After a coaching change Todd McLellan needs to steady the Yzerplan and Red Wings culture
Detroit made the move over Christmas break and now the new challenge starts.
Derek Lalonde’s tenure with the Detroit Red Wings ended with boos, a 4-0 no-show performance against the St. Louis Blues on Monday before he was fired during the NHL’s Christmas break.
For Lalonde, who was a lame-duck coach in the final year of his contract, it had always felt like a question of when not if he’d be let go. Whether it was in the middle of this season or in the summer, when his contract would expire, he wouldn’t be the Red Wings coach to start the 2025-26 season.
While Steve Yzerman rarely explains his logic to anyone outside of his inner circle, the feeling around Detroit was always that the Red Wings GM wouldn’t want an interim coach, instead looking for more long-term solution to help stabilize another stumbling block in the Yzerplan rebuild.
So Todd McLellan got the call, got to bring his top assistant Trent Yawney, and will start a new multi-year deal on Friday morning before the Red Wings host the Toronto Maple Leafs
Now before we get into what McLellan has to bring, we need to acknowledge one of the things that ultimately doomed Lalonde’s tenure in Detroit — he couldn’t help the team overcome any form of adversity.
When the Red Wings missed the playoffs in 2024, on a tiebreaker, it was largely because they went 4-10-0 in games without their captain Dylan Larkin. When Simon Edvinsson got hurt against the Montreal Canadiens last week, the Red Wings quickly unraveled in the following two games.
It’s not solely on Lalonde, it’s also heavily on the players and Yzerman’s decisions, but it’s all reflective of a culture that is quiet and easily broken after years of losing. Lalonde’s job as the head coach was to do his best to change the culture, reverse the accepted mediocrity, and he proved over the past two seasons he wasn’t the emotional leader to do that.
There will be lots of clichés issued tomorrow about Lalonde when the Red Wings hold their first media sessions after the news — about how he’s a good person and how this falls on the team, not him — but it’s all window dressing to hide the larger problem in plain site.
The Red Wings are flawed, deeply flawed in fact, and they needed a coach that was willing to do more to push the buttons.
Instead Lalonde, particularly in his final season, became more interested in managing risk than anything else. It was never about winning matchups with his line decisions, but rather how he could limit the other team, locking down defensively became the goal, and in doing so everything else locked up as well.
It was also a very delicate defensive puzzle, built on a couple individuals, and when those individuals disappeared or had a rough night — like Larkin or Edvinsson — the rest of the team seemed to unravel as well.
Lalonde knew this, and whether he acknowledged it or not, it was one of the reasons he simply accepted or found excuses for veteran players who struggled, while younger players, like Jonatan Berggren, would take the brunt of the criticism.
For example Vladimir Tarasenko was never called out, never scratched, and never moved down the lineup despite being a negative player. The decision to sign him falls on Yzerman, but the lack of any creativity in his management falls on the coaching staff.
Another example, Ben Chiarot isn’t nearly as bad as some fans want to believe, but he’s also not nearly as good as Lalonde would praise him both internally and publicly.
From a roster perspective, as I wrote last month, there’s not a lot of hope right now when it comes to building a winner in Detroit. There are some encouraging future assets, but still more and more questions than answers.
While the Red Wings didn’t announce how long the multi-year deal was, it’s probably something that came up for McLellan in his contract negotiation — he’s gonna need more than one and half seasons to figure this out, and has to hope his GM has learned from past mistakes.
In the short term, McLellan has to find a way for the team’s foundation not to wobble when one important player is unavailable. In the long-term, he has to completely re-code the Red Wings culture to one that picks itself up, which I’m not sure is possible under the current regime.
Think about it this way. When it comes to Yzerman and the Red Wings, everything is still associated with the No. 19 hanging in the rafters, not the body of work he’s done as an executive in Detroit.
Whether you liked Jake Walman or not, and I personally did, one of the main reasons his puzzling trade to the San Jose Sharks was defended by some was because Yzerman made it and there must be a greater plan in place.
By the middle of the 2024-25 season the Red Wings defense is struggling to move the puck and Walman is 12th in the league in points by defenders. Shayne Gostisbehere was also allowed to walk in favor of Erik Gustafsson, Gostisbehere (now in Carolina) is one of the few defenders producing at even a higher level offensively than Walman.
Yzerman is starting to get some public pressure, but it’s still muted, and there will be some places that actually praise him today for firing Lalonde, a mini victory lap during a downturn.
Here’s the reality, the hope of a triumphant “Yzerplan” now heavily revolves around McLellan pulling a rabbit out of what’s become a very ugly hat. Possible, sure, but explaining how and why he’ll do it lead, again, to more questions than answers.