DETROIT — As Red Wings training camp begins this week in Traverse City, Mich., an undercurrent of tension is stirring in Detroit.

The optimism of a new season remains, but for a team that has missed the playoffs in nine straight seasons, patience and youth are not the easy sells they once were.

General manager Steve Yzerman inherited a tough situation when he arrived in April 2019. The franchise was paying the bill for a streak of 25 consecutive playoff seasons from 1991 to 2016, and the previous regime’s major draft mistakes in the final years before Yzerman arrived left Detroit without many young difference-makers.

The result has been painful, going from a legendary playoff streak that tied the third-longest mark in NHL history to what is now a nine-year postseason drought — tied for the fourth-longest absence on record.

It’s been a stinging recoil, especially in a league where half of the 32 teams make the playoffs each year.

Detroit has succeeded in the most crucial part of its rebuild: hitting on its early draft picks. Yzerman’s first four top picks are already in key roles in the top half of the lineup, and a fifth could join that group this season. But even after nailing those first-round picks and adding a pair of high-flying offensive pieces in Alex DeBrincat and Patrick Kane, the Red Wings still haven’t broken through six years in.

They’ve been close — missing the playoffs by a tiebreaker two years ago — but close only counts for so much. And while it’s too reactionary to say the rebuild has failed, it’s fair to say the process has dragged.

The Red Wings’ issues are certainly rooted in broader themes, such as a depleted prospect pool and the absence of an elite goaltender, but the factors driving their drought can also be traced to a few specific moments.

These pivotal situations aren’t the root cause of the team’s problems, but they are missed opportunities that could have helped Detroit get out of its current slump sooner, and didn’t — whether by circumstance, poor decision-making or a combination of both.

The Vrána saga

This one feels like a lifetime ago. The Red Wings pulled off a blockbuster at the 2021 trade deadline, sending Anthony Mantha to the Capitals for a talented young winger in Jakub Vrána, plus Richard Pánik, a 2021 first-round pick and a 2022 second-round pick.

At the time, the deal was all about upside. Mantha was perhaps a more proven commodity and had rare physical tools, but Vrána was still just 25 and already had multiple 20-plus goal seasons to go with very strong rate stats. Throw in the picks, and there was a lot of optimism about how the Red Wings made out.

That optimism was amplified when Vrána finished the season with eight goals and 11 points in 11 games. It looked, for a moment, like Detroit had found a top-line scorer, albeit with defensive warts. Yzerman signed him to a three-year contract with a $5.25 million average annual value.

As it turned out, though, that brief stretch was the peak of Vrána’s time in Detroit.

The speedy sniper missed the first four months of the next season due to shoulder surgery, then entered the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program in the first week of the 2023-24 season. The Red Wings waived him upon his return and eventually traded him to the St. Louis Blues, ending his time in Detroit with all that potential unrealized. Today, Vrána is back in Europe.

This one going sideways isn’t on the Red Wings’ front office, especially considering how the winger performed before and after his time in Detroit. It’s worth noting Mantha has not been a true top-six player since being traded, either. But there’s still a feeling of “what might have been” around Vrána, even if his defensive issues meant he was unlikely to get the kind of usage needed to become a truly dominant player.

When you look at the glaring hole at left wing in the Red Wings’ top six, it’s easy to forget both he and Mantha once looked like long-term answers, only to vanish from the picture entirely.

Pro scouting departures and fallout

The Yzerman front office has been in place for six years, but it underwent a fairly significant makeover right around the midway point. Mark Howe, who had been the team’s director of pro scouting since 2005 (and a scout since 1995) retired in 2021. Then, during the 2021-22 season, the Red Wings lost another huge voice in that area when assistant general manager Pat Verbeek left to become Anaheim Ducks general manager.

That’s two prominent executives to lose from a key department in a span of months.

The very next offseason, in 2022, saw Detroit get a bit more aggressive in trying to climb the standings. After moving on from head coach Jeff Blashill and bringing in Derek Lalonde, the Red Wings also made their first real push in free agency that year, signing veterans David Perron, Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot, Olli Määttä and Dominik Kubalik and trading for goaltender Ville Husso.

That free-agent class has aged a bit better than it once appeared it would, but the player acquisitions since then have been a mixed bag.

Despite two big wins in trading for DeBrincat in 2023 and signing Kane four months later, the pro scouting department has taken a lot of valid criticism for the 2023 and 2024 offseasons in particular.

Detroit spent a combined $12.49 million per year on Justin Holl, Jeff Petry, Vladimir Tarasenko and Klim Kostin (a trade acquisition) in those summers, which left the Red Wings squeezed against the salary cap. That led to some difficult departures in 2024, including a key leader in Perron and a significant puck mover in Shayne Gostisbehere (himself a 2023 signing), as well as Jake Walman via trade.

Yzerman defended his pro scouting group — which never technically hired a director to replace Howe — at the end of last season, saying: “I think very highly of these young men (on the scouting staff). … They’re starting to learn the league more, understand what we’re trying to do, understand the value of the dollar amount. So I think as a pro scouting staff, we’re becoming a better team. We just simply have to walk away from some of these contracts.”

From outside the opaque fortress that is the Red Wings’ front office, it’s impossible to judge the group’s thought process. We also can’t know if keeping Howe (or replacing him) would have changed any of the team’s decisions.

We do, however, have the results. And while there have been some successes, the Red Wings’ decisions on July 1 simply haven’t given them enough help for the money they’ve spent — and in some cases have hindered them.

Gut-punch losses vs. Ottawa

Who could forget this one? In perhaps the closest thing the Red Wings have seen to a playoff series in the last nine years, Detroit traveled to Ottawa shortly before the 2023 trade deadline while jockeying against the Senators in the wild-card race. The stakes were huge, and the results were disastrous.

Detroit unraveled in those two games, first being pushed around by the Senators, then getting flat-out beat. They lost the two games by a combined score of 12-3.

Even before those games, it was possible (and perhaps likely) that the Red Wings were going to trade Tyler Bertuzzi, a fan-favorite winger and pending free agent. But after the Ottawa games, Detroit not only dealt Bertuzzi, they also shockingly shipped young defenseman Filip Hronek to Vancouver for 2023 first- and second-round picks.

The Red Wings used the first-round pick to select young defenseman Axel Sandin-Pellikka, who is now one of the team’s top prospects. How he develops will ultimately determine the Hronek deal’s success.

Regardless, the move signaled that Detroit still felt it was far enough away from contention to trade a 25-year-old defenseman for draft picks.

It’s probably a bit too bold to chalk up the trade entirely to the results in Ottawa. With Hronek a year from restricted free agency, the Red Wings may not have wanted to pay contracts north of $7 million to both Hronek and Moritz Seider on their defense’s right side, especially in what was effectively still a flat-cap environment.

However, it would hardly be shocking if the faceplant in Ottawa at least helped convince Yzerman of how far off his team looked, and to pull the trigger on the deal.

Two years later, the team’s biggest need is for a player just like Hronek: a top-four right-shot defenseman who can move pucks but still defend.

The Walman trade

At one time, Walman was a breakout success story for the Red Wings.

The smooth-skating left-shot defenseman, acquired in the 2022 Nick Leddy trade, climbed to a top-pair role for Detroit in the 2022-23 season. Detroit was happy enough with Walman to give him a three-year contract just before the 2023 trade deadline.

Something changed over the course of the following season.

Walman still often played a major role, but his underlying defensive numbers dropped significantly — perhaps due to intense matchup difficulty playing alongside Seider. Late in the year, as Detroit chased a playoff spot, Walman was consistently out of the lineup, but his availability was frustratingly hard to pin down, with Lalonde saying Walman was “not completely himself.” Walman later told The Athletic he was “pretty badly injured” and trying to play through it, but he ultimately dressed for only two of the team’s final 14 games.

That missed time coincided with the arrival of Simon Edvinsson on the left side. With a suddenly crowded blue line that also included Chiarot and Määttä, Yzerman was asked that summer how Walman fit into his plans.

“Depending on what we do or don’t do this summer, he’ll be back in competition for ice time, like they all are,” Yzerman said at the time. Less than a week later, the Red Wings traded Walman to the San Jose Sharks for nothing — and actually included a second-round pick in the deal to do so.

Three days later, at the NHL Draft, Yzerman said the team “needed to move at least one contract to do some of the things we want to do. And unfortunately, that was the price to do it.”

It was a shocking move that hasn’t aged well. Walman put up 32 points in 50 games for the Sharks, who then flipped him to the Edmonton Oilers and received a first-round pick.

This spring, when Yzerman was asked if he regretted the move or if he could shed any light on his thinking, he responded, “No and no.”

We can only take Yzerman at his word on the regret component. But after the Walman trade, the Red Wings’ only major signing was Tarasenko. The team fell short of expectations in 2024-25, and Yzerman traded away Tarasenko for nothing afterward.

Meanwhile, the Red Wings have a glaring hole in the top four of their defense (albeit on the right side rather than the left), and the Sharks wound up with first- and second-round picks. That’s quite the difference.

Conclusions

Let’s start here: No general manager or front office bats 1.000. Some things — as in Vrána’s case — are also out of their control.

That said, the Hronek and Walman trades are loud missteps at a time when the Red Wings’ defense might be their biggest obstacle to getting back to the playoffs.

Longest NHL playoff droughts, all-time

(*-current streak)

Nothing happens in a vacuum. If the Red Wings didn’t trade Hronek, would they still have spent nearly $6 million per year combined on Holl and Petry in the summer of 2023? Detroit was legitimately tight to the cap in 2024, so it’s possible fitting in Hronek at $7.25 million really would’ve been too difficult last season — but maybe keeping him would’ve saved them from some undesirable contracts. Maybe it was less about the cap and more about needing a significant shakeup in the locker room. Maybe it was simply all about the long term.

Whatever the thinking, one year later, the Red Wings suddenly have plenty of cap space and a big Hronek-shaped hole at RHD. That’s hard to ignore.

With Walman, Yzerman clearly feels content with his decision to trade him, but giving up a draft pick to do so looks even worse now than it did then.

Would the Red Wings have ended their playoff drought by now with one of those two defenseman still in the fold, or if the 2023 and 2024 offseasons had yielded better results? We’ll never know.

But revisiting the moves and the circumstances that led to now adds greater context to the position the Red Wings find themselves in: a season with higher stakes and more pressure than they’ve seen in nearly a decade.

(Top photo of Steve Yzerman in 2019: Dave Reginek / Getty Images)