The newly promoted Red Wings assistant GM opens up on his post-playing journey, life for a current Detroit prospect vs. a 90s one, and working with his former teammates in the Red Wing front office

As Kris Draper sits down to speak at Little Caesars Arena Wednesday morning, it has not yet been an hour since his promotion went public.  A face best known for the mangling it suffered at the hands of Claude Lemieux, a mangling that spurred the NHL's defining rivalry of the late 90s and early aughts, today is beaming.  

Steve Yzerman has just named the 20-year NHL veteran the Red Wings assistant general manager. Draper remains director of amateur scouting, he will still run Detroit’s draft, and he jokes that he doesn’t want too many new responsibilities given the state of his travel schedule before the promotion.

When Draper looks around the Detroit organization, he sees familiar faces all around him. Yzerman, Nicklas Lidstrom, Dan Cleary, Nicklas Kronwall, and Jiri Fischer work with him in the front office. Kirk Maltby works under him as a scout. Draper won the Stanley Cup with each of them in their Red Wing playing days.

“I think it’s pretty special,” Draper says. “Anytime that we get to walk in the dressing room, there’s some special pictures up there that you’re never going to forget. Some moments that you’re never going to forget. It’s incredible how fortunate I’ve been to be a part of this organization for 30 years.”

He invokes the infamous 1993 “trade for future considerations” that sent him from Winnipeg to Detroit, a deal which pegged his value at exactly $1, a reasonable going rate for an Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull BluRay at Walmart but an altogether shocking figure for a professional hockey player.

“Here I am sitting up here as an assistant general manager of the organization right now, and it's, I mean, it's unreal,” says Draper. “For a lot of these prospects, you look at the path that that people take to get to the NHL, it's never the same. It’s gonna be different for every single one of these prospects.

“Dan Cleary, at the time he was a late birth [i.e. he was young for, and at a fundamental disadvantage to, his draft class], but at the time, he was a highly, highly touted NHL prospect. And then he had a tough time making it and sticking in the NHL…He came in on a try-out and ended up being a huge part of winning the Cup in ’08, and now he runs our player development. This is now his home.”

“Everyone knows it didn’t work out well in Winnipeg,” Draper adds of his own journey. “I got an opportunity with the Detroit Red Wings, and he were are 30 years later."

Besides his promotion, the occasion for Draper’s press conference is the conclusion of development camp; it’s an event that lays bare the changing of the times between his early 90s arrival in Detroit and the modern Red Wing organization.

Draper, with affection and realism both palpable in his voice, refers to Joe Louis Arena (which the Wings called home from 1979 to 2017, during which time the organization claimed four Stanley Cups) as “a dump, but our dump.” 

He expresses good-natured envy of the facilities and information available to a Detroit prospect in 2023, and it’s this information (concerning nutrition, sleep, financial literacy, and “how hard it’s going to be from here”) he most wants the Wings’ present crop of youngsters to take from development camp.

“I gotta be honest, I snuck in some recovery in these massage chairs,” Draper confesses. “I’d never leave this place. With the food that they have, the workout facility, the rink, you name it, it’s incredible. We’re very fortunate to be able to give these prospects what they got [in] the last week.”

On a more serious note, Draper observes that the abundance of information available today affords prospects more specific and individualized development plans. As he fought his way into the NHL ranks, the only off-season objective was a generic mandate to get into the best imaginable physical condition.

Today, Draper, Cleary, and company “can basically pinpoint” specific growth areas for each player. “Some needs to get more explosive, some need to get stronger,” he says. “The upper body strength, the lower body strength, the skating, the agility, you get to be able to go over all this with them.

“What were doing right now is basically saying ‘you know what? This is what the test score says right now. You’re 17, 18, 19 years old. This is what we have to work on,’” he explains.

For Draper, life after his playing career began coaching his son Kienan’s ’02 Little Caesars AAA team. Detroit selected Kienan in the seventh round of the 2020 NHL Draft, and the younger Draper (wearing 34, rather than his father’s 33) took part in development camp as he prepares for his sophomore season at the University of Michigan (where he does sport the familial 33).

During the end-of-camp 3-on-3 tournament, Kienan played on Carter Mazur’s wing. Mazur played on the same Little Caesars team. Draper recalls coaching a 10-year-old Mazur at The Brick, an annual youth tournament in Edmonton, the 2023 edition of which is ongoing. 

Even then, “Maze,” as Draper calls him, ”was just always low maintenance…It was just go play...It's amazing at that youth level when you start watching these young kids…they start getting to about 14, 15, they kind of are the type of player that possibly they could be going forward.”

However, when it came time to define his own professional path forward, Draper opted for scouting instead of coaching. The scouting life afforded greater freedom and flexibility, which appealed to Draper, who joked that it was easier to avoid the gaze of then-GM Ken Holland. 

Under Holland, Draper was a “special assistant to the GM;” then, at Draper’s request, Holland dropped the “special.” Despite that promotion, Draper, by his own account, “wasn’t in charge of anything really.”  Under Yzerman, Draper has found direction and a clear organizational specialty. “I take a lot of pride in my job right now as director of amateur scouting and [to be named] assistant general manager by Stevie means a lot—that he appreciates what we’re doing right now. That means a lot to me.

“The Detroit Red Wings are one of the most important things in my life. It’s been like that for years, and I want to be a big part of us getting back into the playoffs and then from there being Cup contenders to being Cup champions again. And we know hard it’s going to be. We know the hard work that we have to do, and we’re all in this together.”

As he tells it, Draper’s promotion began to come together in the last four or five weeks of the season. Yzerman wanted to get out and watch some prospects in preparation for the draft, and he consulted Draper as to where his energies were best devoted. The pair took trips out west together and spent 12 days in Europe at U-18 Worlds. “It was just a good opportunity to talk hockey prospects,” Draper says.

When they got home, Yzerman summoned Draper to his office. Draper’s head raced with thoughts of being called into the principal’s office in elementary school, but instead, Yzerman bestowed him with a new role. Draper's pleasure at “earning the trust” of his one-time captain in a new position, with both know moved on from the ice to the executive suite, is obvious.  He acknowledges that “one day I would love to” be a GM, but for now though, what Draper craves most is the return of playoff hockey to Detroit. 

"Once the season ended and we went into the playoffs, it was just different,” Draper recalls. “It was different around here. Detroit Red Wing fans are absolutely incredible, but then it goes to a next level come playoff time, and I want [the current group of Red Wings] to go through what what we were able to go through and then they're going to understand exactly what playoff hockey means in Detroit and in Hockeytown.”

Working with the likes of Yzerman, Lidstrom, and Cleary and spending 30 years of his life under the same employer is special in its own right, but Draper won’t feel their work is done until the glory of the teams he played for return.  The four Cups he won as a player aren't enough:

“It's incredible to be able to see all you know, a lot of former teammates that and like I said before, we're all in this for the same thing. We want to be good again, and we want to be great, and we all take a lot of pride in what the Detroit Red Wing organization meant to our lives.  We played arguably in the greatest era of the Detroit Red Wing organization, and we want to bring that back, and we all understand how hard it's going to be. But we're all in this together.”