The Detroit Red Wings Are Finally Ready to Rejoin the NHL’s Elite. (Maybe.)
Steve Yzerman’s team is off to a blazing start, raising hopes that winning will become a habit again in Hockeytown.
With a record of 5-2-1 and a +11 goal differential, the Detroit Red Wings have been one of the best teams in the NHL so far this young season.
Once upon a time, a sentence like that wouldn’t have raised eyebrows. Detroit was the most dominant franchise in hockey during the 1990s, 2000s and into the 2010s, making the playoffs an incredible 25 consecutive times and claiming four Stanley Cups. Winning was simply a habit for Hall of Famers like Steve Yzerman, Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov and Brendan Shanahan, among others.
But their dynasty began to crumble as the 2020s approached, leaving the rebuilding Red Wings with the league’s worst record from 2017 through 2023. Maybe a dip like that was inevitable after such a long period of success; after all, every team eventually sees its fortunes ebb and flow over time. But this wasn’t any ordinary rebuild.
For one thing, it was more of an extreme makeover: Detroit bottomed out as one of the worst non-expansion teams in league history in 2020 and 2021. And Yzerman, the man guiding the teardown, not only had one of the best reputations of any executive in the game, but he was also one of the greatest players in franchise history. That meant expectations for a turnaround would be high — and moreover, they would be personal for many Detroit fans.
After retiring from serving as the Red Wings’ captain for an NHL-record 20 years and 1,303 games (plus a brief stint in Detroit’s front office), Yzerman became general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning before the 2011 season. The Lightning immediately came within a win of the Stanley Cup Final in his first season, and they would make three more deep playoff runs during Yzerman’s stay, on top of tying what was then the record for most wins in a single season. With that track record, Yzerman’s return to Detroit in 2019 as executive vice president and GM was hailed as a major coup that surely would soon lead to another dynasty.
Even the early growing pains were to be expected, the product of turning over nearly an entire roster in a short time. (Only two members of the dreadful 2020 Red Wings are still on the 2024 club.) But the hype for Detroit as a potential breakout team began in earnest during the summer of 2021, based on its youth — it had the fifth-youngest roster in the league — and a number of prospects with the talent to lead, from new team captain Dylan Larkin to the up-and-coming tandem of defenseman Moritz Seider and winger Lucas Raymond. Each offseason since, the Red Wings have been fixtures on lists like these of improving clubs expected to make the leap into contention.
While Detroit has teased its potential at times, though, the team hasn’t come close to the revival many were expecting. The Red Wings began 2022 with a solid 13-9-3 record, but fell to 19-31-7 the rest of the way to finish nowhere near the playoffs. Similarly, Detroit started 13-7-5 in 2023 and was even hanging around near .500 as late as February, but went 7-16-2 down the stretch to once again land more than 10 points out of the final wild card. Despite the positives — Larkin emerging as one of the league’s better young centers, Seider winning the Calder Trophy for best rookie, etc. — it has taken Yzerman and the Red Wings longer than anticipated to complete their return to glory.
Until this year, that is. Larkin is off to a career-best start — 4 goals and 11 assists in 8 games — playing on a line with Raymond and former Ottawa Senators winger Alex DeBrincat. DeBrincat himself currently leads the NHL in goals scored, and looks like one of the best pickups of the offseason. Detroit has the second-most goals per game (4.38) of any team in the league, a huge improvement over its 24th-place finish last season, and the team is also among the good half of the league in fewest goals allowed per game (3.00) with the help of newcomers Shayne Gostisbehere and Justin Holl on the blueline and James Reimer in net.
In terms of net Goals Above Replacement added minus subtracted since last season, no team is even close to Detroit in the early going. By GAR, five of the Red Wings’ top nine players in 2024 are new to the team. All of this is a testament to the job Yzerman and the front office have done in adding talent and building around the developing homegrown core. At long last, it is now finally possible to see the payoff at the end of the Red Wings’ rebuilding journey.
To wit: After sitting below average for seven consecutive seasons in the Elo ratings, which track a team’s strength over time, Detroit is finally closing in on an above-average mark again with its start in 2024.
The big question is whether Detroit can keep adding to its momentum from here. According to PowerRankingsGuru’s composite NHL odds, the Red Wings still only have a 41% chance to return to the playoffs for the first time since 2016.
Some of that is probably due to the small sample size of excellence we’ve seen from Detroit so far. (Remember those other seasons with solid starts that ended up falling apart?) While there is reason to think this is by far the most talented roster Yzerman has assembled with the Red Wings, it takes a while for statistical projections to change their opinions of teams in a sport as prone to noisy data as hockey.
But maybe the larger concern for Detroit’s long-term sustainability this season is the fact that Yzerman has built a team that doesn’t play like the ones he captained for so many seasons.
Dating back to the arrival of the fabled Russian Five in 1995, the secret sauce behind the Red Wings’ dynasty was a heavily possession-focused brand of hockey. It was a natural tactic to use with so many hyper-skilled players on the ice — and it carried over into the era of subsequent stars like Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg. From at least 2008 (the earliest year in Hockey-Reference’s data) through 2016, Detroit never once ranked outside the top 9 in 5-on-5 Corsi percentage, a proxy for possession that measures a team’s share of shot events in its games, and it never missed the playoffs. Just as clear a trend was the absence of possession during Detroit’s slide into losing; it never ranked better than 20th in any season since 2017.
The trouble for the 2024 Red Wings is that you wouldn’t know they were succeeding if you only looked at their possession stats. They rank just 29th in Corsi this season — or, if you prefer the NHL’s new EDGE puck-tracking data, they are below-average in their share of offensive zone time at even strength, as well as in the share of time spent in their own end. History tells us that teams who succeed off of an abnormally high shooting percentage (DeBrincat, for instance, has scored on nearly 35% of his shots) while sitting underwater in terms of net shot attempts tend to struggle to keep their good fortune going.
That could mean the Red Wings are once more tantalizing their fans with the promise of rejuvenation, only to disappoint them yet again. And if that does end up happening, the mood at Little Caesars Arena won’t be pretty — not even a legend of Yzerman’s stature has forever to turn a team around. But perhaps this year will be different, possession numbers be damned.
The Red Wings finally have all of the conventional ingredients in place to win again, between their homegrown foundation and recent acquisitions. The only thing left is to recapture the successes of the past, and get back to a place where it’s no longer surprising when winning hockey is played in Detroit.