Imagine you’re a Detroit Red Wings fan. For a quarter-century, your team was a lock to make the Stanley Cup playoffs and a four-time Cup-winner. In short, your Wings were the NHL’s gold standard franchise – and if, at any point in that span of time, someone had told you Detroit would miss out on post-season action for nine straight seasons, you would’ve laughed at them.
Well, here we are, and no Red Wings fans are laughing anymore. And when Wings fans look around the league, you can see why their patience with Detroit GM Steve Yzerman has just about run out.
The team Yzerman left as an executive, the Tampa Bay Lightning, haven’t missed the playoffs since 2016-17. Meanwhile, the St. Louis Blues – the Wings’ rivals from their days in the Norris Division – have found a way to win a Cup, miss out on the playoffs, then get back into the post-season, all in the same period Yzerman has been Detroit’s GM. And in Los Angeles, the Kings have moved on from GM Rob Blake despite L.A. making the playoffs for five straight years.
It’s easy to see, then, why many Wings fans have run out of goodwill for Yzerman. Yes, you have to give him his due for being one of the all-time great competitors in league history, but when you haven’t produced so much as one playoff game in six years as an NHL GM, you eventually run out of runway to stick the landing. And that’s the territory Yzerman has now entered heading into next season.
It doesn’t matter that the Red Wings have approximately $21.3 million in cap space to use this summer to improve via free agency, as it no longer feels like Detroit is a popular destination for free agents. And after some questionable moves Yzerman has made – the abysmal contract given to defenseman Justin Holl, and the inability to get that same kind of high-end assets out of defenseman Jake Walman that the San Jose Sharks were able to get for him – it’s fair to wonder whether Yzerman has lost his fastball as an NHL executive.
If Detroit ownership had given up on Yzerman, they would’ve announced a management change by now. But this has to be the final season Yzerman has to shepherd his team into the playoffs, right?
If Detroit is in the same place next spring as they are right now, there can’t be any more excuses or calls for more chances for Yzerman. He has to be held to the same standard as any other GM, and that means his days of dining out on his sterling reputation as a player have basically come to an end.
Enough is just about enough for Yzerman as Wings GM, and not even a Hockey Hall-of-Fame career as a player can permit him to have lifeboat after lifeboat, year after year, to show he can get the job done in Detroit’s front office. Yzerman’s wizardry on the ice has eluded him as an executive, and he now is firmly on the clock, with one more season to prove an increasingly-large group of doubters wrong.
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