to analyze it. And then try to address how we move forward.”
Better players?
Yzerman acknowledged that the Wings “need better players,” as he put it. There’s a core in place – Dylan Larkin, Moritz Seider, Lucas Raymond, Alex DeBrincat, Simon Edvinsson, John Gibson – but the surrounding cast isn’t good enough. That was on display as the Wings faltered through another March and April after being 12 points up on a playoff spot in late January.
“We all have to take responsibility for it,” Yzerman said. “I’m not going to sit here today and just criticize, dump on our players, beat our players up. Our management team, our hockey operations staff, our coaching staff and our players have to do what is necessary throughout the course of the season. On my end of things, we’ve got to try and improve the team and address the areas that need to be improved.
“Some players have very good seasons here. And some even that had good seasons I expect more from, and to make the adjustment to playing not just down the stretch, but playoff type hockey. I went through this as a player myself. The ups and the downs. The failures, the disappointments. And you have to learn from it. You have to adjust and you have to be mentally tough enough to get through it. And that’s a challenge for a lot of our guys. But ultimately, it’s up to Todd and myself and our staffs to make these players better.”
Yzerman wasn’t sold on team’s midseason success
It turns out, when things were going well, Yzerman wasn’t sold the 2025-26 Wings would end the league’s now-longest active playoff drought.
“Truthfully, throughout the course of the season, when we watched our record, it was pretty good,” Yzerman said. “But we had concerns. Todd and I talked about it. We see the deficiencies, the areas that we need to improve upon, and that probably goes for every team. You’re never totally comfortable with you, regardless of where you’re at. But where we were in the standing – there was a lot of stretches where we played well. We had several road trips where that was encouraging, [only] to come home and have a poor home stand. Why that is, I’m not really sure.
“It’s something we’ve got to figure out, and I don’t have a good answer for it.”
Yzerman relayed a conversation he had with assistant general manager Kris Draper. “We were in third overall or something, and we’re like, let’s be realistic,” Yzerman said. “I don’t think we’re as good as our record at the time, but we are winning games, and we are where we are, and at the deadline we were where we were, and for the most part we were playing at .600 hockey, a little over .600, and at the end we were under .400.”
With Gibson under contract through next season, and Sebastian Cossa on the docket to be in the NHL next season, the Wings are well set in goal, though they may decide to add a third goalie, in case there’s nervousness about Cossa. On defense, the team is also well set with Seider, trade-deadline acquisition Justin Faulk and Jacob Bernard-Docker and Axel Sandin-Pellikka down the right side, and Edvinsson (who needs a new contract), Ben Chiarot and Albert Johansson down the left side.
The area Yzerman most desperately needs to address is the top six forward group – to finally find a center who improves the second line, and a skilled, scoring forward to play with Larkin and Raymond. But top centers don’t often show up on the free agent market – teams keep those players. The biggest notable pending unrestricted free agent looks to be Alex Tuch, but he may end up staying with the Buffalo Sabres.
Getting over the line
Yzerman was patient his first several seasons, knowing what a bad product he inherited and that he needed time to restock with drafting and developing. Nobody realistically expected the early 2020s Wings to make the playoffs. But they got better, and expectations grew, especially after running the chase all the way to Game 82 in 2023-24 before missing out on a tiebreaker. That season was supposed to teach the group about the importance of every point.
But it’s not a lesson that has infiltrated the whole lineup.
“As we’re kind of close to being a playoff team, we’re fighting for a playoff spot, I think now the focus will be more on how do we get this lineup over the edge,” Yzerman said. “I guess the edge being, become a playoff team. But the reality is, we need to score more five-on-five. So that requires talent, the scoring ability. We need to be a harder team to play against. We hear our players talk about that. And my message to them would be, guys, we need our team to be harder to play against. In order to do that, you guys got to be harder to play against.
“So either that or I got to get ready and bring in other guys. Our bottom six, we need some production as well. And also to have some definition, you know, maybe a true checking line or a shutdown line. And then depending on what you have in your top nine, you build your fourth line a little bit around that. But if you don’t have enough production, then you got to get some production on that fourth line. If you’re not big enough and hard enough or whatnot, then you need that. Truthfully, we need a little bit of all of that.”
Contact Helene St. James at hstjames@freepress.com.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Steve Yzerman: Detroit Red Wings ‘have to move forward’ but how?
Reporting by Helene St. James, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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