Columnist Bob Wojnowski told Ilitch he didn\u2019t think Red Wings fans had the patience to stomach a \u201cre-rebuild.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI understand the frustration, and I share it,\u201d Ilitch responded. \u201cAnd I am committed to building a championship-level organization. I have an assessment. You probably have an assessment. Fans probably have an assessment. I\u2019m not sure how much any of that matters. It\u2019s really going to be the assessment of our new leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, if it\u2019s going to be up to the new leader, whether that ends up being Horcoff or someone else, what\u2019s Horcoff supposed to do in the interim? Stack assets, play the kids and evaluate everyone until a decision is made? Try to make the playoffs?<\/p>\n
Well, he\u2019s going to try to make the playoffs.<\/p>\n
The Red Wings were tied with the Carolina Hurricanes for first in the Eastern Conference and had a 12-point playoff cushion on Jan. 24, then finished 9-15-5 and were booed off the ice in their home finale.<\/p>\n
It might have looked like they were in limbo in the offseason. They weren\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Horcoff, who has been part of the Detroit front office since 2016 and was an assistant GM since February 2022, started handling the day-to-day business of hockey operations. He talked to coach Todd McLellan.<\/p>\n
\u201cMidsummer, we really started to talk about what we were going to accomplish this summer, not just sit here and wait for an announcement to be made,\u201d Horcoff said. \u201cWe made a strong decision internally to not do that, to get to work right away.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were excited about the team we had. We knew we were in first place at the end of January, and we know we\u2019re close, and so we got to work on, \u2018What can we do?\u2019 Dove into every department. \u2018How can we get better in every aspect, in every area? Where do we need to make changes in order for us to help these players and put them into the best possible position to get over the hump?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Horcoff added: \u201cWe weren\u2019t waiting for direction. We were moving forward here and making the necessary decisions to improve our hockey club.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is a job interview for Horcoff. It\u2019s a massive, messy challenge. It\u2019s a massive opportunity too.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m ecstatic to have this opportunity,\u201d Horcoff said. \u201cWhat my job is to make sure that \u2026 First off, it\u2019s two things: It\u2019s to listen, and it\u2019s to support, and that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to do early, is listen to the people in this organization.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have some fantastic people here, from players to staff, very capable staff, management, coaches. I want to listen to them all and hear their ideas on how we can make improvements. My philosophy is, focus on the day to day and hopefully we get some results.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Columnist Bob Wojnowski told Ilitch he didn\u2019t think Red Wings fans had the patience to stomach a \u201cre-rebuild.\u201d…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":850782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-850781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=850781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/850781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/850782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=850781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=850781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=850781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}