Steve Yzerman further explains Deadline moves

Following a brief flirtation with a Wild Card postseason spot, the Detroit Red Wings have fallen into a rut that's seen them go winless in their last six games. And as such, GM Steve Yzerman stuck to what he said was his plan and unloaded a number of team assets at last week's NHL Trade Deadline. Detroit parted ways with scrappy forward Tyler Bertuzzi and offensive-minded defenseman Filip Hronek, while also dealing Oskar Sundqvist to the Minnesota Wild and unloading Jakub Vrana to the St. Louis Blues; both players fetched draft picks in return. 

Yzerman made an appearance on "The Stoney and Jansen" show on 97.1 The Ticket FM earlier this morning, and he gave further insight into the reasoning behind his moves while acknowledging the competition in the Atlantic Division is further ahead in their respective rebuilding stages. . 

"I look at Montreal, ourselves, Buffalo and Ottawa, we’re all rebuilding, not so much Buffalo and Ottawa now, but Montreal and ourselves, still acquiring assets, draft choices, prospects potentially to try and build," Yzerman said. "(Buffalo and Ottawa) have been doing it a little bit longer than us, they’ve done a very good job. I’m not making any excuses, we need to be better, but we’re not there yet. I look at their nucleuses of young players and I look at what they have coming, they’re just ahead of us.

"So we gotta stick with it and we have to draft well. We have to get lucky on some occasions, maybe at some point here, maybe this year, get lucky in the lottery and that’ll kind of speed it up a little bit."

To say that Detroit has been unlucky when it comes to the NHL Draft Lottery would be an understatement. They fell to the 4th pick in the 2020 Draft despite owning by far the League's worst record that season; they've also not been able to draft any higher than 6th overall after their postseason streak ended in 2017. 

"But that’s the way it goes," said Yzerman. "I don’t have control over what happens with the draft lottery. We haven’t had much luck as an organization there, and that’s OK. We still have to find players where we’re picking, and we expect to and should expect to find players, it just takes a little longer."

Red Wings fans may be a bit confused as to the direction of the team, considering the money that was spent to bring in free agents like Andrew Copp, David Perron, and Ben Chiarot; Detroit also traded for goaltender Ville Husso and locked him up to a three year contract.

"I wanted to bring in players that were good people and good players to be partners for Moritz Seider, to help our team," Yzerman said of the offseason additions. "For us to get one of those high, high picks, we’re not just trading Bertuzzi. We’re trading Larkin, we’re trading everybody to get one of those picks. You look at the teams that are at the bottom and what they did to get there, there’s like five of them that are trying to get to the bottom. For us to do it, it wasn’t going to happen." 

"The moves I made last year, really, it was like, I don’t want to get beat 10-0 every night, OK? We’re building, we’re building, we’re going to be patient. ... I just felt like where we’re at, in free agency last year, we need to get some players that are going to help our (younger) players evolve. I don’t want to be terrible forever. What happens? Your good players start to go backwards and regress, and I didn’t want that for our guys."