The NHL offseason always feels especially long when you follow a team that didn’t even make the playoffs. Sure the playoffs are still enjoyable, but it pales in comparison to watching your favorite team battle it out with some of the best teams in the league. It has already been 141 days since the Red Wings played their final game of the 2022-23 season, meaning we are significantly closer to next season than last with Detroit’s 2023-24 regular season opener taking place on October 12, 2023 against the New Jersey Devils. The offseason is finally coming to a close!
Now that we can see the upcoming season on the horizon, with the Traverse City prospect tournament kicking off in about two weeks and Detroit’s NHL training camp beginning the week after, I think it’s high time we start to dig into some approaching storylines. One of those storylines will be the milestones reached by Red Wings players next year, with a handful of guys approaching some meaningful career landmarks that I’d love to take a moment to highlight.
Related: The NHL’s Top 100 Prospects – Preseason Ranking
WIthout further ado, let’s take a look at seven Red Wings players who will be approaching major milestones in the 2023-24 season.
Dylan Larkin – 500 Points, 200 goals
Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin has been put in a weird situation throughout his career thus far, as the bridge between the last great Detroit team and the next one. That means that he played through some of the leanest years in franchise history so to see him hitting some significant milestones like this is quite impressive when you consider the quality of the team around him throughout most of his career.
Larkin needs just 64 points this season, a mark he has surpassed three separate times in his career so far, in order to hit 500 in his career. Once he reaches that mark, Larkin will be the 14th player in Red Wings franchise history to score 500 points with the team. Larkin is also close to scoring his 200th NHL goal, currently sitting at 179 with only 21 goals needed. He is also tracking to hit 600 career games played just a few weeks into the season, currently sitting at 584 games played in his NHL career.
Alex DeBrincat – 200 goals, 400 points, 500 GP
One of Detroit’s biggest additions in years is also set to hit some massive career milestones this year. Alex DeBrincat is a great bet to hit each of the above milestones, currently sitting at 187 goals and 373 points in 450 career games. Another healthy season from DeBrincat should mean he hits all of these goals early in the new year.
Another possible milestone for DeBrincat is hitting the 40-goal mark (something he has done twice in his career), which would make him the first Red Wings player to do so since Marian Hossa scored 40 in the 2008-09 season a full 15 years ago. While this might be a bit of a reach since he won’t be playing with a playmaker nearly on the level of prime Patrick Kane, I think it is at least realistic to expect DeBrincat to compete for the title of the team’s leading goal scorer next season.
David Perron – 300 goals
David Perron was an excellent veteran presence for Detroit last season both on and off the ice, with more experience than anyone else and a ton of leadership qualities. He quickly established himself as an important piece for Detroit as they hoped to continue improving and to start digging their way out of their rebuild. Perron has played for a wide variety of teams around the league throughout his 15 year career, and is set to break the 300 goal mark this upcoming season.
Related: Red Wings’ 5 Most Important Prospects
Perron currently sits at 293 career NHL goals, meaning he is just seven goals away from being the NHL’s next 300 goal scorer. He has scored at least seven goals in 14 of his 15 career seasons, with the only exception being a season where he only played 10 games (and scored five goals). Only 220 players in NHL history have ever scored at least 300 goals, and while that might sound like a pretty large group, it would make him only the sixth player from the 2007 Draft class to reach the milestone behind players like Patrick Kane, Jamie Benn and Max Pacioretty.
Michael Rasmussen – 100 points
Michael Rasmussen hasn’t followed the exact development path that Red Wings management had dreamt of when they took him ninth overall in the 2017 Draft, but over the last 18 months he has taken some serious steps forward and looks like he will be a meaningful contributor for the team going forward. Though he set a new career high for points with 29 last season, he was on pace to score 42 points if injuries had not shortened his season, which would have blown his previous mark of 27 out of the water.
Regardless, Rasmussen has taken steps both offensively and defensively to be a great middle-six piece for the team and looks like he is soon going to hit one of the first big milestones of his career, 100 total points. Big Raz currently sits at 86 career points which should make surpassing 100 a cakewalk for the Surrey-native.
Justin Holl – 100 points
Free agency acquisition Justin Holl is certainly not an offensive defenseman in the NHL, but he has spent enough time in a meaningful role for the Toronto Maple Leafs that he is also approaching 100 career points. 18 points stand between Holl and reaching the century mark, which is a pretty realistic number for him to reach as he has scored 18 points or more in each of his last four seasons. While his role may be a bit different in Detroit with both Moritz Seider and Jeff Petry above him on the depth chart for the right side of defense, I think this milestone is pretty likely to be reached this year.
Moritz Seider – 100 points, 200 GP, Top-20 in Franchise scoring amongst defensemen
Last, but certainly not least, we have Moritz Seider who is set to hit a few big milestones himself this year. Detroit’s number one defender is 36 games away from his 200th game which is insane because it feels like it was only yesterday that we were hyping him up as he entered his rookie season. He is also just eight points removed from reaching 100 career points (I give it until the end of October) which would make him the 31st defender to score at least 100 points while wearing the Winged Wheel.
Seider will hit those first two milestones no problem so I’d like to set a more challenging goal that I still think is quite reasonable. I think that Seider will enter the top-20 for franchise scoring amongst defenders, a number that would require him to hit 131 career points, surpassing Bill Quackenbush, the bearer of a hall-of-fame worthy name. He would need 39 points this year to reach the top-20 which feels pretty safe but I could see him pushing as high as 14th (currently held by Chris Chelios) on the list this season which would require him to score 61+ points.
Bonus: Derek Lalonde – 50 wins
I put this one in a bonus section all to itself because Red Wings head coach Derek Lalonde is not a player and because the milestone is rather pedestrian, but I still wanted to take a chance to celebrate the little victories. “Newsy” is a first time NHL head coach and showed some real promise last year as a communicator and motivator with his staff, players, and the media and I expect he will have a very long and well-deserved career in the NHL. 15 wins stand between Lalonde and 50 career wins which should take until late November give or take a couple of weeks.
Many Big Moments to Come This Year
There are many more milestones in reach for Red Wings players this season, but there’s a different milestone entirely that I think would take the cake as the biggest accomplishment by anyone on the team this year and that’s reaching the playoffs for the first time since the 2015-16 season.
Seven consecutive seasons have ended with the regular season and if this Red Wings team, with plenty of new depth pieces and the massive addition of DeBrincat, can push themselves over the top and become a playoff team for the first time in nearly a decade then that will be a much bigger success than any individual milestone to come this year.
