Another Canucks management lesson: The failure of Steve Yzerman

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“Don’t trade away your high picks.”

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“Don’t trade away good young players.”

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That was an assessment offered this week by an NHL source after word dropped that Steve Yzerman was no longer to be general manager of the Detroit Red Wings. It’s an important lesson for observers of the Vancouver Canucks as we watch Ryan Johnson take on a rebuild of his own:

Don’t make the same mistakes that Yzerman did.

You need to find young star players with your first-round picks. You need to be aggressive in building the rest of your roster, but to do so you shouldn’t be trading away your good young talent. Draft picks on their own don’t make a contender. Only smart decisions do.

Hired in 2019 to rebuild a team he once played for and was indeed a legendary captain of, Yzerman’s Wings never made the playoffs. In fact, the Red Wings — who have won 11 Stanley Cups in their history and are one of the NHL’s most storied franchises — hasn’t been in the playoffs for a decade, stretching back to the final years of Ken Holland’s two-decade run as GM.

Under Holland, and with Yzerman as captain for a time, the Red Wings became the NHL’s winningest team for a long period, winning three Stanley Cups along the way.

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It was supposed to be a new dawn for the Wings. They brought back a great face from the great old days, someone who had built up an excellent reputation as a manager in Tampa Bay.

But it wasn’t. The Red Wings kept treading water at best. From time to time there were glimmers of hope, but never any consistency, and it falls on Yzerman and his failed “Yzer-plan,” as fans liked to call it.

Yzerman did start on the back foot, as three of the four first-round picks made by Holland and his staff in the years before Yzerman taking over proved to be duds at best, and absolute busts at worst: Evgeny Svechnikov, Dennis Cholowski, and crucially Filip Zadina. (The Red Wings eschewed Quinn Hughes, leaving him to the Canucks to draft one pick later.)

All played in the NHL, but have struggled to make much impact. Yzerman’s drafting in his first three years yielded quality in the first round — Mo Seider, Lucas Raymond and Simon Edvinsson.

But there has not been much since in the first round. And even worse, nothing outside of the first round. His two 2023 first rounders, Nate Danielson and Axel Sandin-Pellikka have both played in the NHL and could prove to be quality players, but neither are looming stars.

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“They hopped on so many landmines,” said Elite Prospects’ J.D. Burke. The Red Wings have accrued a pile of picks under Yzerman, but missed far too often.

“You look at the Danielson, (Marco) Kasper and Michael Brandsegg-Nygård picks and you can maybe justify each of them in a vacuum, but not for a team that needs franchise players,” Burke added. “Even in a world where they hit on all those of those three picks, none of them has franchise player upside, so it wouldn’t really do anything for a team like Detroit.”

On top of that, when they did deliver on a good young player, such as Filip Hronek, they traded them away.

It’s no wonder, in the end, former captain Dylan Larkin wanted out. The team just spun its wheels, never truly accepting that they needed to land near the bottom of the league for another season or two in order to find a true star in the making. Instead, Yzerman signed quality middling players, like J.T. Compher, Andrew Copp and Ben Chiarot. He traded a first-round pick for Alex DeBrincat — a great player, but the Red Wings weren’t close enough to being the team that Yzerman wanted it to be.

They didn’t add enough to the team, and instead the Wings remained in the mushy middle, picking later in the first round where you can find reasonable prospects, but no superstars.

The Canucks cannot afford to miss the Yzerman lesson.

pjohnston@postmedia.com

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