DETROIT — Steve Yzerman had to do something.
After watching his team get booed off home ice in the Red Wings’ final game before the Christmas break Monday night, dropping them into the NHL’s bottom five after 34 games, it was clear patience in Detroit had run out. And Thursday, Yzerman acted accordingly, firing the team’s third-year head coach, Derek Lalonde, as well as associate coach Bob Boughner, and replacing them with veteran bench boss Todd McLellan and assistant coach Trent Yawney.
It was a move many fans had called for throughout the team’s disappointing 2024-25 season, as the Red Wings slipped from being a tiebreaker short of the playoffs last season to one of the league’s worst teams in a matter of months. They were underwhelming offensively, porous on the penalty kill and on too many nights, just plain flat.
All of these are things McLellan, who has more than 1,100 games of NHL head coaching experience backing him, will be tasked with fixing — starting Friday with a home game against the Toronto Maple Leafs.
But while Yzerman, the team’s general manager since 2019, has made that change, it can’t be his last. Not if McLellan is going to have a serious chance at succeeding where Lalonde could not.
Because while Lalonde was hardly a perfect coach, the way the Red Wings have fallen flat this season is about much more than coaching.
Lalonde is a sharp hockey mind, but at least publicly was a relatively mild-mannered communicator. It’s entirely possible, then, that a new voice and new message can light more of a fire under the Red Wings players.
But if a room full of professional athletes truly needs someone else to light their fire for them, that speaks to a much bigger issue. Especially for a team that has made a point of bringing in veteran leadership over the past three offseasons — and given out some cumbersome contracts in the name of doing so.
So while swapping Lalonde for McLellan may well give Detroit a spark, as it often does with coaching changes, Yzerman will simultaneously have to look long and hard at his roster and perhaps make a change or two there once the NHL’s trade freeze lifts on Friday.
As close as the Red Wings got to the playoffs last season, that result now looks more like a mirage year than a building-block season. And while Detroit’s farm system still has a few important pieces working their way up the pipeline, glaring long-term questions remain.
The biggest are at forward. Detroit has long been building around top-line center Dylan Larkin, but increasingly, the crawling pace of the rebuild looks like it will mean Larkin, 28, will be into his 30s by the time the team is in serious contention. That’s not the end of the world — Yzerman didn’t win his first Stanley Cup until he was 32, and Larkin should still be a highly effective player for many more years — but it does mean the team will need a robust core of younger players around him.
Dylan Larkin is a highly effective player, but he can’t carry the Red Wings on his own. (Nic Antaya / Getty Images)
Detroit has one such young star, Lucas Raymond, tracking toward a potential 80-point season this year at age 22, and another good scoring winger in Alex DeBrincat. From there, though, so much remains to be seen. Recent first-round picks Marco Kasper and Nate Danielson look like playoff-style two-way centermen who will really help the Red Wings, but both have some questions around what their ultimate NHL scoring productivity will be. The team’s 2024 first-round pick, Michael Brandsegg-Nygård, has a big-time shot in a heavy body, but he’s only 19 and has gotten off to a slower-than-hoped offensive start in the SHL.
All of Kasper, Danielson and Brandsegg-Nygård look like they will become good NHL players. But to get to where the Red Wings want to go, they’ll need more star power alongside Raymond and Larkin up front. They surely will have to continue to look for that through the draft, but as they’ve seen, that process will not be quick.
So while Detroit is making changes, is there a young forward it can trade for whose contributions can come sooner? Trevor Zegras in Anaheim or Dylan Cozens in Buffalo would fit the bill as young players who have already proven they can hit 60-point offense in the NHL, but have seen their production dip of late.
Such a trade could be costly, but you can’t find players as young as those two in free agency, which is largely limited to players aged 27 and older. And frankly, Detroit’s approach in that market is another area Yzerman may need to revisit in the coming months after the way its forays have played out lately.
After firing the team’s last coach, Jeff Blashill, in 2022, Yzerman sought to give Lalonde a better roster to work with and brought in proven players such as Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot and David Perron. Then, in 2023, he added to that with J.T. Compher, Justin Holl and Shayne Gostisbehere, and trades for DeBrincat and Jeff Petry. This summer, he signed Vladimir Tarasenko and Erik Gustafsson to multi-year deals.
There were a few success stories in that mix, but the majority of those deals have not aged well and Yzerman may now have to try and get out from one (or more). Some of that is simply the risk of operating in free agency, but the low success rate speaks to a potential need for additional voices in the player personnel and pro scouting departments, too. The Red Wings never formally replaced Mark Howe as director of pro scouting when he retired, for example.
Those kind of changes and hirings may take longer, and be lower-profile, than firing a coach. But make no mistake, the roster in Detroit — and the way it was assembled — are the biggest reasons the Red Wings are where they are today.
Yzerman stepped into an exceedingly difficult situation five and a half years ago. Success — let alone fast success — was never a given, no matter how much hope his arrival brought. But he’s now fired two coaches without a playoff appearance, and inevitably that puts him even more in the spotlight as general manager. His next moves are going to be more scrutinized than any to this point.
The decision to move on from Lalonde had begun to feel inevitable, and doing it in-season as opposed to waiting until the summer could give Yzerman’s team a short-term boost. That seems to be the calculation.
But if the Red Wings are serious about fixing their issues in a long-term sense, they can’t stop here. Just as on the first day of Yzerman’s tenure, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
(Top photo of Steve Yzerman: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)
