The Yzer-plan never came together for the Red Wings

Steve Yzerman's first two first-round picks should have been the foundation of a contending team. He was never able to build around them. From within or through external moves.

The Detroit Red Wings sent some shockwaves through the NHL on Wednesday when they announced Steve Yzerman is leaving his role as general manager and moving into senior advisor role to Governor and CEO Chris Ilitch. It is the classic “demotion by promotion” move for an organization that doesn’t want to have to fire a franchise icon and legend.

Nothing in the announcement or official press release from the Red Wings indicated that this was a voluntary move by Yzerman.

Given the lack of success for the Red Wings under Yzerman, it’s probably a justified move.

He arrived in Detroit prior to the 2019-20 season in the hopes of rebuilding the organization after the mess former general manager Ken Holland left behind. There was excitement. Hope. Optimism. And a renewed sense of energy after things had grown stale toward the end of the Holland era. Yzerman had been a key architect in rebuilding the Tampa Bay Lighting, and the thought was he could repeat that success in Detroit.

He brought them success as a player.

Now it was time to rebuild the team as an executive.

The results simply never came.

In seven years under Yzerman’s watch, they never made the playoffs, never became anything more than mediocre, never topped 92 points in a single season, and went through some absolutely brutal late-season meltdowns, including this past season, that kept them out of the postseason.

All of it extended the ongoing playoff drought to 10 seasons (going back to the end of the Holland era), which is now the longest active playoff drought in the NHL.

It is not a stretch to say that almost any other general manager with that resume would have probably been fired a year or two ago, and that the only thing saving him for this long was the fact he is Steve Yzerman, Red Wings legend.

When the offseason began with Yzerman still running the show, it seemed as if he was going to get at least one more year to try and salvage it and finally produce some results in his rebuild.

But the timing is the eye-opening thing here. Every other general manager and front office job has been filled. Most of the big offseason moves have already been made. The draft is done. The top free agents are signed. There’s still time for trades (we’ll get into that here), but this is when the offseason starts winding down for most teams.

It’s almost as if Red Wings ownership was giving Yzerman one last chance to save his job. And based on what happened on Wednesday, it is pretty clear that he failed and they do not even want to see how the 2026-27 will play out.

Now there is another mess left behind that a new general manager is going to have to try and fix.

Let’s talk more about that, and the Yzerman era as a whole.