Bultman: Replacing Derek Lalonde can’t be the Red Wings’ only change

DETROIT – Steve Yzerman had to do something.

After watching his team get blown off home ice in the Red Wings’ final game before the Christmas break on Monday night, falling into the NHL’s bottom five after 34 games, it was clear that Detroit’s patience was wearing thin. And on Thursday, Yzerman acted accordingly, firing the team’s third-year head coach Derek Lalonde and associate coach Bob Boughner, replacing them with veteran bench boss Todd McLellan and assistant coach Trent Yawney.

It was a move many fans had been calling for throughout the team’s disappointing 2024-25 season, as the Red Wings slipped from a playoff tiebreaker last season to one of the league’s worst teams in a matter of months. They were underwhelming offensively, porous on the penalty kill and on too many nights, just plain flat.

All of these are things that McLellan, who has more than 1,100 NHL head coaching experiences, will be tasked with fixing — starting Friday with a home game against the Toronto Maple Leafs.

But while Yzerman, the team’s general manager since 2019, has made that change, it may not be his last. Not if McLellan is to have a serious chance to succeed where Lalonde could not.

Because while Lalonde was hardly a perfect coach, the way the Red Wings have fallen this season is about much more than coaching.

Lalonde is a sharp hockey mind, but was at least publicly a relatively mild communicator. It is therefore entirely possible that a new voice and a new message could light more fire under the Red Wings players.

But if a room full of professional athletes really needs someone else to light their fire for them, that speaks to a much bigger problem. Especially for a team that has made a point of bringing in veteran leadership over the past three offseasons — and handed out some onerous contracts in the name of doing so.

So while trading Lalonde for McLellan could very well give Detroit a spark, as it often does with coaching changes, at the same time, Yzerman will have to take a long, hard look at his roster and perhaps make a change or two there when the NHL’s trade moratorium lifts Friday.

As close as the Red Wings came to the playoffs last season, the result now looks more like a mirage year than a building block season. And while Detroit’s farm system still has a few key pieces working their way up the pipeline, glaring long-term questions remain.

The biggest ones are ahead. Detroit has long built around top-line Dylan Larkin, but increasingly the hectic pace of the rebuild looks like it will mean Larkin, 28, will be in his 30s by the time the team is in serious contention. It’s not the end of the world—Yzerman didn’t win his first Stanley Cup until he was 32, and Larkin should still be a highly effective player for years to come—but it does mean the team will need a sturdy core of younger players around him .

Dylan Larkin is a very effective player, but he can’t carry the Red Wings on his own. (Nic Antaya/Getty Images)

Detroit has one such young star, Lucas Raymond, who is tracking toward a potential 80-point season this year at age 22, and another good scoring winger in Alex DeBrincat. From there, however, there is so much to see. Recent first-round picks Marco Kasper and Nate Danielson look like playoff-style two-way centers that will really help the Red Wings, but both have some questions about what their ultimate NHL scoring productivity will be. The team’s 2024 first-round pick, Michael Brandsegg-Nygård, has a big shot in a heavy body, but he’s only 19 and has gotten off to a slower-than-hoped offensive start in the SHL.

All of Kasper, Danielson and Brandsegg-Nygård seem to be good NHL players. But to get to where the Red Wings want to go, they need more star power along with Raymond and Larkin up front. They’ll certainly have to continue to look for it throughout the draft, but as they’ve seen, that process won’t be quick.

So while Detroit makes changes, is there a young forward it could trade for whose contributions could come earlier? Trevor Zegras in Anaheim or Dylan Cozens in Buffalo would fit the bill as young players who have already proven they can hit 60-point offense in the NHL but have seen their production drop off lately.

Such a trade can be expensive, but you don’t find players as young as those two in free agency, which is largely limited to players 27 and older. And frankly, Detroit’s approach in that market is another area Yzerman may have to revisit in the coming months after the way its forays have played out of late.

After firing the team’s last coach, Jeff Blashill, in 2022, Yzerman tried to give Lalonde a better roster to work with, bringing in proven players like Andrew Copp, Ben Chiarot and David Perron. Then, in 2023, he added to it with JT Compher, Justin Holl and Shayne Gostisbehere and traded for DeBrincat and Jeff Petry. This summer he signed Vladimir Tarasenko and Erik Gustafsson to multi-year deals.

There were a few success stories in that mix, but the majority of those deals haven’t aged well, and Yzerman may now have to try to get out of one (or more). Some of that is simply the risk of operating in free agency, but the low success rate speaks to a potential need for additional voices in the player personnel and pro-scouting departments. The Red Wings never formally replaced Mark Howe as director of pro scouting when he retired, for example.

Those kinds of changes and hires can take longer and be lower profile than firing a coach. But make no mistake, the roster in Detroit — and the way it was assembled — are the biggest reasons the Red Wings are where they are today.

Yzerman stepped into an extremely difficult situation five and a half years ago. Success – let alone quick success – was never a given, no matter how much hope his arrival brought. But he’s now fired two coaches without a playoff appearance, and that inevitably puts him even more under the spotlight as a general manager. His next move will be more scrutinized than anyone else’s to this point.

The decision to move on from Lalonde was starting to feel inevitable, and doing so in-season as opposed to waiting until the summer could give Yzerman’s team a short-term boost. That seems to be the math.

But if the Red Wings are serious about fixing their issues long term, they can’t stop here. As on the first day of Yzerman’s tenure, there is still much work to be done.

(Top photo by Steve Yzerman: Dave Sandford / NHLI via Getty Images)