On April 19, 2019, the Detroit Red Wings hired Steve Yzerman as their general manager (GM).
Fans were familiar with Yzerman from his days as a player and the team’s captain, but Tampa Bay is where he cut his chops as a manager. Now that his tenure in Detroit has reached five years, we can start to draw some conclusions about who he is as a manager and how he approaches the job.
1. Yzerman Sticks to His Plan
Since his first day on the job, Yzerman has insisted that the “Yzerplan” would take time. Whenever an organization is committed to building through the draft, that requires a high level of patience as prospects almost always take years to develop after they are drafted. To that point, only two Yzerman picks have become Red Wings since he took over GM duties: Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond.
Even as recently as the 2023-24 season, Yzerman has slow-played the Red Wings’ development. While he hasn’t been shy about adding talent in free agency, he has rarely spent future assets to improve his team’s standing. Even though the Red Wings were in the thick of a playoff push at the 2024 Trade Deadline, he opted to mostly stay put, showing belief in the existing group’s ability to end the organization’s playoff drought. Detroit fell one point short of making the playoffs, and it’s fair to wonder if things would have gone differently if Yzerman was willing to add to his team at the deadline.
Related: Yzerman’s Best Trades as Red Wings GM
Doing so would have gone against everything Yzerman has said he aimed to do, however. He has long said that the goal isn’t to make the playoffs in any specific year or season. Instead, the goal is to assemble a “nucleus” of players that will form the backbone of a long-term championship contender. His plan isn’t to add veterans like Patrick Kane and Vladimir Tarasenko and hope they propel the team into the playoffs; his plan is for those veterans to compliment a roster led by young stars like Seider and Raymond. When the Red Wings do cross the threshold and become perennial playoff contenders, it will be because of the maturation and development of Yzerman’s draft choices, not the players he was able to lure to Detroit through trades or free agency.
2. Yzerman Overripens His Prospects
Yzerman may have replaced Ken Holland as GM back in 2019, but some might have forgotten that Holland was Yzerman’s mentor in the latter’s early days as an executive in the NHL. Under Holland’s tutelage, Yzerman learned how to negotiate contracts, work out trades with his collogues across the league, and how to manage a front office. But there is perhaps no clearer sign that Holland was Yzerman’s mentor than how the latter manages the prospects he drafts.
Long-term Red Wings fans are likely familiar with the term “overripe” when it comes to prospects. That term refers to prospects that are ready for the NHL and have been for a while. It has long been Holland’s philosophy that organizations should not only refrain from forcing their youngest players to the NHL, but they should also wait until those prospects are clearly ahead of their peers playing in the AHL and other leagues across the world. From what we’ve seen of Yzerman to this point in his tenure, he shares a similar outlook on how to develop and manage prospects.
As previously mentioned, Seider (2019, sixth overall) and Raymond (2020, fourth overall) are the only Yzerman draft picks that have become full-time Red Wings to this point in Yzerman’s tenure. Both of them made their debuts in the 2021-22 season, and Yzerman has been pretty vocal about how he originally expected Raymond to at least start that season in the AHL. Since that season, however, the Red Wings have not had a single rookie crack the opening night roster – excluding Elmer Söderblom, who made the opening night roster of the 2022-23 season before he was reassigned to the AHL a month into the season.
Yzerman’s patience with the Red Wings’ prospects came to a head during the 2023-24 season when two players, Jonatan Berggren and Simon Edvinsson, were left off the NHL roster for most of the season despite both looking NHL-ready the prior season. Berggren, a second round pick in Holland’s last draft with the Red Wings, played in 67 games with the Red Wings in 2022-23 and had spurts where he was Detroit’s most creative player on the ice. Edvinsson, the Red Wings’ top pick in the 2021 draft, looked ready to go after a nine-game audition late in the 2022-23 season, but was instead tasked with another season atop the Grand Rapids Griffins’ defensive depth chart in the AHL.
This fact is something to keep in mind, especially with the growing expectation that a number of prospects could push for a role in Detroit this season. Yzerman has made it clear that he doesn’t just want his prospects to play in the NHL, he wants them to thrive and play meaningful minutes when they arrive. He may not use the term “overripe”, but it is clear that the concept is something Holland passed on to Yzerman.
3. Yzerman Keeps His Cards Close to His Chest
This one is pretty self-explanatory. To be a GM in any sport is to be in an ongoing game of poker with all of their colleagues, the agents that represent all of their players, and even the media. Like any good poker player will tell you, it rarely benefits you to reveal your hand and/or your intentions.
We’ve seen many examples of Yzerman playing coy and refusing to directly answer a question. There have even been instances where he pauses mid-answer and outright says, “I’m trying to answer your question without actually answer it.” The term “negotiating through the media” can be observed throughout the league, but Yzerman often seems content to keep things in house, often to the detriment of fans and media that want a better idea of what’s going on behind the scenes.
There is also the fact that the Red Wings have generally been leak-proof since Yzerman returned to Detroit. Any tidbit of information that insiders share often comes with the disclaimer to “take it with a grain of salt”, and we saw a good example of that this offseason when multiple outlets reported the Red Wings were close to acquiring New York Rangers defenseman Jacob Trouba during or shortly after the 2024 draft. As we know now, Trouba is still a Ranger, the situation was/is a lot more complicated than what was initially reported and there is some debate about how close a deal actually was. Another clear example of the Red Wings being leak-proof was the Seattle Expansion Draft as Detroit was the last team to have their expansion casualty leaked out ahead of the actual event.
4. Yzerman Prioritizes Compete & Two-Way Ability in Prospects
If you take an in-depth look at the Red Wings’ prospect pool, you’re going to find a wide variety of players with various levels of skill and upside. However, there are a couple traits that have seemingly become synonymous with the Red Wings and their draft strategy: compete and two-way ability.
Related: Red Wings Top 25 Prospects: Post-2024 NHL Draft
This is especially true when comparing the organization’s top picks in each draft from 2022 to 2024. Marco Kasper (2022), Nate Danielson (2023), and Michael Brandsegg-Nygård (2024) each have traits that differentiate them from one another, but each of their scouting reports remark on their ability to positively impact the game at both ends of the ice as well as the fact that none of them take a shift off. Like Dylan Larkin, the captain of the Red Wings, these players embody the ideals of Detroit: hard work, grit, and the willingness to get back up after getting knocked down.
Yzerman and his amateur scouting team don’t just prioritize these traits in the first round. Players like Redmond Savage, Jesse Kiiskinen, and Carter Mazur are all hard-working players that don’t play a glamourous game, but they are hard to play against and make their teams hard to play against in turn. The commitment to targeting these types of players should eventually result in a Red Wings team that is as hard to play against as it is fun to watch and easy to cheer for.
5. Yzerman Is Unpredictable
One thing that makes Yzerman such an interesting GM to cover is that he doesn’t always do things by the book. Some GMs and teams become fairly predictable for one reason or another, but the Red Wings always seem to be ready to surprise people with Yzerman in charge.
Just within the last couple of years, we’ve seen a few instances where the Red Wings did something that surprised folks from around the league. Perhaps the most famous instance of this was when Yzerman traded up in the 2021 draft, moving picks 23, 48 and 138 to the Dallas Stars in exchange for pick 15, to select goalie Sebastian Cossa. While most pundits expected the Red Wings to pick a goalie in the first round of that draft, the popular pick was Swedish goaltender Jesper Wallstedt, especially considering Detroit’s pattern of prioritizing prospects from the European leagues. They picked Cossa instead, and people still debate to this day about whether that was the right move.
But the draft floor isn’t the only place Yzerman has proven to be a little unconventional. In an industry where the almighty dollar often dictates who plays, who stays and who goes, there have been a few instances where the Red Wings’ GM has showed that his roster construction won’t be swayed by the terms of a player’s contract.
A few days into Jan. 2023, the Red Wings turned heads when they announced they had placed forward Jakub Vrana on waivers. The scoring winger had just returned from the player assistance program and was in the second year of a three-year contract in which he made an annual salary of $5.25 million. Other organizations might have refused to pay a player that kind of money to play in the American Hockey League (AHL), but once Yzerman decides a player is no longer a fit, he usually takes swift action to address the situation.
We saw Yzerman take similar action earlier that season when he waived goalie Alex Nedeljkovic. Nedeljkovic was in the final year of a two-year deal that paid him $3 million annually, but his struggle to find any sort of consistency at the NHL level ultimately landed him in the AHL for the majority of the 2022-23 season.
Whether it’s going off the board during the draft, waiving an unexpected player, or even his willingness to throw money around in free agency despite the Red Wings’ standing in the league, we have learned that trying to predict what Yzerman is going to do is a fool’s errand more often than not.
More to Learn?
With Detroit finishing last season just outside of the playoffs, we are nearing the end of the “build” phase of Yzerman’s plan to rebuild the Red Wings. Every maneuver and decision he has made to this point has been in the interest of shaping the team’s future, and while every good GM always has an eye on the future, the focus is slowly shifting towards the present and ending what is now an eight-year playoff drought.
With that adjustment comes a different approach to team-building and, perhaps, a different approach to handling the organization’s assets. The Tampa Bay Lightning were a playoff contender for the majority of his tenure as their GM, so we have some history to go off of, but how has the experience Yzerman has gained since then shaped his outlook on building a contender? How many of his current habits are a product of the rebuild and how many are simply how he does business?
Hockeytown learned a lot about Yzerman during his time as “The Captain”, but it feels like we’re just starting to get familiar with Yzerman “The GM”. How he manages the next few seasons – and what we learn about him along the way – will go a long way towards determining how we look back on his tenure years from now.
