Here’s a cold, hard fact: The Detroit Red Wings are just one loss and one more Canadiens win away from missing the playoffs for a ninth straight season. For a team that once upon a time made annual trips to the postseason, this seems unprecedented.
Go back to that 2015-16 season, and think back to where you were at the time. Did you ever once believe you’d see your Red Wings on the cusp of missing the playoffs for a ninth straight year? Yeah, those Red Wings that enjoyed a dynasty during the 1990s and 2000s as kings of the Western Conference, where they played until the latest major realignment?
Now, it’s almost like we've come to expect it. Either bad hockey all year round, or good hockey until a certain time, before something happens and it all falls apart. This season, I pointed to losing Andrew Copp and nobody’s willingness to step in when Dylan Larkin ran out of talent. Probably because the entire team ran out with him.
Red Wings are down to their absolute last chance with no strings attached
Okay, maybe one string is still intact. One thread, really. Because if the Wings win out and the Canadiens lose out, and if the New York Rangers lose one game in that same stretch, the Red Wings are in the postseason. Now, make a list of all the things that have a better chance of occurring, and you’ll see just how minuscule of a chance the Red Wings have to make this happen.
And they’ve had two months to figure this thing out and fix it. Two months, or nearly two months to be more accurate, since that loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning before the 4 Nations Face-Off break. How one team manages to win so often before the stakes rise and they forget what made them so good is beyond me.
One man whose reach it can’t be beyond is general manager Steve Yzerman’s. Yzerman is a legend in Hockeytown and he always will be. He’s also a legend in Tampa Bay, since he crafted much of those championship-caliber lineups, and set the stage for what the Lightning are today.
Red Wings are on the cusp of disappointing a legendary fan base again
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but the narrative around this team is changing. Nobody can take their Stanley Cups and dynasty years away and they’ll always live in the fans’ collective memory banks. But right now, when someone thinks of the Red Wings, they think of a once-proud franchise that doesn’t know how to get its act together.
This was supposed to be the year that Detroit hockey got back on track. The reality? It’s just another 82-game season, and one in which the Red Wings will have about six months to think about as the clock ticks toward October 2025 following what should be an offseason in which Yzerman says, “Enough already.’ And if he doesn’t, you have a duty to tell him, “Enough already,” as a fanbase.