After signing massive extensions this summer, Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond are irrefutably cornerstones of the Detroit Red Wings, and like everything else as Red Wings, they did it together

From the moment they arrived in Detroit, together of course, Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond have been twin marvels: Seider the towering blueliner who defied his draft day critics to wind up a number one defenseman from the moment he got to the NHL and Raymond the prolific winger who raced ahead of his expected timeline to the league then kept on flying so that when Dylan Larkin went down to injury late last season there was little doubt the Red Wings’ best player became number 23. For three seasons now, Seider and Raymond have been affable, productive, and energizing for a proud franchise looking to power out of nearly a decade of pain.

Heading into year four of their joint tenure in Detroit, a few big things have changed. Most obviously, the contracts have changed. The entry-level deals, dictated to them by their draft status and the collective bargaining agreement, are gone; in their place, Raymond signed an eight-year, $64.40 million contract on Sept. 16, and three days later, on the first day of training camp, Seider signed a seven year, $59.85 million deal.

The Red Wings around them have also changed. They arrived in the NHL to a team that wasn’t much worth watching were it not for the spark they provided. Now, Detroit enters the year having come as painfully close to the postseason without qualifying as possible last season. To say that makes this year playoffs or bust would be too fatalistic, but it’s also clear that progress can only really mean one thing after last spring’s near miss.

Put those two changes together, and expectations too have changed for Seider and Raymond. Young and fun is no longer good enough, at the individual or collective level; now is the time for winning. And, fair or not, Seider and Raymond will now be inextricable from their contracts in public discourse with those lucrative deals becoming a cudgel the moment some pundit deems their performance unsatisfactory.

There are three Red Wings with contracts that run into the 2030s. One is captain Dylan Larkin, the franchise’s standard bearer through the difficult post-dynastic years. The other two are Seider and Raymond. In other words, more than anything, what the new contracts for Seider and Raymond codify is their ascendance beside Larkin as franchise cornerstones, making that trio Detroit’s Core. If it was still up for any debate entering the summer, the new contracts closed the case: Seider and Raymond are both leaders and stars for the Red Wings.

“We’re gonna ask more of them in those situations,” said Detroit coach Derek Lalonde Saturday, when asked about their joint emergence as such. “I think the first part of young players’ [development] is their own self-accountability, and I think they’ve done a good job with growing that. And then I think it’s probably some accountability on peers and the group, and they’re continuing to grow in that. So it’s been a nice progression watching them in that area of leadership.”

With respect to the new contracts, both Raymond and Seider would rather look forward than bask in their achievements. “Obviously, [the contract] is something to be proud of and obviously very happy for it,” Raymond told The Hockey News last week. “At the same time, I always feel like you get drafted, you get that kinda same sense, but then you need to play good, and same thing here. Now it’s about moving forward and taking the next step.”

Seider expressed a similar sentiment, saying to THN of the restricted free agency process, “I think the biggest thing I took away is I don’t want to take anything for granted. I’m very honored and very pleased with what I got offered, and now it’s kinda time to pay it back and prove they made the right decision. Other than that, obviously I think I can help the team and hopefully that can turn out in a good way in the long term here. That’s basically all I was looking for.”

Meanwhile, for both players, leadership is a natural extension of what’s happened on the ice. Seider is a supremely skilled defenseman, but he is also endlessly self-sacrificial, as content to spend his minutes blocking shots and clearing the crease while playing the most difficult minutes in the league a year ago as he is to zip passes around the offensive zone. Raymond has emerged as a budding superstar power forward. He scored a career high 31 goals and 72 points a year ago, and while a career high shooting percentage helped, Raymond drove that shooting percentage up with a newfound acumen for generating quality offense from the inner slot. Irrefutably, Detroit needs both at their best to realize its season’s ambitions.

Seider got a delayed start to that objective, missing the Red Wings’ stay in Traverse City during training camp as he wrapped up his contract negotiations, but he points out that making the adjustment from Germany to Detroit is much easier from a jet lag perspective than the other way around. “It’s easy coming this way,” he told THN. “You just go to bed very early, and you wake up early. It’s nice: you have the whole day in front of you. I kinda feel like an old person just waking up at six in the morning and being ready to go and going to bed at nine. It’s just nice.”

There were signs of rust in his first game of the pre-season—a stumble here, a mis-placed pass there—but he also blocked three shots, a reminder of an incessant willingness to prioritize winning over himself. “I think that the only thing you have to look at is how Moritz Seider is blocking shots,” said goaltender Alex Lyon after that game, in response to a question about Detroit’s desire for improved team defense. “That’s not something that’s a given [in the pre-season], and it just speaks to the level of urgency that we have, and, just to reiterate, where we want to be and how we want to play the game. The way you do anything is the way you do everything, so it starts right now.”

Meanwhile, Lalonde made clear this pre-season that he has no plans of lightening Seider’s load. “I don’t foresee that changing,” the coach said, when asked about the difficulty of his minutes. “Where we are as a team, how valuable he is, how he can handle top lines—I think part of our continued growth with [standings] points and wins over the last two years, why it’s headed in the right direction, is because of that part of [his] game and being able to handle matchups. So, I don’t think that’s going to change, as long as he’s here with the Red Wings.”

For Raymond, year three in the NHL represented a gauntlet thrown down. His sophomore season had been disappointing, a step back from his rookie campaign’s production. He responded to those circumstances by tacking on muscle over the summer, then putting up career highs in goals, assists, and points. From the home opener against Tampa, a newfound physicality showed up in Raymond’s game.

Per Lalonde, that growth was a natural extension of a pugnacious quality already latent in Raymond. “Probably a little bit of his physical maturity, being able to hang in there and win more of those battles,” Lalonde said. “Even last year, he was evolving, some of that internal growth, and we talked about him being a little bit bigger and a little bit stronger, now all of a sudden he turns four or five of those 50-50 battles into wins, and now it’s more puck touches, more offense, and you see the entire game [grow]. I think that compete, that high compete, battle, has always been in him. It’s just evolved more as he’s become stronger.”

To Seider, what stood out most was the way Raymond managed to raise the floor on his night-to-night performance. “I think he just [learned to] limit his off nights,” Seider explained to THN. “Always, there’s not gonna be 82 games where you can perform on an ‘A’-level basis, but if you can limit those off nights or whatever you want to call them to a ‘B’-level or an ‘A-minus,’ you’re gonna be fantastic. And I think he’s shown a lot of growth in that. Even though you’re not at 100%, you can still show up and win us hockey games, and that’s exactly what he did.”

The obvious through-line in Raymond and Seider’s time in Detroit is their connection with one another, and that connection extended to an exciting but stressful summer culminating in the new contracts. “It was nice for both of us,” Raymond said to THN of going through the RFA process alongside Seider. “We had each other throughout that process, and obviously I signed a little bit before him, but kept in contact…It’s a little bit of a stressful time.“

Seider spoke to the way being RFAs together was just the latest step in a shared journey. “We started from day one, always side by side, and kind of went through the same phases over and over again,” he said. “Obviously, it’s nice to have someone who can relate to the same exact situation, and obviously it helped when he came down to Mannheim and we worked out for a whole week. There’s a lot of catch-up going on during those weeks, and it was just nice. It was needed. I think it was good to have someone next to you who’s picking your mind the same way and can feel into that situation, because it’s a weird situation for everybody. It’s hard to figure out for a person that’s not in that scenario, trying to figure out every side of it, and it’s nice to have someone who’s going through the same thing.”

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this is literally true. Raymond has never played an NHL game without Seider. Seider has played exactly eight without Raymond, when the latter was injured during their sophomore year in 2022-23. To Seider, as supportive as friends and family could be, there was a value in having someone who knows exactly what you are going through during a tense negotiating process, even as all parties wanted the same outcome.

“Family, yes, of course, but it’s different,” Seider said to THN of his support network over the summer. “Obviously they’re not going out there. They’re not doing what they’re doing. It’s hard for them to understand where you are coming from sometimes, and it’s obviously a lot easier having someone like him who is in the exact same boat, and now obviously we’re cruising on the same ship for a long time now.”

For Larkin, a player who knows a little something about graduating from exciting young talent to stardom and leadership, Seider and Raymond’s growth is a natural progression.

“Obviously through playing games, playing with different players, we’ve had a lot of good leaders, even in their short time with us, come and go, and you pick up things from other guys. I hope they can say they were brought into an environment where from day one they were looked at to be impact players,” Larkin said Monday, cracking an optimistic smile at this last line.

”With that, you slowly become looked at as a leader on the team and a part of the core,” he continued. “I’ve noticed them be more vocal. Lucas at the end of last season—the way he played, the way he took over, started to dominate shifts, periods, and games. Mo with how he sacrifices the body, he’s always there for us. Those guys have continued to grow. I think they have more growth in them, but that’s any young 20-something in the NHL. We expect a lot out of them, and they’ve always answered, so I’m excited for them this season.”

Now, as the Red Wings look to Raymond and Seider as leaders alongside Larkin in their quest back to the playoffs, the consensus external expectation is that they will once more fall short in the gladiatorial ring that is the Atlantic Division. Within the dressing room, however, expectations have never been higher; to a man, the returning Red Wings have named last year’s miss as motivation to finish the job this time around. So, what is Raymond and Seider’s first challenge as newly minted stars? Defy the external expectations and meet the internal ones. It won’t be easy, but, as Larkin pointed out, that’s never been a problem before.

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