It’s Time to Celebrate the End of the Rebuild

The Detroit Red Wings have fallen on hard times due to the past. But now we have reason to celebrate once again.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me this has been the most exciting several weeks I’ve had as a Red Wings fan in a long time. We’ve been forced to suffer with mediocre-to-bad teams in Detroit for quite some time now, always being sold on the idea of hope and patience.

The most uncontrollable thing in the sports world is the rebuild. Call it Retooling if you want. But the idea is the same regardless.

Salary caps are good for business. It helps keep the league stable because no team will ever be able to assemble, and/or retain a super team. When the time for roster turnover comes, hopefully your team is savvy enough to make the right moves so that, even if team performance does decline temporarily, the team is back to championship contention in short order.

Of course, the alternative is that you fall of a cliff into a deep, dark Rebuild hole.

The Red Wings had fallen off that cliff in 2019. It had been 11 long years of slow decline since the glory of the last Cup run, and they were a disaster on 3 fronts absolutely necessary to be a sustainably successful team: a high-level core group, cap flexibility to pivot when necessary, and promising prospect depth to keep it all going.

The Dark Days

In 2019, the old championship core of Yzerman, Lidstrom, Datsyuk, and Zetterberg had all moved on. Ken Holland had attempted to retool on the fly, and several of the previously promising prospects (and a free agent or two) were signed to long-term deals.

This illustrious group included Jimmy Howard (6 years, $31.75M), Frans Nielsen (6 years, $31.5M), Jonathan Ericsson (6 years, $25M), and the coup de gras Justin Abdelkader (7 years, $29.75M). To make matters worse, all four of these contracts featured some sort of trade/movement protection for the player for most if not all the years.

In retrospect, it was the right idea to lock up another core. But these were clearly the wrong players to build around.

A large portion of the suffering over the last decade can be traced directly back to these failed bets. That’s because, not surprisingly, given these other contracts. The 2019 Red Wings did not have much cap space. In fact, they had $0 in cap space and were quite a bit over the cap and had to utilize the LTIR.

So once those preposterous contracts began to age it became clear that the players were not worth as much as we had paid. And we were left with no way out.

We couldn’t move the players, and we couldn’t reduce their roles by bringing in other good players. We couldn’t do anything except watch the free fall.

The last thing that could have saved the Red Wings was injection of life via young prospects.

Unfortunately, the draft picks that could have provided that life were squandered by bringing in more washed-up veterans to keep the playoff streak going. Between 2012 and 2016, the Red Wings lost a net of 6 draft picks or then-prospects via trades for the likes of Kyle Quincy, David Legwand, Erik Cole, Dylan Sadowy, and $6M cap space (trading away Datsyuk’s contract). To make matters worse, two of those draft picks we traded away became Andrei Vasilevskiy and Jakob Chychrun.

It would be a massive understatement to say that Steve Yzerman had a tough job ahead of him when took over after the 2018-2019 season. They were nearly at the deepest, darkest part of the Rebuild. He knew that as well, preaching patience right from the start. But what has happened in the last 3 years shows that there is hope when you fall down that dark hole.