As the Stanley Cup Final continues Friday night, the NHL Draft looms at the end of next week. Steve Yzerman and the Red Wings will be picking 15th, a small sign of progress after years of picking in the top 10 -- but never in the top three. It's a relevant distinction as the Oilers lean on Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl to keep the series alive and the Panthers turn to Aleksander Barkov, Sam Reinhart and Aaron Ekblad to help close it out. All of them were top-three picks.
Can Yzerman build a Cup contender without players plucked from the top of the draft?
"I do believe you can," he said Friday, commending Stars GM and former Red Wings exec Jim Nill for doing just that in Dallas. "I would love to have a Connor McDavid, I’m not sure how I go about doing that. I think you can build a really good team, I really do."
Detroit's roster remains under construction. Yzerman's blueprint -- "I don't use the term Yzerplan, just so you know," he said with a laugh -- has been clear from the start, to assemble a consistent contender through the draft. And as he reiterated Friday, lest anyone forgot, "That’s going to take time." It took five years just for the Wings to miss the playoffs on the final day of the season.
That's longer than anyone would have liked for the Red Wings to return to semi-relevance, Yzerman included. He's tried to accelerate things by trading his way up the draft, but who ever wants to move down? Every year, Yzerman said, the Wings ask the teams at the top of the board, "'What do you want for your pick?’ and 99 percent of the answers have been, ‘We have no interest in moving our pick, we're using it,' particularly with 1, 2 and 3."
"It just hasn’t happened for us," he said. "I’ve tried in the past, and I’m OK with it."
They've made the most of their lottery misfortune, turning a fourth overall pick into Lucas Raymond and sixth overall picks into Moritz Seider and Simon Edvinsson. More recently, they've drafted Marco Kasper eighth and Nate Danielson ninth, and all of them project as good players on better teams in the future, at the least.
"Are they going to be superstars? Maybe, but I think they’re going to be really good players," Yzerman said. "And we’re going to have the nucleus of a team. My hope is, at the worst, we have a nucleus of really good players. That is going to give us that consistency."
The closest thing the Red Wings have to a superstar is Dylan Larkin, and he remains a long way from that stratosphere. It's OK to admit that, and still build around him. It's one reason Yzerman has been gradually adding to the roster rather than aggressively upgrading, not that he's been entirely shrewd in free agency. He has a couple bad contracts to show for his mistakes, just as the cap's about to get tight for the Red Wings with Seider and Raymond due big-money extensions .
"I can’t say five years in that I’m thrilled with exactly all the decisions I’ve made or how things have played out, but I plan to stick with what we’re doing. We’re constantly trying to find an advantage, whether it’s acquiring a player in a trade or (different) things, and it’s been challenging," Yzerman said.
The Wings have never been a player or two away from breaking through in the East, which is loaded with stars and playoff mainstays. They need waves of talent to create their own tide. Yzerman is trying to ride one while catching another, and there's no guarantee it will work.
The team at the moment is centered on Larkin, Raymond, Seider and Alex DeBrincat, Larkin the oldest among them at 27. In time, the load will be distributed among the likes of Kasper, Danielson, Edvinsson and fellow first-rounders Axel Sandin-Pellikka and goalie Sebastian Cossa, the 15th overall pick three years ago. Question is, amid a franchise-worst eight-year playoff drought, how much time?
"I’m hopeful that somehow in the next couple of years, this nucleus of relatively young players that we have, starting with the Larkins and the DeBrincats, who are maybe our older young guys, along with the Edvinssons, Seiders, Raymonds, Danielsons, Kaspers, Carter Mazur, Sandin-Pelikka, whoever we (draft in the first round) this year, all of a sudden we have a group of 12 guys who are 21 to 29 and that’s our group for that playoff window," said Yzerman.
"Still," he added, "I don’t think we’re quite there yet. I’m hopeful that we can compete for a playoff spot this year again as well."
That's the closest Yzerman's come to establishing a timeline of contention for the Red Wings. It's the first time in his tenure that he's identified a "playoff window," even vaguely. To ever open it, Detroit needs continued growth in Raymond and Seider and major development this year and next in their top prospects, before Larkin -- who's entering year 10 of his career and just underwent another surgery on an upper-body injury he suffered late last season -- plateaus or starts to decline. That's a closer reality than the Wings probably want to admit.
Larkin was another 15th overall pick, the best find for Detroit in the latter years of the Ken Holland era. He stepped in and made an impact the next season, on the last Red Wings team to make the playoffs. These Red Wings need a similar boost to get where they're going before it's too late, either from this year's pick or a prospect on the cusp. They would benefit the most from the early arrival of Cossa, the 21-year-old who's coming off a strong season in the AHL. The crease has been a crux of Detroit's shortcomings.
"He had a very good year. We’re very pleased with his progress," Yzerman said. "I don’t rule out any player coming to training camp and standing on his head or playing brilliantly and forcing us to re-evaluate our plan, but right now I anticipate him playing an even bigger role in Grand Rapids next year."
The most aggressive move of Yzerman's tenure was trading for and extending DeBrincat last summer, at the cost of a first-rounder. It doesn't feel like that sort of blockbuster is in store this year, certainly not with Detroit's top pick. Like those teams at the top of the board, Yzerman intends to use it to acquire "a good player, a player that plays for us in the NHL."
"We need that," he said, "and it’s not as simple or as automatic as we all like to think it is."
They now need much more than that from the players in the system. And entering the sixth season of a work in progress, they need it fairly soon.
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