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Start Your Engines – Feb. 22 2022 – Vol. 75 Issue 11 – Matt Larkin
“WHOOOAAAAA,” BOOMED THE crowd at Vancouver’s Rogers Arena on June 21, 2019. It sounded like a reaction to the slam-dunk competition at NBA all-star weekend. But fans were actually responding to a jaw-dropping draft pick.
The 2019 NHL draft attendees were justified in their mania. Moritz Seider wasn’t exactly an obscure nobody playing in the Turkish second division when the Detroit Red Wings picked him sixth overall, but every major prognosticator had ranked him outside the top 20. The pick was so “off the board” that Seider himself put his hands to his face when he heard his name called. He was that surprised.
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Making Seider the highest-drafted German defenseman in NHL history launched a new era in Hockeytown. The once powerful Red Wings’ engine had wheezed to a halt in 2016-17, ending a run of 25 consecutive playoff berths. That streak was the third-longest in NHL history. It had started as a source of pride for a franchise that captured four Stanley Cups between 1997 and 2008, but it gradually morphed into a rusty old anchor, dragging the team by its neck into deep, perennial mediocrity, with GM Ken Holland signing any decent veteran to a pricey long-term contract in hopes of keeping the streak alive.
Divisional Focus: Red Wings Look to Snap Maple Leafs' Series Reign The Red Wings aim to win four crucial divisional games over the Toronto Maple Leafs next season
By 2019, after three consecutive playoff misses, Holland stepped aside and proudly handed the keys to his friend, his former pupil and one of the top players in franchise history: Steve Yzerman.
Yzerman arrived from his GM job in Tampa ready to transform the Red Wings top to bottom, but doing so required patience. With so many bad contracts tethered to the team, he couldn’t make quick, wholesale changes, but he could let the boat sink to the ocean floor – by holding the team’s best young prospects off the NHL roster and letting a depleted Detroit squad bottom out for a couple seasons until he could throw some veterans overboard, buying out Justin Abdelkader and Frans Nielsen.
The tank job was epic enough to produce, in 2019-20, Yzerman’s first season as GM, the lowest points percentage by any NHL team since the expansion Atlanta Thrashers of 1999-2000.
But Yzerman’s initial brush stroke, before all that, was the first draft pick of his Wings tenure: Seider.
With that shocking selection, Yzerman sent the message he wasn’t confined to conventional thinking. Three years later, he has, in Seider, a future franchise pillar and Calder Trophy candidate. And Seider has company. Two of his teammates may wind up co-finalists for rookie of the year in the same season.
How did three freshman – Seider, right winger Lucas Raymond and goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic – become the new faces of a formerly floundering franchise seemingly overnight?
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