Red Wings’ defense sunk them in 2024-25
The puck will soon drop for the Stanley Cup Playoffs, once again without the Detroit Red Wings.
On Monday’s episode of Daily Faceoff LIVE, Tyler Yaremchuk and Frank Seravalli recapped the Red Wings’ season, highlighting why the club once again failed to qualify for the postseason.
Tyler Yaremchuk: It’s been nine straight seasons now without the playoffs. If you go from Steve Yzerman being hired, it’s now five years without making the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It was an ugly year in Detroit, in a season where you look at a team like Ottawa who was neck-and-neck the last couple of years with these teams looking to take the next step forward. Ottawa does, but why didn’t Detroit? What was the big problem plaguing them this year?
Frank Seravalli: It’s their defense. It’s not anywhere near Stanley Cup Playoffs caliber. This is nine straight springs without the playoffs in Hockeytown. They lost the moniker because you can’t be Hockeytown without the playoffs there. This is a team that, look at their backend as it’s constituted right now. There have been injuries, but Simon Edvinsson and Moritz Seider are tremendous starting points for a playoff defense. The problem is they have no other bona fide, seemingly NHL defensemen after that. They struggled. They’ve struggled from jumpstreet. The biggest hole in Yzerman’s game has been their ability as a staff to properly evaluate NHL-level defensemen on the pro side of the game. Their signings, their trades, their players who have moved on elsewhere have been better elsewhere. Jake Walman is a great example. Shayne Gostisbehere is another one. The guys that they have chosen to part with are guys that they should have kept, and vice versa. It’s been really tough to watch. You have a team that went out last summer and brought back Patrick Kane and signed Vladimir Tarasenko. Those are like missing pieces of a Stanley Cup team, not a team that is scrapping to make the playoffs. They kind of did things out of order. If you’re going to spend cap dollars, fix your defense first. Figure that part out and then add in the missing pieces if you want to at the trade deadline. And then it’s almost like we got to that trade deadline period and I don’t know if anyone had a more disappointing result. It was almost like Yzerman was broadcasting to everyone else, ‘Hey, I’m not a believer in our team. I don’t think we can get over the hump and get in this year.’ I think your team then internalizes that, and this was a team that made a really significant and important coaching change in bringing in Todd McLellan on Boxing Day. They had a tremendous record after that and showed some signs of promise, and then kind of fell apart again when they didn’t get a vote of confidence.
You can watch the full segment and the rest of the episode here: