What Alex DeBrincat's Extension Means For The Red Wings' Future

On Tuesday night, Alex DeBrincat scored two goals and added an assist as part of the Detroit Red Wings' 5-4 overtime loss to the New Jersey Devils, and then his night got even more rewarding. 

Shortly after that game, which dropped the Red Wings to 1-3-2 on the season, the team announced DeBrincat signed a seven-year extension with a $13 million AAV that will keep the Michigan native in the fold through 2034.

It's impossible to deny that this is a good deal. The max term of seven years is a bit worrying for a player who will be nearly 30 when the new contract begins, but given where the cap is going, the AAV is a bargain for a guy who is 17th in the NHL in goals (111) and 33rd in points (230) since his arrival in Detroit back in 2023-24.

This is, by any measure, an elite scorer, so getting him for just $13 million — currently the 11th-largest AAV in the league, but that will drop quickly — is some nice work for Red Wings interim GM Shawn Horcoff.

This is a team that needed a win after a summer of self-inflicted harm, including the ongoing sagas involving Dylan Larkin (who we can only assume still wants out) and unsigned cornerstone defenseman Simon Edvinsson (back in North America but without any reported progress on a new contract).

This move is something Detroit fans can point to and say that maybe there is a steady hand on the wheel. DeBrincat rocks, and this is a nice contract for him. It's a positive for the team to sign him. Assuming that this team can get back into some sort of competitive state in the next few years, they can spin this deal as the start of a new era of Red Wings hockey.

But who is going to buy it?

It's been yet another rough start for the team, and if you want to argue that DeBrincat's four goals and eight points in six games to start the season is a little empty-calorie as a result, that line of reasoning wouldn't be ill-founded.

This is another situation like Larkin's, where we are no doubt talking about a very good player who nonetheless — and for reasons largely outside his control — is obviously not someone who's making a big difference in the Red Wings' fortunes.

They averaged 89.5 standings points per 82 games since his arrival in Detroit, and while that's up from the three years prior to that (75.3) it's still not good enough to get a team into the playoffs.

If Detroit wants to match that meager 89.5-point average, let alone exceed it, they are already going to have to start playing at a 92-point pace for the rest of the season. Which might not sound like a lot, but that matches last year's output, which wasn't good enough, and was also the team's best point total since 2015-16.

Clearly, this is something that is difficult for them to accomplish, and it gets harder every day.

While simply locking in a locally-born player who actually wants to be there is a positive, this contract has to be considered in the broader picture of Detroit's goals. They clearly want to be in the playoffs; well, last year in an Atlantic Division with a ton of upheaval, they missed the cut line by seven points.

You can present any number of injury- or performance-related excuses you want, but it was hardly a surprising reversal of fortune.

DeBrincat will probably bring a lot of value, at least in the first few years of this new contract, but the question is whether it's the right kind of value. The philosophical question here is whether they should be chasing some larger amount of standings points, given the age of many of their most-used players, or maybe trying again on the rebuild.

It's understandable that ownership saw how the Yzerplan went and wanted to zag, but at least it provided a point on the horizon to which the organization was headed. Tear-down rebuilds don't always work, and their success rate when the team pulls the chute and spends all its money and roster opportunities on a bunch of UFA mediocrities is basically zero.

Almost every team that's won the Cup in the salary-cap era had multiple high draft picks on the roster from at least a few years of failing on purpose.

The DeBrincat deal — which, again, is solid — shows management believes it is close to breaking through and being, if things go exactly right for 84 games, a roster that might be as good as the seventh-best team in the conference.

So the question is whether DeBrincat's positive-value contract might still be a net negative, in terms of what kind of value the Wings should be seeking. Would a player with his resume not be more valuable to the Wings as a trade chip?

Maybe Horcoff didn't want to get into a second set of trade negotiations around one of his team's big offensive drivers this season, but surely the haul he could have gotten for DeBrincat has more long-term value to the team than what this particular borderline-elite scorer is going to bring to the table in both the short term and long term.

Over the first few years of this deal, his quality will add points to the Red Wings' total in the standings at a time when they should be trying to rack up as many high-end picks as possible.

However, that's just what they should be doing. What they want to do is exactly what this contract accomplishes: Give fans something to feel good about, while forestalling the possibility of a more serious rebuild, in hopes that maybe they sneak into the playoffs once or twice in the next eight seasons. 

But it's being talked about by Insiders and local reporters as a "win" and "exactly what the Red Wings needed." And it's not-not that.

But the results of Tuesday night's game is a perfect encapsulation of what it actually accomplishes. All his big night amounted to was a loser point in a season that looks like it's already going off the rails. It created the illusion of competitiveness in a game where they got completely pushed around by a middling team, but not much more than that.

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