While we await the outcome of Chris Ilitch’s search for the new hockey ops group to lead his NHL franchise, we can skip ahead and consider a few options for how the 2026-27 season may play out.
The two big factors that loom large over the franchise are as follows:
The team has consistently been in the playoff picture, only to falter down the stretch, particularly during the month of March. For four straight seasons, the team has either been in playoff position as January 1st arrives, or close enough to claim a playoff spot, yet they have consistently been one of the worst performing teams in March, resulting in them missing the post-season.
Dylan Larkin, the team’s one proven scoring line center and current team captain, has requested a trade, which makes the franchise’s short-term window to compete for playoff position murkier. Marco Kasper, who had a breakout rookie campaign, stumbled badly last season, raising skepticism about whether he can hold down a second line center spot; Nate Danielson was underwhelming in his short stint in the NHL before missing a large chunk of the season due to injury. If Larkin is traded, it’s reasonable to believe the team will have zero scoring line centers on the roster.
Elliotte Friedman has reported that internal candidates for the GM spot — almost certainly Shawn Horcoff and likely Kris Draper — have been interviewed, and personally, I’d be shocked if either was given serious consideration. As I’ve stated previously, Steve Yzerman was the last, best chance to keep the Ken Holland management tree alive in Detroit, and with Yzerman being removed — again, this is what Friedman believes to have happened — that should signal a move in a new direction.
Friedman believes Ilitch is leaning heavily on the analytics people in the Detroit Tigers organization, and with this being the case, I think it makes sense to consider two paths as the interviews for the new hockey ops group continue.
Let’s consider both of them right now.
Path One: Compete From Day One
The Ilitch family has spent something like $750 million on player salaries over the 10-year playoff drought, so there’s a case to be made that Chris Ilitch wants to see this thing finally turn the corner. While the Ilitch family has never been known to be ‘hands on’ owners, Friedman suggested that the fact Detroit struggled to acquire premium hockey players played a key role in the decision to move Steve Yzerman out of the GM chair.
As you may recall, Keith Gave reported that the Canucks and Red Wings came to an agreement on trading Quinn Hughes to Detroit, however the all-world defender — who grew up and still lives in Michigan — rebuffed Yzerman’s attempt to get him to give a wink and a nod on signing a new contract that would keep him in Detroit beyond this upcoming season.
Of course Hughes still hasn’t extended with the Minnesota Wild, and Jim Rutherford reported a couple seasons ago that Hughes intends to play with his brothers who are currently part of the Devils organization, but it had to be a kick in the teeth for a family who turned their NHL club into one of the most desirable franchises in pro sports.
It stands to reason that Chris Ilitch may have thought ‘if Steve Yzerman can’t get this done, I need to go in a new direction’, and this just so happened at a point in time when analytics are finally starting to become a key part of the decision making process across the NHL. Ilitch’s Detroit Tigers team has been using this same methodology for four years, so you’d certainly expect Ilitch to be an owner who would embrace this new trend within the NHL.
Given what we’ve heard thus far, I think there’s a case to be made that Ilitch will try to Moneyball his roster this upcoming season. If Jeff Greenberg becomes your VP of hockey operations and someone like say Tyler Dellow becomes your GM, you assess players by their ability to tilt the ice and assemble a roster that improves Detroit’s Corsi and Fenwick stats.
Corsi and Fenwick are straightforward stats that tell you how well your team tilts the ice in your favor. The Red Wings have consistently been in the bottom half of the league with both metrics, so even when they start a season strongly, their inability to consistently drive play comes back to haunt them over a full 82 game season.
Dellow has worked for two organizations that have been great at dominating Corsi and Fenwick, first with New Jersey and most recently with Carolina, a team that has dominated both stats for nearly a decade while riding an 8 year playoff streak that culminated with them winning their second Stanley Cup this summer.
While the Canes looked to have made a colossal error in trading Martin Nečas for Mikko Rantanen, they pivoted and made what appeared to be a losing trade that landed Logan Stankoven and ultimately K’Andre Miller. Taylor Hall, who was acquired as part of the Rantanen trade, stuck around and played a key role alongside Stankoven and Miller in Carolina’s Cup-winning season.
Carolina has consistently been one of the most data-forward organizations in the league, and it would make sense to follow their lead. There’s really nothing you can criticize when it comes to how they’ve assembled their roster and — like Detroit — they’ve never had amazing lottery luck.
Will Detroit need to trade Dylan Larkin? Almost certainly, but as we saw with the Rantanen trade, a data-driven management team can acquire pieces that fit their needs. Carolina had one scoring line center in Sebastian Aho and relied heavily on Jordan Staal, who has been a 35 point center for the past 8 seasons. Acquiring Stankoven, moving him to center, and then splitting the 2C minutes with Staal while putting Stankoven in more offensively advantageous spots addressed the complete lack of a 2C.
Staal took most of the draws and provided the Selke caliber defense, while Stankoven led the squad in playoff goal scoring and was the top point producer among Carolina’s centers.
So with Chris Ilitch appearing to pivot towards a more data-informed decision making process, you can see how that would appeal to him from the standpoint of making Detroit competitive for a playoff spot sooner rather than later.
Path Two: The Tank
There’s a small but vocal minority among Red Wings fans who believe you need to tank until you get your Cale Makar, Matthew Schaefer or Macklin Celebrini; and to a certain extent you can understand their thinking. While Detroit has made the most of their few top 10 draft picks, all you need to do is look at the transformative role a prodigy can play in altering the fate of your franchise. There there’s the fact players across the league would immediately be interested in playing alongside such a prodigious talent, which would immediately make Detroit a more appealing destination.
This is enticing because it would fell two birds with one stone.
The prospect currently ranked as the #1 pick in the 2027 NHL draft is Landon DuPont, a Schaefer-esque rearguard who it just happens will play down the road in Ann Arbor this winter. While the Red Wings have one Norris-caliber defender in Moritz Seider, adding a player with DuPont’s eye-popping talent would be a good problem to have. The draft also has several centers currently rated within the top 10, but none is viewed as being a Celebrini-caliber talent.
While I understand the sentiment to tank for a generational talent, I personally find it hard to embrace this path. But we’ll play along and see how this would work if the new hockey ops team suggests a tank is the way to go and Chris Ilitch signs off on this path.
If you embraced this path, it would resolve the Dylan Larkin situation fairly quickly. Trading your disgruntled captain, your lone, proven scoring line center, would immediately result in your franchise taking on lots of water. The organizations where he would waive his trade protection would almost certainly give the Red Wings a return that would be heavy on futures such as draft picks and possibly one or two younger players.
While this would be catastrophic for Detroit, if your primary objective is to tank, this would be the single biggest move to improve your draft odds. Steve Yzerman was unwilling to do this, and I find it hard to believe a team using data analysis would trade Larkin for peanuts, but again, we’ll follow this thought experiment through.
Finally, you would likely need to trade Alex DeBrincat. While the Atlantic division looks to be the most loaded division in hockey, if you are fully committed to a tank, you would almost certainly need to move DeBrincat. This one would truly hurt, as the loss of Larkin, DeBrincat and Patrick Kane — who re-joined the Blackhawks this summer — would remove players who totaled 91 goals and 209 points last season, and that’s without even including James van Riemsdyk, who was Detroit’s fifth leading goal scorer.
Removing 4 of the top 5 goal scorers from last season’s team would likely ensure Detroit would be in the running for being the worst team in the league.
While on the one hand that would be ‘easy’ — you could move Larkin and DeBrincat with no issues whatsoever — the NHL Draft lottery would cloud Detroit’s draft position. As we’ve seen over the past few seasons, the team that finished dead last in the standings often doesn’t get the first overall pick. So even though the club could do everything in its power to finish dead last, it’s fate regarding whether or not the organization would be able to draft Landon DuPont would rest entirely on how the lottery’s ping pong balls fell during the draft lottery process.
There’s a real chance Detroit could fall to 3rd overall in the 2027 draft, denying them DuPont and likely the center deemed to be the best one available, who would almost certainly go #2 overall.
Vancouver had the worst record last season but picked third overall this summer. While this is an outlier, it can certainly happen: with the past 4 drafts, the worst team didn’t pick first overall three times.
Were they to finish dead last, the Red Wings would — at a bare minimum — receive the consolation of drafting a center who would almost certainly project to be a scoring line contributor, with Leo Carlsson going 2nd overall in 2023 and Michael Misa going 2nd overall in 2025, but in this scenario they would have missed out on the prodigy who would give them the best chance of turning the franchise from pretender to contender.
And if that’s the case, what happens next? Do you tank the following season, hoping for things to go differently?
For some fans, it’s easy to say yes; for a GM who has at most 5 years to turn things around, you aren’t setting 40% of your tenure on fire, hoping for a miracle.
For me, I view this as more of a plan B. As mentioned previously, the Ilitch family has spent somewhere in the neighborhood of three-quarters of a billion dollars on rosters that haven‘t played a second of playoff hockey. Any GM they hire isn’t going to embrace being the worst team in the league unless you find yourself in that spot as the trade deadline approaches.
We’ve seen this play out across the league with teams like Boston during the 2024-25 season, where they realized they weren’t competitive and traded away players to get a good draft pick to add to their core. For the Bruins, that turned into drafting James Hagens 7th overall.
Hell, the Toronto Maple Leafs missed the playoffs once in 9 years this past season and were rewarded with the #1 overall pick this summer.
Neither team had plans to tank at the start of the season, yet found themselves in a position where it was advantageous to trade away assets and thereby improve their lottery odds.
I think that’s how a tank would play out in Detroit this season. While Chris Ilitch and the new hockey ops team will almost certainly try to ice a competitive team, the Dylan Larkin situation combined with the state of the Atlantic division may result in the organization being an active seller in advance of the trade deadline, as they both reformulate the roster to one they think can become competitive, while trading away pieces to help improve their draft position next summer.
And if the lottery balls somehow finally fall in their favor, we’ll have reason to believe the franchise’s fortunes have changed for the better.