At some point in the future, perhaps after Simon Edvinsson’s jersey retirement ceremony, Steve Yzerman will have dealt enough players and acquired enough draft picks that he will finally declare the Detroit Red Wings rebuild to be over and keep himself from sending so many players packing at the NHL trade deadline.
That time is not now. And it probably won’t be next year, either, if you apply Yzerman’s view of what he needs to see from the team in order to keep himself from dealing valuable assets and contributors like Tyler Bertuzzi, Filip Hronek, Jakub Vrana and Oskar Sundqvist, as he did this week.
Basically, Yzerman needs to be convinced the Wings are not only a likely playoff team, but also one that’s primed for a deep run.
“But do I think we’re a Stanley Cup contender this year? No,” the Wings general manager said Friday. “Did I think we had a chance to make the playoffs? Yes.
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“And if I thought we were a Stanley Cup contender, I would not have traded our unrestricted free agents. I would have continued to play it out and either try to continue to try to re-sign them or let it play out and sign them at the end of the year or say, ‘You know what? We’re making a run and whatever happens, happens.’ We’re not at that point yet.”
Yzerman is right. There’s no question the Wings aren’t even close to being a Cup contender. But how many teams realistically can say that? A handful in each conference? Even when the Wings were on their quarter-century run of making the playoffs, they weren’t a contender every year.
So Yzerman, once again, did what he’s done since he took over the Wings. He chose the certainty and potential of draft capital over the uncertain immediate future of a growing team that has shown promise has face-planted hard in a three-game stretch against Tampa Bay and Ottawa.
And it was the back-to-back losses by a combined score of 12-3 to the Ottawa Senators, a team Yzerman considers the Wings’ approximate equals, that affirmed his thinking about the team’s limited potential this season.
“I guess I was weighing at the time,” Yzerman said, “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 that in unrestricted free agency. What is that worth to us?
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“And then ultimately, it’s what’s the return I’m going to get for the player versus what is the impact they’re going to have on the team for the rest of the season? So, you know, in the last few days it was pretty clear to me that I felt definitely that the right thing to do was I gotta look toward the future.”
Unfortunately, it seems like it’s a future that never comes. Yzerman is right about the competitive level of this team, but he’s definitely stacking the deck to ensure no one glimpsed the true potential of this team this year by trading talented, veteran players.
As Yzerman took the podium Friday to address reporters, the Wings stood at 28-24-9 through 61 games, good for 65 points with four teams between them and the New York Islanders, who held the second wild card spot with 70 points.
With a quarter of the season left, would it have been so impossible to imagine the Wings making another run like the one that led them to eight wins in nine games, thrust them into the playoff hunt and made them the toast of the town just a week earlier?
I have no problem with what Yzerman got in return. He won all four trades that earned him a net gain of two conditional first-round picks, a second-rounder, a fourth-rounder, a seventh-rounder and a prospect.
But draft capital only holds the theoretical value of future promise. In the present, we have real people, real players who have to walk into their dressing room in Long Island on Saturday knowing they are a team that’s been made worse for yet another year.
If you watched Dylan Larkin’s excruciating news conference Thursday, it was a perfect illustration of the difference between a bright future when a bleak present. Larkin was there to discuss his eight-year contraction extension, but it was sadness that overtook him and made him come to a full stop and cry at the memory of bidding goodbye to Bertuzzi, his friend and fellow fierce competitor.
Before the All-Star break, David Perron said he wanted to make a push and give Yzerman something to think about before the trade deadline. Larkin said he hoped the team could stay together, see the season through and give it all they’ve got.
It wasn’t enough for Yzerman. He sees this team much differently than the team sees itself.
“It’s not like a perfect process,” he said, “and it’s going to be up and down a little bit and hopefully over time we just can get better.
“So I do have mixed emotions about it. But again … the reality is we’re still building, we’re still in that phase of acquiring prospects, of acquiring young assets.”
The problem with rebuilds is no one ever announces their completion. There are probably some ancient Egyptians and Romans still wandering around building pyramids and constructing aqueducts. If they get a break from such simple tasks, maybe they can tackle a real challenge by helping Yzerman construct a playoff team and keep it together.
Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.