Before he took a single question at his end-of-season press conference, Steve Yzerman brought up two teams who succeeded this season where the Red Wings failed. The Canadiens and the Blues, he said, were sitting outside the playoffs when they stood pat at the trade deadline.
"Neither team did anything. They both ended up making the playoffs and are playing very well at this time, led by their best players," Yzerman said Tuesday.
It felt like a direct response to Dylan Larkin's comments a couple weeks ago when the Red Wings captain lamented the fact that the front office -- that is, Yzerman -- didn't add any significant pieces at the deadline before the Wings collapsed in March for the third year in a row. And while Yzerman downplayed the notion that he was sending Larkin a message, he made it clear that the Red Wings need more from their top players to take the next step and snap a franchise-worst nine-year playoff drought.
"Obviously, I’ve addressed Dylan’s comments directly with Dylan and I will not elaborate on that in this room," Yzerman said. "If Dylan wants to share what I had to say with him, he’s more than welcome to."
Larkin faded down the stretch as he played through an injury he suffered at the 4 Nations Face-Off. So did Lucas Raymond, and the Red Wings faded with them. To Yzerman's point, Nick Suzuki and Robert Thomas, the respective No. 1 centers for the Canadiens and Blues, elevated their games and lifted their teams into the playoffs.
Suzuki had 37 points in 26 games after the 4 Nations; Montreal went 15-5-6 and leapfrogged Detroit in the standings. Thomas had 40 points in 26 games; St. Louis went 19-4-3. Larkin had 20 points in 27 games. The Red Wings went 11-13-3 and lost crucial games to both the Blues and the Canadiens in the final two weeks of the season.
At his own season wrap-up, Larkin said that when the Red Wings "didn't do anything" at the deadline other than to acquire a backup goalie in Petr Mrazek and bottom-six forward in Craig Smith, "we didn’t gain any momentum from the trade deadline and guys were kind of down about it."
"It'd be nice to add something and bring a little bit of a spark on the ice and maybe a morale boost as well," he said.
Yzerman said Tuesday that while he sensed "frustration and disappointment" on the part of the players who have been here the past couple seasons -- "and that's to be expected" -- he didn't get any feedback in exit interviews on "morale taking a dip" at the deadline.
"And again, I will say, I’m counting on our best players, our leaders, to give us a bit of a morale boost," Yzerman said. "That’s what they’re paid for and that’s the expectation for them."
Yzerman said later that leadership in the locker room room doesn't fall entirely on Larkin's shoulders simply because he wears the C. He acknowledged that the Wings "need more" of it from core players like Raymond and Moritz Seider and that "everybody just has to be their own personality." Larkin, Seider and Raymond are Detroits' three highest-paid players, all making over $8 million per year.
"So yeah, I’m counting on more leadership," Yzerman said. "Dylan Larkin can use more leadership, much like myself as a player. Look at all those guys I played with. Just because you wear the C or you don’t wear the C doesn’t mean you’re not a leader on the team."
For a few years now, the Red Wings have been a fragile team. They tend to drown when the tide turns against them. Or, as Todd McLellan put it Tuesday, "it doesn’t take much for us to start taking on water. And when that happens, it takes a long time for us to get out of it." It didn't take long for that to register with McLellan, who watched the Red Wings win seven straight twice in his first 20 games behind the bench, then lose six straight at one of the most critical junctures of the season.
"You could see that we could sustain the good for a number of games and number of days, and find different ways to win when it was going well. When it didn’t go well, we scrambled and struggled to get ourselves breathing again," said McLellan. "It happened over days, within games, within periods, within segments of games. I could list a number of times, a number of games where that happened and we couldn’t recover.
"So, the mental fortitude, the resiliency has to come from us. We have to drive it. And for me, you’ll probably hear me talk about game management until you’re sick of it. We can’t just put our skates on and play the game. We have to manage our way through the game, and playoff teams are doing that right now."
As for the Red Wings' inactivity at the trade deadline, Yzerman doesn't regret it. He reiterated that the prices for players who could have given them a boost were too high for a team that's not yet ready to prioritize the present over the future.
"I sit here today and I feel very comfortable — I can’t say I’m happy or that I liked it — but I’m comfortable with the fact that we weren’t able to make a trade that involved our top prospects, our first-round picks, any of those highly-valuable assets," Yzerman said. "We’re prepared to do that, and as shown, we did trade a first-round draft pick recently for Alex DeBrincat. I feel very good about that move. We’ve got an excellent player on our team.
"We’re prepared to use our draft picks, our prospects, we’re prepared to use any player, for that matter, in a trade that makes us better and helps us in our timeline to ultimately be a team that can not only make the playoffs but compete for a Stanley Cup."