Season End Thoughts

I don’t know where the Red Wings go from here.

Just going to get that out of the way. I can’t look at the pieces Detroit has right now, the holes they have right now, and confidently say “This is the way forward.”

Part of that is that I don’t know that it’s a talent issue. Is talent (or lack thereof) a part of it? Absolutely. But does dropping a better second line center on this roster put them in the playoffs?

The reason I question it is that this roster as currently constructed had a pretty strong grasp on a playoff spot early in the 2026 calendar year. There’s an ebb and flow to the season, for sure. Things do change throughout the year. But the Red Wings’ roster largely didn’t. If it was talented enough to be tied for first place in the Eastern Conference in late January, I don’t see how it wouldn’t be talented enough to even make the playoffs.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this team should have been a Cup favorite or anything just because they led the conference near the midway point of the season. It’s a flawed lineup. The second line center for much of the season – Andrew Copp – didn’t even break into double-digits in goals scored. And it’s not like he was particularly bad; a contending team just needs more than that from their top six forwards.

I just look at this roster and how they played for a big chunk of the year and think it’s reasonable that they could have made the playoffs. The holes in the lineup shouldn’t have prevented that.

Yes, I know that their five-on-five scoring cratered late in the season and their goaltending didn’t make up for it. I get the underlying stats behind the drop off. I’m more interested in what was behind the play that led to those stats. Why did the things that were working stop working? How does that get fixed?

After Detroit’s 5-4 loss on Easter Sunday to the Minnesota Wild – a game in which the team rallied to for a tie before blowing it late – Copp said “As soon as you let the outside noise and you guys (media) start to impact what we’re doing in here, that’s when issues start to happen.” It stuck with me because at that point – with the Wings already having lost control of their own destiny and needing help from other teams just to stay alive in the playoff hunt – the noise should have been inside the Detroit dressing room. Maybe that noise was in the room. Maybe team leaders were on it. The way Copp said it, though, seemed dismissive; like the team had better things to worry about than another late-season collapse.

You could drop a new second-line center and a new top-line right wing and a whole new fourth line into the lineup and if veteran leaders are shrugging off yet another collapse as “outside noise” then it’s not going to matter.

Copp is one of the players who was brought in near what was supposed to be the end of the rebuild to teach a young core how to win. A guy who had been around the league for awhile and knew how things worked. He and Ben Chiarot and J.T. Compher and Patrick Kane. And this team still looks like they don’t know how to win. Because they didn’t look talentless down the stretch, they looked listless.

How do you fix that?