It is Christmas 2025 and the Detroit Red Wings are in a playoff spot. More impressively, they sit in the top-10 in leaguewide standings and have a higher than 60 percent chance of making the playoffs. Things are looking good in Detroit as the Red Wings attempt to end their nearly decade-long playoff drought.
American Thanksgiving is often cited as the holiday you want to be in a playoff position by. With Christmas being right before the halfway mark of the season, however, you can argue December 25th is a better date to keep an eye on.
The Red Wings have been in a playoff spot on Thanksgiving in prior seasons but faded away down the stretch. There are reasons to believe their standing at Christmas this year is not a mirage and they will continue to look like a playoff team.
Seider Is a Star
No team can hope to compete in the playoffs without at least one elite defenseman on their roster. To this point in his career, Moritz Seider has flashed the potential to be that caliber of defenseman. Whether it was growing pains, bad coaching or a lack of support throughout the roster, he couldn’t do it on a consistent basis, and that kept the elite tier just out of reach for the German defender.
Related: Red Wings’ Seider Taking Steps to Superstardom
This season has been an explosion of sorts for Seider. From a production and possession standpoint, he is on pace to have by far the best season of his career. The Red Wings heavily outshoot and outscore their opponents whenever he is on the ice, and he is on the ice anywhere from 40 to 50 percent of the game every night.
Simon Edvinsson has proven to be a capable partner for Seider on Detroit’s top pairing as the pair rank among the league’s best pairings in several categories. There are people inside and outside of Detroit’s media circle that are already building a Norris Trophy argument for Seider, and he would be the first Red Wing nominated for the award since Nicklas Lidstrom won the award back in 2011.
That the Red Wings have a defenseman that is in those early Norris conversations legitimizes their defense and, ultimately, their team.
Todd McLellan
Everywhere head coach Todd McLellan has gone, he has whipped his team into shape in a hurry. The Red Wings are his fourth stop as an NHL head coach, with previous stops in San Jose, Edmonton and Los Angeles.
When he joined the San Jose Sharks as a first-time head coach, he helped guide the Sharks to the Western Conference Final in both his second and third season. Across 540 regular season games with San Jose, his teams accumulated 311 wins and a points-percentage (P%) of .637. To this day, he is still the winningest and longest-tenured coach in Sharks history.
After his time with the Sharks concluded, McLellan was hired by the Edmonton Oilers ahead of Connor McDavid’s rookie season. While the Oilers missed the playoffs in his first season, they finished one win away from the Western Conference Final the following season. His tenure with the Oilers was the least-successful of his career, finishing with a 123-119-24 record, but that did not stop him from landing a job the very next season.
McLellan joined the Los Angeles Kings as that organization was hoping to put the finishing touches on their rebuild. The Kings won just 50 out of 126 games in his first two seasons, but he helped them begin their current run of four straight seasons in the playoffs.
Since joining the team in late-December of last year, McLellan and the Red Wings have 48 wins in 86 games and a P% or .599 – a rate that currently stands as the second-best of his career. He has built his career around helping teams reach the next level in their competitive window, so perhaps it’s no wonder the Red Wings look the best they have in almost a decade with him behind the bench.
Just as teams have to respect Seider and the team he plays for, teams have to respect McLellan and the team he coaches.
Potential for Growth
The phrase “this isn’t even my final form” will sound familiar to fans of the popular anime Dragon Ball Z, but it’s a phrase that applies to the Red Wings just as much as it applied to Frieza. The Red Wings may not have a literal transformation in store, but they are a young team with a ceiling that is dictated by the growth of their youngest players.
Seider’s superstardom is well-established at this point, but his partner Edvinsson is growing into a legitimate top pairing defenseman at the age of 22 (he turns 23 in February.) His continued growth is what gives Detroit’s top pairing the potential to be the best pairing in the NHL.
Lucas Raymond came into the league the same season as Seider and has already established himself as a top line winger in the NHL. Given his evident skill level and ability to produce in a variety of ways, there’s a solid argument to be made that he’s the best player on the roster – and that’s saying something because there’s stiff competition for that distinction this season.
Emmitt Finnie continues to develop after surprising the masses by making Detroit’s roster out of training camp. Axel Sandin Pellikka is asserting himself as a legitimate top four offensive defenseman despite not being old enough to buy alcohol in the United States. Nate Danielson and Marco Kasper have already shown strong two-way ability even if the offense isn’t coming at a high level quite yet.
That the Red Wings are where they are in the standings despite icing a roster with so many developing players is a testament to the talent on the roster presently as well as where that talent might take them in the future. After years of rebuilding and keeping an eye on the future, it finally feels like that future has arrived – but the good times are just getting started considering the wealth of talent still marinating in their system.
Putting Hockey Back in Hockeytown
Over the last few seasons, the Red Wings have struggled to capture their fans’ attention. “Jared Goff” chants echoed across Little Caesars Arena as the Detroit Lions established themselves as Super Bowl contenders. The Detroit Tigers’ young talent emerged and catapulted them into playoff contention over the last two seasons in Major League Baseball. Even the Detroit Pistons, who share Little Caesars Arena with the Red Wings, made the playoffs last season in the National Basketball Association and currently hold the top record in the Eastern Conference.
During the Red Wings’ run of excellence beginning in the 90s, Detroit was known as “hockeytown”, a hockey-crazed city whose team was the class of the NHL. They’ve fallen away from that over the last decade without making the playoffs, but whether it’s because of the organization’s centennial celebration or the fact “Hockeytown” is written across the center ice logo again, you can practically feel Detroit becoming a hockey town again.
If that doesn’t convince you to jump on the Red Wings bandwagon this season, then I recommend you head to Detroit and exerience it for yourself.