A year ago, Steve Yzerman kept his coach. He took 10 days after the season ended to announce Jeff Blashill would be back for another go.
“I like (Blashill’s) methodical approach,” Yzerman said at the time.
Turns out methodical goes only so far. On Saturday afternoon, Yzerman decided not to bring Blashill back. No one is surprised. Nor should they be.
For there is methodical, and there is what the Wings showed the last third of this season: Two six-game losing streaks, a seven-goal home loss to pitiful Arizona (ouch), a nine-goal loss at Pittsburgh and a seven-week streak of at least one game with five goals allowed.
Five!
Blashill wasn’t going to survive that. Couldn’t survive that. Not after almost six years of losing and almost six months of wildly uneven hockey and, worse, wildly uneven effort.
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You can blame the players in part. You can blame their youth and overall lack of talent — the Wings desperately need another scoring center, another winger and another top-flight defenseman to hang behind the blue line with Moritz Seider.
None of that is Blashill’s fault. The problem is, the Wings showedthey could be competitive over the first few months of the season. The bar was set. Blashill admitted it Friday night after the Wings beat the New Jersey Devils in their finale.
“(There were) times this year where our team showed really, really great and extraordinary type sacrifice and work ethic,” he said. “Times this year when we played our best hockey, we were as good as anybody. We beat a number of good teams.”
False hope?
Not really.
No one suggested the Wings were Stanley Cup contenders after theyknocked off the Edmonton Oilers and St. Louis Blues and the Boston Bruins and the New York Rangers. Yet, as Blashill noted, his team showed it could compete, as long as the effort and intensity were there.
Blashill had to know this was coming. When asked Friday if he thought he’d be returning for another season, he mentioned how he was focused on watching his kids play hockey and lacrosse over the weekend.
Blashill got seven years in the big seat, and while you can give him a pass for several of them considering the state of the rebuild — especially before Yzerman returned home three years ago — he ultimately struggled to develop consistency.
Those nine- and seven-goal losses showed a team that was losing its way. And while Blashill argued that the “arc of the organization is headed in the right direction,” he also acknowledged there were too many “steps backward.”
That ultimately cost him his job. A decision Yzerman hinted at when he spoke to reporters after the trade deadline in March.
“This has been an up-and-down year for us,” he said. “We’ve had a lot of progress. The last six weeks have been disappointing for all of us.”
Yzerman said he would sit down with Blashill at the end of the season and talk about the state of the team and its direction. A year ago, he took his time. This time, he did not, releasing a statement less than 24 hours after the regular season ended that he’d fired Blashill (along with assistant coach Doug Houda and goaltending coach Jeff Salajko).
The former Red Wings captain and current franchise icon was hired to restore the team to its former glory, to the place it was when he wore the “C” on his jersey. He has spent the past three years cleaning up the team’s salary cap and drafting a handful of promising young players.
That includes Seider and Lucas Raymond, the defenseman and forward who look like future stars. And while he’ll need to keep finding gems in the draft, it’s getting time to venture out into free agency and take bigger swings with trades.
Because while a different coach might have kept the team around .500 all season — the Wings were 23-22-6 after a Feb. 17 win and 24-24-6 after a March 1 win — no coach is going to make this a championship team with the current roster.
Still, Blashill’s replacement will be as important a decision as Yzerman has made. The Wings had become stagnant. Undoing that will be the next coach’s most critical charge.
Yzerman was clear when he was hired that the rebuild would take time. Years, if we’re counting. This is how it works in hockey, where prospects take time to develop and owners can’t spend their way to contention like they once did.
A year ago, the Wings icon bet on a safe, methodical approach as the team headed into the third year of his plan. He liked Blashill’s vibes, liked his calm and patience, liked that he was steady and thorough — all sensible qualities for the coach of a young team.
He also liked the team’s fight.
“We play hard,” Yzerman said last spring.
That is harder to say this spring.
Yes, talent is an issue; health is an issue, too. But in a sport in which random bounces and puck luck often determine the small margins between winning and losing, relentlessness is critical.
The Wings showed plenty of that the first few months of the season. Then they didn’t. In the end, that’s on the coach.
The next move is on the general manager.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.