The Detroit Red Wings were one of the NHL's worst teams under GM Steve Yzerman. Now, a new GM must handle Dylan Larkin's trade request and reconsider the ideal return, writes Ryan Lambert.
The Yzerplan is dead.
The Detroit Red Wings announced Wednesday that Steve Yzerman will no longer be their GM and executive vice-president. He will transition to a role as senior advisor to Chris Illitch, the team's governor and CEO.
What that means, effectively, is that Yzerman's vision of the future for the organization was a failure. The Wings generated few franchise-changing prospects beyond Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond, and zero playoff appearances, while posting the league's fifth-worst points percentage over Yzerman's seven-year reign of error.
From 2019 to the present, perennial failures like Columbus, Arizona/Utah combined and Seattle have all finished ahead of the Red Wings in the standings.
This was all forced, in many ways, by the Dylan Larkin situation.
It is rarely a sign that things are going well when the team's captain, who has five years left on his now-extremely cheap deal, comes to you and says he would like to be traded. It's made worse by the fact that he's a hometown boy who grew up cheering for the very GM who has failed him these last seven years.
All the losing, the lack of enough elite talent to build around Larkin (who was never himself all that elite), going through three coaches in a four-year stretch and the late-season meltdowns suffered by all three meant the Yzerplan was doomed basically from the start.
You can say that bad lottery luck contributed to that, which is certainly true, but the end result is the same: the Red Wings were never good enough under Yzerman, who is only being allowed to "transition" to a different role, instead of being tossed out into the street with a big boot print on his back, because of what he did for the franchise as a player. It's face-saving, but everyone sees it clearly for what it really is.
Detroit fans don't have to like how Larkin went about his business — it's certainly a little déclassé — but it was his right under the contract negotiated by... ah, it says here "Steve Yzerman."
And if he wants to say, "I'm so sick of losing that I will only go to a team I believe can win," well, he certainly knows what a loser looks like by experience.
One of the things you can criticize the Red Wings for is trying to build around Larkin, who has proven himself more of a "great No. 2 center on a good team" than a "No. 1 center on a team that can barely make the playoffs."
But one can easily imagine that this decision signals that all involved on the team side of things recognize that Yzerman's approach with his captain wasn't working.
Helene St. James of the Detroit Free Press reported last week that the now-ex-GM wanted roster players for Larkin, not futures that would likely extend the losing seasons into the indeterminate future.
No roster players on Larkin's four-team list were forthcoming — and certainly none that were going to move the needle in any serious way toward Detroit's first playoff appearance since 2016 — and this is the last-ditch effort to pivot.
Whether Larkin shows up to camp in Detroit this September is still an open question, but the smart money is on "he won't," and that's because Yzerman's attempt to hold the line on maximizing value for his unsettled captain while trying to keep the Yzerplan going was a catastrophic failure.
Larkin will likely get what he wants sooner than later, depending on how long the search for the next GM takes. And unless the new guy can do a better job of convincing Larkin to waive his no-movement clause for even more teams, he will be traded for futures.
That, in turn, probably signals the 10-year playoff drought stretching into its teenage years and even more difficult decisions about who stays and who goes from the roster in the interim.
Why, for example, keep the many fine-to-good veterans Yzerman signed or traded for with the express goal of being just good enough to get into the playoffs?
His successor's first job will be moving Larkin, and the second will be testing the market for guys like Alex DeBrincat, Andrew Copp, Mason Appleton and Justin Faulk, all of whom have just one year left on their contracts.
It wasn't necessarily always going to end this way, but it was a fait accompli even a few years before the Larkin demand came in. The current captain had a clearer vision of the Red Wings' future than the one from the 1990s, and that was the problem all along.
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