Red Wings Summertime Bits and Bobs
What do the recent acquisitions tell us about where the franchise is headed?
While Steve Yzerman and Dylan Larkin engage in a game of chicken regarding the former Captain’s destination, Detroit made two free agency signings and one trade this month. Let’s take a look at those moves and try to suss out what they tell us about this upcoming season.
The Dylan Larkin Sitch
At the end of Steve Yzerman and Kris Draper’s press conference to discuss their latest draft picks, the general manager took a moment to provide an overview of what’s going on with Larkin. Yzerman confirmed that Larkin requested a trade and then provided a list of teams where he would waive his no trade clause. Yzerman basically said he will act in the best interest of the Red Wings organization and he could not guarantee he would be able to honor Larkin’s request.
What that statement told us is Yzerman isn’t going to approve a deal he finds unacceptable just to move Larkin. Beat reporter Helene St James has suggested Yzerman is seeking a scoring line center and a scoring line winger in return for Larkin and the 5 years remaining on his contract, which indicates Yzerman isn’t going to settle for futures where there will be much less certainty regarding what you ultimately received. With futures you would also have to wait for those players to develop, and no one associated with the organization has much patience following the previous 10 seasons.
Some of us who follow the team closely have suggested next season could be a good time to do a minor retool in an effort to get the best draft pick available in the hopes of addressing the team’s obvious need for a first line center, however Yzerman’s comments indicate he doesn’t share that view.
Looking at the recent Brady Tkachuk trade and the massive offer sheet Leo Carlsson just signed — which would result in Anaheim getting four first-round draft picks — there’s plenty of reason for Yzerman to hold out for the best deal.
With this being the case, the general manager has every reason to believe he can get a suitable deal if he’s patient. Given he doesn’t seem keen to take a step back, he’s going to leverage Larkin’s contract to bolster his current team, not tear it down.
Team Additions
The biggest addition thus far has been Viktor Arvidsson, who was signed for 2 years. Arvidsson was a nice pickup, particularly if Patrick Kane has decided his time in Detroit is over. While Steve Yzerman has made comments indicating he would like to bring Kane back for another season, there has been plenty of reporting to indicate Kane is considering his options, with his hometown Sabres being suggested as his next stop.
Regardless of what happens with Kane, Arvidsson is a quality addition. He finished last season just outside the top 10 among left wings in even strength goals. Arvidsson has been a consistent 20 goal scorer at even strength for Nashville and Boston, so there’s a decent chance he’ll be a solid addition to a team that was 29th in the league in 5v5 goal scoring. It wouldn’t shock me if he gets the first crack at the 1LW spot at the start of the season.
Last season in Boston, Arvidsson played most frequently with Casey Mittelstadt and Pavel Zacha, with Fraser Minten being a regular linemate, so he played up and down the lineup. He didn’t play much with David Pasternak, which may be an assumption since last season was a bounce back year for him after modest goal totals in Los Angeles and Edmonton. Evolving Hockey estimates he potted 12.9 goals above replacement for the Bruins, which matches a career high he last generated during the 2016-17 season for Nashville.
For Arvidsson’s career to date, Evolving Hockey estimates he’s scored 66.7 goals above replacement, providing a lot of data to suggest he’s not going to be called a ‘jersey’ by Todd McLellan.
While I’ve been highly critical of Detroit’s pro scouts, this was a great acquisition for the organization.
Detroit also made a trade, acquiring Keegan Kolesar from the Golden Knights. Kolesar is a big body who is feisty, delivering north of 230 hits every season since he fully entered the league as a 24 year old. While this won’t address the complete lack of depth scoring that has plagued the team, the hope with Kolesar is he’ll add some bite to the lineup and be a good culture / vibes guy.
Kolesar isn’t a big time scrapper, but he will dance: Hockey Fights has him averaging 6 fights per season. The hope is he’ll give the team some backbone with his play in the corners and in front of the net, in addition to standing up for his teammates.
That’s the role he’s played in Vegas:
Kolesar has led the team in hits in each of the last two seasons, and ranks third in the NHL this year with 33 hits. He has already fought twice following hits on teammates he didn’t like. The first came on Oct. 12, when San Jose Sharks defenseman Kyle Burroughs leveled Vegas’ Michael Amadio and Kolesar quickly jumped to his defense.
“It’s huge when you know you can just go out there and play, and know guys have your back,” Amadio said.
Only two days later, Anaheim Ducks forward Sam Carrick hit Brayden McNabb up high and Kolesar dropped the gloves again.
“It takes a special person and character to do that job,” McNabb said of Kolesar. “It’s a tough job and he does a tremendous job of it.
Kolesar is another guy who will never be called a ‘jersey’, meaning his presence on the ice will be felt by the opponent. While I was interested in signing Eeli Tolvanen, a player who combines high hit totals with better offensive production, Keegan routinely finishes the season as one of the top hit generators in the league.
Finally, Detroit signed Daniil Tarasov, who looks to be John Gibson’s backup. Both Tarasov and Gibson are signed through this upcoming season, with Michal Postava and Trey Augustine likely ticketed to Grand Rapids to share the net.
Tarasov played 33 games for the Panthers last season, and while his save percentage and goals against average are fairly pedestrian, he’ll be fine in a backup role that has him essentially replace Cam Talbot, who may very well be headed to retirement.
The Russian goalie has NHL size at 6’5” and at 27 years old should be capable of playing as many games as needed. Last season was a career high for him in games played, so he should ensure Gibson’s workload remains reasonable. That wasn’t the case late in the campaign with Talbot struggling to provide the team with quality starts.
Last season, Talbot was credited with .480 quality starts, good for 44th in the league among goaltenders with at least 20 games played. Tarasov, conversely, was ranked 30th with .548 quality starts. So Tarasov should be an upgrade.
The RFA Offer Sheet
There’s a part of the collective bargaining agreement that almost never gets utilized: the ability for any team in the league to sign a player who is a restricted free agent to an offer sheet. I think the primary reason it’s considered verboten is nearly every general manager in the league tends to view that player as being ‘under contract’, hence the fact they rarely attempt to sign another club’s restricted free agent. It likely comes down to a bit of wishful thinking, something along the lines of ‘I won’t sign your RFAs, so you do the same with mine’.
Another part of the decision making process is the fact you will need to hand over some of your best draft capital to the opposing team if you successfully sign an RFA and the offer sheet doesn’t get matched; make the offer too low, though, and the team who currently holds the players’ rights will match the offer.
So while it’s a solution, it’s a solution fraught with many challenges.
All that logic went out the window last week when the Philadelphia Flyers signed Leo Carlsson to a 5 year, $90 million offer sheet. The offer sheet was structured in a way to make it less likely Anaheim would match. The contract also denied the Ducks a single day of unrestricted free agency for Carlsson, as it walks him right to the start of his unrestricted free agency status, where he will be free to sign with any team he likes when he hits 26 years of age.
The value of Carlsson as a high quality player under team control just got flipped on its head.
While the Ducks could very well match, it will put them in a financial bind, as they still have to build out their defense and sign Cutter Guathier to a new deal. In essence, matching the offer sheet means their window just got opened up for them, as Carlsson will hit free agency in 5 years.
To make matters worse, young defenseman Pavel Mintyukov received an offer sheet as well, and used the threat of signing it to get the Ducks to succumb to the pressure by inking ‘Minty’ to a new 5 year, $7.2 million AAV contract.
Their cap space is quickly getting eaten up.
The interest in signing players like Carlsson to offer sheets is due in part to the sudden rise in the salary cap, although St Louis took advantage of the flat cap in 2024 when they signed Philip Broberg and Dylan Hollaway to offer sheets the Oilers could not match due to salary cap constraints.
Then there’s another angle for teams like Philadelphia and Detroit, two franchises who have been denied high quality centers through the NHL draft. The Red Wings have followed traditional means for building out the roster but have yet to draft a high quality scoring line center since Pavel Datsyuk in 1998 and Henrik Zetterberg in 1999. Dylan Larkin is the closest the organization has come to filling that role, and he was drafted back in 2014 and has likely played his last game for the club.
In cases like this, it would be understandable to throw your hands up and decide that extending an offer sheet to one of the best young players in the league is your only way to address a need when ‘acceptable’ methods have failed your organization. If clubs like Anaheim, San Jose, New Jersey, Chicago and Toronto get all the lottery luck, it stands to reason that offer sheets can help to spread the wealth to other organizations like the Red Wings who typically move down the draft lottery, not up.
#SorryNotSorry
So while I would like to see Detroit do something along the lines of what the Flyers did in signing Carlsson to an offer sheet, I understand Steve Yzerman is unlikely to ever be that bold; he’s more likely to follow the Carolina Hurricanes path to success where you build around two good but not elite scoring line centers.
So with that being the case, we will have to wait and see how the Dylan Larkin trade eventually plays out. Patience, however, is something this fan base doesn’t have much of right now.