Steve Yzerman was curious, but ultimately, he was committed to the plan he and his staff had drawn up for the Detroit Red Wings even before a brief flirtation with a playoff spot. As he put it, you can’t just pull a good team out of a hat.
Yzerman, now in his fourth season as general manager of the Detroit Red Wings, was a seller once again, unloading four players over the past week to gain multiple draft picks, including two first-rounders. That gives him flexibility: Either those picks are used to draft players to help the rebuild in the future, or they are used to acquire a player to help the rebuild in the present. It all fits with Yzerman’s plan to revive the Red Wings, and to do so the only way possible: Draft and develop, supplement via free agency and trades, and be patient.
“We spent time coming up with a plan,” Yzerman said Friday afternoon, an hour after the trade deadline passed. “The win streak, it gave food for thought, delayed some things to see where we were, but ultimately we stuck to the plan with what we had in place. That, in general, was keep our young players, look at opportunities maybe to make a trade to see if there was a fit, and then ultimately decide on any of our pending UFAs, the guys we couldn’t sign or wouldn’t be able to sign, or for whatever reason might not be prepared to sign them at this point, if we got reasonable return, was to move them for future assets.”
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What he did and why
Yzerman ultimately moved four players, and got a stockpile of draft picks.
He banked a conditional first-round pick in 2023 (the pick becomes an unprotected 2024 first-rounder if it is in the top 12 this season) and a second-round pick in 2023 from the Vancouver Canucks for defenseman Filip Hronek and a fourth-round pick in 2023. This one was a surprise, given Hronek is 25 and was having a career year.
“We weren’t actively shopping Filip,” Yzerman said. “We weren’t actively pursuing it. But I felt with where we are at with the return we were getting, it was a good decision for the future. It stings our team a little bit right now.”
That was Yzerman’s first trade this week. The second was sending forward Tyler Bertuzzi to the Boston Bruins for a top-10-protected first-round pick in 2024 (via the New York Islanders) and a fourth-round pick in 2025. That one was expected, because Bertuzzi is a pending unrestricted free agent; with no common ground on an extension, Yzerman simply could not afford to risk losing Bertuzzi for nothing. The other two moves saw Yzerman send Jakub Vrana to the St. Louis Blues for a seventh-round pick in 2025 and a minor-league player and Oskar Sundqvist to the Minnesota Wild for a fourth-round pick in 2023.
Ultimately, the two ugly losses to the Ottawa Senators that marred Monday and Tuesday reaffirmed that the best course was to stockpile for the future.
“How both games played out, it was clear to me we’ve got work to do, a lot of work to do,” Yzerman said. “Had we won those two games, I think the big things that needed to be done probably would have been done, but maybe you don’t do some of the smaller things and you give yourself a chance to be successful.
“I guess I was weighing: OK, a playoff run, stay in the playoff hunt, maybe make the playoffs, and then be sitting there at the end of the season and lose these players to unrestricted free agency — what is that worth to us? And then it’s, ‘what is the return I’m going to get for the player?’ versus ‘what is the impact he is going to have for the rest of the season?’ So in the last few days, it was pretty clear to me that the right thing to do was to look forward. We can’t be sitting here when our season ends, and these players leave, that we got nothing in return. The big picture, that was the right thing to do.”
How it can help the rebuild
Bertuzzi and Hronek dated to the 2013 and 2016 drafts, respectively, and not that long ago looked like key pieces in the rebuild. Trading them was a big deal.
“I had mixed emotions,” Yzerman said. “These are young players, reasonably young players that are part of your team. The return, the assets that we got, I’m pleased with that. Now it’s important that our staff make good decisions, whether we use those draft picks in particular at the draft or we use them to acquire players. We have to make good decisions with them. Overall, I think the returns we got for all the trades was reasonable.”
Yzerman parlayed the first-round pick he got from the Washington Capitals while swapping Anthony Mantha for Vrana at the 2021 trade deadline to move up in that year’s draft and select Sebastian Cossa, whom it is hoped will become the goaltender of the future. He parlayed a third-round pick last summer into a trade for Ville Husso, who came in and grabbed the No. 1 job in net. That’s the strength Yzerman has given himself, now: Four first-round picks and four second-round picks in 2023 and 2024 combined.
“Going into the draft, going into the off season, it gives you different options,” Yzerman said. “Last year, we used a third-round pick to get Ville, a goaltender who is playing for us. That turned out to be good for us. I would look at those opportunities in the future, to use our draft picks to get players. Otherwise, we intend to go through with making selections and hopefully these selections turn into players.”
Stoking excitement
“Please be patient” may not be a good marketing slogan, but it is the truth. Yzerman lived it as a player, patiently going 14 years from being drafted (1983) to winning the Stanley Cup (1997), and that was when there were 26 teams and no salary cap. Now there are 32 and financial constraints for all teams.
“I just can’t come up with first-round picks, I can’t come up with star players,” Yzerman said. “We need these picks to either try and trade for a star player, which, it just doesn’t happen that often, or we have to continue to draft and regardless of where we are a picking, find a player who is an impact guy.
“Myself and my staff, we need to draft well and run a good program to get these guys to the NHL, but it is going to take time. I’m going to stick with it and I’m going to try to make some moves along the way that can expedite it and hopefully those are good moves. But you don’t just pull those out of a hat, you know.”
Contact Helene St. James at hstjames@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @helenestjames.
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Her latest book, “On the Clock: Behind the Scenes with the Detroit Red Wings at the NHL Draft,” is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Triumph Books. Personalized copies available via her e-mail.