Red Wings Training Camp Storylines To Watch

On the Red Wings' back-up goalie battle, Alex DeBrincat's fit, and the progress of Detroit's young forwards

On Thursday morning in Traverse City, the Detroit Red Wings 2023 training camp will begin.  As Detroit lays the foundation for a fresh season and a new roster takes shape, here are three storylines to monitor in training camp.

Alex DeBrincat will arrive at Red Wing camp as the off-season's marquee acquisition. The hometown kid coming back to Detroit with the understanding that his offensive gifts will uplift the team he grew up cheering for on its slow and steady march back to the postseason.

Of course, DeBrincat's availability this summer is a reminder of the disappointment of his 2022-23 campaign.  The Ottawa Senators dealt the winger because he never quite found a home in his lone season in the Canadian capital.  Instead of matching the 41 goals he scored in his final season in Chicago the year prior, DeBrincat found the back of the net just 27 times.

For any player experiencing a change of scenery, there is bound to be a sense of pressure to perform—delivering on the promise that led some new team to pursue your services.  For a goalscorer like DeBrincat, there pressure can be even more acute.  

As the old cliché goes, they won't ask how, they'll ask how many at the end of the season, and DeBrincat will be judged as much on his pure scoring as on the totality of his performance.  Meanwhile, expectations for the Red Wings are mounting, and fans will be keen to see the team off to a strong start.  

Put those two factors together, and you get the sense of an imperative for DeBrincat to start fast in the 2023-24 season.  In the context of training camp, that means it will be worth monitoring DeBrincat's form from the jump in camp.  Who is he playing with, and where does there seem to be chemistry?

Because his Senators' tenure never got off the ground, fit feels of paramount importance to DeBrincat's long-term success in Detroit, and our first opportunity to gauge that progress will come in camp.

Entering training camp, Ville Husso is Detroit's unquestioned starter in net.  This is less a reflection of Husso's 2022-23 performance than it is a product of his short-term competition: 2023 UFA signings James Reimer and Alex Lyon.

Last season, Husso's .896 save percentage in 56 games was not exactly confidence inspiring, but in bringing in Reimer and Lyon this summer, the Yzerman regime made clear that it does feel comfortable with Husso remaining the team's starter.

Reimer had the unfortunate task of playing behind the Sharks defense a year ago in San Jose, and he managed just an .890 SV% in 43 games.  Lyon provided the Panthers with a late season boost, delivering a .912 in 15 games of work.

At 35, Reimer's days as a full-time starter appear done, and the 30-year-old Lyon has never been a regular starter for any sustained stretch.  As such, I wouldn't expect either to pose much of a threat to Husso when it comes to claiming starting duties in camp, but their contract status suggests an open competition for the back-up role.

As this graphic from our friends at PuckPedia shows, Reimer signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal this summer, and Lyon signed for two years at $900K each.  

Detroit did not offer much of a commitment to either Reimer or Lyon via the contract those two players agreed to; that suggests that either one could emerge as the number two out of camp, with the other sent off to Grand Rapids to start the season.

In theory, either Sebastian Cossa or Jan Bednar could make a push for the NHL roster in a back-up role, but I wouldn't count on it, especially not from Cossa, whom the Red Wings will not want to rush to the NHL stage.

Injuries are inevitable in an 82-game season, and teams know to expect to use a minimum of three goaltenders over the course of the season, so the Red Wings will want to keep both Reimer and Lyon as options.  Still, camp will offer us a first glimpse at which player is in the driver's seat for back-up duties.

In his pre-training camp press availability, Steve Yzerman spoke about his excitement for some of Detroit's young players to push for greater roles in the coming season.

"Some of our younger players—we mentioned Joe Veleno, Michael Rasmussen—they want a bigger role, they want more ice time, they want to play on some of these special teams, they want to take face-offs in the last minute of a game. So there's competition there," Yzerman said. 

For the purposes of this conversation, I'd like to focus on the Red Wing forwards who are both young and returners to the NHL roster.  Youngsters trying to claim full-time roles for the first time (e.g. Marco Kasper and Carter Mazur) and players arriving to Detroit from elsewhere (e.g. Daniel Sprong and Klim Kostin) have their own unique challenges.

However, a step forward for Detroit in the standings will almost certainly have to coincide with growth from the Red Wings class of young but established forwards.  Here, I'm thinking of the two Yzerman cited (Veleno and Rasmussen) as well as Lucas Raymond and Jonatan Berggren.

Yzerman was explicit in his expectation for Veleno and Rasmussen's growth—pushing for more minutes in higher leverage positions.  

Meanwhile, Raymond has already claimed a top six, top power play role, but his challenge will rest in bouncing back from a disappointing season.  Berggren has dabbled in those top-of-the-lineup spots, but he hasn't solidified his place there.  In 2023-24, the young Swede will seek to leverage his mature and diverse offensive toolkit into becoming a fixture atop Detroit's line-up.

In training camp, it will be worth paying attention to those four young forwards' progress.  What sort of progress can we see from them, and where do they appear to fit in amidst a revamped roster