For the past ten years, "Hockeytown" has been without playoff hockey.
For the past seven years, the Detroit Red Wings have been under the careful stewardship of franchise icon Steve Yzerman, and despite what seemed like steady, year over year improvements to the team, Detroit still finds itself sitting on the outside looking in, leading fans to wonder what this team actually is progressing towards, if at all.
"I'm very disappointed with how this season played out. There were a lot of things to be excited about, seeing the younger faces come into the lineup," Said Yzerman at the Red Wings' end of season media presser, "Say maybe the 3/4 poll we were generally pretty positive. And now we sit here today in the same spot we have for the last seven years."
Nine of the players on Detroit's roster on the last night of the season were drafted by Yzerman. However, the forward group drafted by Yzerman has struggled with consistency. Lucas Raymond headlines the group, with Emmitt Finnie and Marco Kasper being the only two others who played consistent NHL minutes with the team. Elmer Soderblom, who the Red Wings had in and out of the bottom six of their lineup, was traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins at the March 6th deadline, and the massive 6'8" winger has outproduced anything he had with the Red Wings this year in his short time in the Steel City.
Kasper and Finnie spent the majority of their seasons on the wings, but Kasper was projected as more of a center coming out of the draft and Finnie was a surprise as a 7th round rookie to make the roster, spending much of the year sharing a line with Raymond and captain Dylan Larkin. However, the bottom half of Detroit's roster didn't see any players break the 15 goal mark aside from James van Riemsdyk, and most of his production came in the first half of the year on the power play.
Late in the year, when the Red Wings needed scoring from their depth players while Larkin and Raymond were suffering dry spells or out of the lineup with injury, it was really only Alex DeBrincat and Patrick Kane who were contributing on the offensive side. The latest crop of free agents, including Mason Appleton and Travis Hamonic, simply didn't contribute enough, and it made it hard for a team that has seemingly found the ceiling of some of their prospects' potential to get good results.
"Ultimately it's incumbent upon me and my staff to improve the team." Said Yzerman, "Seven years ago I knew what I signed up for. I knew what the task at hand was. To sit here and say hey, everything is going perfectly to plan? No. There's a lot of things I'm pleased about in the organization and areas that I'm not happy. Disappointed. [There are] Things that we need to have done better."