Red Wings: 5 Things We’ve Learned About Steve Yzerman

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.

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.