Steve Yzerman, the Red Wings, and rebuilding an NHL team in the modern era

It is really hard to get back to the playoffs when you start rebuilding; but how long should it take before you start to see progress?

Rebuilds in the NHL can take time.

They can potentially take a lot of time.

They are probably going to take longer than you initially expect or want them to take, especially if you do not get some sort of insane draft luck that lands you a Sidney Crosby, Alex Ovechkin or Connor McDavid type of generational icon that can immediately transform your franchise. You also usually need two of them to truly get out of it. Crosby needed Evgeni Malkin. Ovechkin needed Nicklas Backstrom. McDavid needed Leon Draisaitl. One is not enough.

The length of time those rebuilds can take is one of the biggest reasons why I am starting to shy away from the idea that a scorched earth, tear it down to the foundation and start from scratch rebuild is the way for teams to go. There are too many teams in the league now, not enough high-end talent to always go around, and too many variables that have to go your way to make it work and succeed.

When you were talking about a 25-or 26-team league (or less), where 65 percent of the league (or more) had a playoff spot every year, maybe you could get through it a little bit faster. Maybe things would go your way easier and the timeframe would not seem so endless and daunting.

But in a 32-team league where only half of the teams make the playoffs? That lowers the odds quite a bit. That makes the challenge even tougher.

That is a big reason why we have so many teams stuck in perpetual rebuilds right now with the type of extensive playoff droughts we never used to see in the NHL.

There are currently five teams in the NHL on playoff droughts of five years or more this season: Buffalo Sabres, Detroit Red Wings, Anaheim Ducks, Ottawa Senators, and San Jose Sharks.

Three more teams are likely to join them this season in the Philadelphia Flyers, Chicago Blackhawks and Columbus Blue Jackets, which would raise the number to eight (though, Ottawa could lower that down to seven if its drought ends).

Five of those teams are working on droughts of six years or more.

Several of them tore their rosters down to the foundation and started extensive rebuilds at some point during those droughts (or to start those droughts). Some did it more than once and had to start over.

Had it not been for the two shortened years of 2019-20 and 2020-21 (with the 2020-21 season being especially funky due to the temporary division realignments and playoff formats) Chicago’s playoff drought would be in the six-plus years column, while Montreal would also probably be in the six-plus year column.

The same is probably true for Utah/Arizona, whose only playoff appearance of the past 12 years was that shortened 2019-20 season.

That is a significant chunk of the league (literally a third of it) that has simply not been even remotely competitive for the past five-plus years.

It is mostly unprecedented in NHL history to have this many teams going this long without making the playoffs at the same time.

For context: Between 1967 (the start of the post-Original Six era and the 2005-06 season (the start of the salary cap era and when the league fully took shape as a 30-plus team league) there were only 16 five-year playoff droughts in the ENTIRETY OF THE NHL over 38 seasons.

Only nine of those droughts extended beyond six seasons, and three of those belonged to expansion teams playing in their first years in the league.

By comparison, since the start of the 2005-06 season, including the current droughts mentioned above, there have already been 15 different five-year playoff droughts (which could increase to 18 after this season) and 11 droughts of six-years or more.

In other words: When you make the decision to stop trying to be a playoff team in today’s NHL, you are in for a long, dreadful run of futility.

It is not that general managers got worse or more incompetent. Quite the opposite. Even though there are a lot of bad general managers in the NHL right now, teams in general are still smarter than they used to be, have more knowledge and information at their disposal than ever before, and tend to have a better idea of evaluating talent and player and draft pick value.

Plus, there were some absolute morons running teams in the 70s, 80s and early 90s that quite literally had no idea what they were doing.

It is simply the result of a 32-team, salary capped league that has not changed the number of playoff teams in decades (this is not me arguing for an increased playoff field).

All of this brings us to one of the teams mentioned above currently mired in one of those extensive playoff droughts — the Detroit Red Wings.

I am focussing on the Red Wings here because I just find them to be the most fascinating team out of that group.

— They have a big name general manager in Steve Yzerman who already saved the franchise once as a player and is trying to do the same as an executive. He also arrived in Detroit with massive hope and expectations given the team he was leaving behind in Tampa Bay.

— He came into a tough spot and had to try and clean up a salary cap and talent mess that was left behind by former general manager Ken Holland. The team was not only bad, it was full of awful contracts and had little in the way of promising young players.

— He has also been running the program for six years, and this past week made his second coaching change of his rebuild replacing Derek Lalonde with Todd McLellan.

His rebuild is taking a long time with almost no progress being shown in the areas where it matters the most — the standings and on the ice.

When you criticize the rebuild, you get a lot of pushback from Red Wings fans asking what he should have been doing instead. Yzerman himself took issue with questions on the timing during the McLellan press conference, essentially saying you can’t trade all of your bad players for good players, while also taking a page out of the fan playbook and asking what else he could be doing.

The obvious follow-up question would be “why do you have so many bad players six years into this?”

But in his defense, it is a complex situation.

On one hand, you have to weigh in everything I just pointed out about how difficult it is to start over from scratch and how long it can take in today’s NHL. Especially when you do not get any draft lottery luck. And the Red Wings haven’t. Their highest pick of the Yzerman era so far has been No. 4 overall, and that has been the only pick in the top-five.

They have been bad, but they have not been bad enough (or lucky enough) to get the draft lottery balls to go their way — or to have them go their way in the right year — to land a truly franchise-changing player. That hurts the process and the plan. The difference between the No. 1 or 2 pick and the No. 5 or 6 pick is, historically speaking, absolutely massive.

Despite that, the Red Wings have still done well with some of their draft picks.

Mortiz Seider, the No. 6 overall pick in 2019, is a really good NHL player.

Lucas Raymond, the No. 4 overall pick in 2020, is a really good NHL player.

They have a really strong farm system that has a lot of potential high-end players that could (and should) be more really good NHL players. Even if none of them project to be megastars or franchise-changers on the level of Crosby, Ovechkin or McDavid.

But the Yzerman-Red Wings problem is not just an issue of bad luck or rebuilds taking a lot of time.

There are more layers to this.

Let’s talk about it.