Years of success have finally caught up with the Detroit Red Wings.
For the first time in 25 seasons, the Red Wings won't partake in the playoffs, ending the third-longest run in league history. Tuesday's loss to the Carolina Hurricanes was the final nail in the coffin for a campaign long awaiting the inevitable.
Entering the season, general manager Ken Holland, the tenured architect of the Red Wings who has guided the team to four Stanley Cups, admitted his club was probably not a contender, but that a traditional teardown wasn't in the cards.
Rather, the Red Wings opted to rebuild on the fly, integrating young players like Anthony Mantha and Andreas Athanasiou around a strong supporting cast.
But the results weren't there this season, with the Red Wings poised to finish near the bottom of the East.
"I expected more, I expected we'd be in the thick of things," Holland told Ted Kulfan of The Detroit News.
The Red Wings can be seen as victims of their own success to an extent, as years of sustained winning have caught up with them at the draft table, having had little opportunity to select highly touted prospects in the first round over the last two-and-a-half decades due to consistently impressive finishes in the standings. This year, though, Detroit will make its earliest first-round pick since 1990.
"We've got 11 picks in 2017," Holland said. "We've got an extra second-round pick in 2018, which is looking like it should be a deeper draft than this year. I also think every draft, players come out of the second, third and fourth rounds. We've got more spins of the wheel."
The silver lining is that the youth movement is already well on its way. At this year's trade deadline, Detroit shipped out three veteran skaters in Brendan Smith, Steve Ott, and Thomas Vanek to return a collection of draft picks, the lifeblood of a salary-cap league.
More hope is on the way from the farm, which has produced Mantha and Athanasiou in recent seasons, and continues to foster talent like Martin Frk, Evgeny Svechnikov, and Tyler Bertuzzi.
"We've got some players in Grand Rapids that we think are not very far away," Holland said. "We've got to continue to draft, develop and push these players through the system, and hope that some of them become way better than where we pick them in the draft."
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