Can you import/export culture? And why does that have anything to do with David Perron and the Red Wings?

Let's talk about an outside the box idea after the Red Wings made a trade for their prior alternate captain on Thursday.

Looking solely at his production, David Perron isn’t much of an asset anymore.

His play took a dip last season, 16 points in 43 games, and while he’s already surpassed that this season with 25 points in 49 games, he hasn’t played since January 20 because of a sports hernia injury.

In fact he might not even play again this season, as laid out in the conditions on the trade last night between the Detroit Red Wings and Ottawa Senators.

If Perron plays in a game before the end of the regular season or during the playoffs, the Red Wings will give the Senators the Columbus Blue Jackets’ fourth-round pick, which was acquired in a previous trade.

If the Red Wings advance to the second round of the playoffs and Perron appears in 50% of the first-round games, the Red Wings will instead give up their own third-round pick to the Senators.

If Perron’s season is over the trade essentially didn’t happen.

It’s a low-risk play by the Red Wings that examines another key side of team building and the deadline, and one I’ve always found fascinating. Can you import (and export) culture or identity with one player?

Remember Perron played for Detroit during the 2022-23 and 2023-24 season. He was an alternate captain and the loudest voice in a room that former Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde constantly bemoaned for being too quiet.

When Dylan Larkin needed a vocal lieutenant, Perron played that role. Perron was the player that pushed and pulled Detroit into more of playoff fight during the 2023-24 season and scored the dramatic goal against the Montreal Canadiens in the season finale that kept the playoff hopes alive before the Red Wings missed the postseason on a tiebreaker.

Perron wasn’t re-signed by Detroit after that season, he wanted to return to Detroit, but Red Wings general manager Steve Yzerman elected to let him walk and he inked a two-year deal with the Senators.

That decision, amongst other things, was one of the bigger disagreements between Yzerman and Lalonde about the state of the team. Throughout Lalonde’s final half season in Detroit, before he was fired on Boxing Day 2024, the Red Wings coach publicly talked about how much his team missed Perron and the role he provided in the room, about how no one stepped up and filled that void.

In hindsight it’s kind of funny, because both Yzerman and Lalonde were right to various degrees. The Red Wings at the time needed to move on from Perron, there needed to be some internal growth and leadership opportunities that we’ve since seen from Moritz Seider and Lucas Raymond, who both have become more vocal since Todd McLellan gave them the full-time alternate captain roles.

But the Red Wings, last season, still needed Perron at time and maybe they need him again. This is where Yzerman, while he’ll never admit, is giving an ironic hat tip to his old coach and bringing Perron back, even if it only becomes a ceremonial role where he never plays because of the injury.

Detroit, which lost on Wednesday in overtime to the Vegas Golden Knights, currently have an 82.2 percent chance of making the playoffs according to MoneyPuck. Good odds, but for anyone who’s followed the Red Wings in the past handful of years, there’s always the fear of the March debacle which has doomed all positive feelings and defined this lengthy playoff drought — close, but not close enough in the biggest moments.

Those feelings certainly crept up on Wednesday when Detroit got an overtime point, but it felt hollow after blowing a 3-1 lead in the third period and the team had a lack of any physical response to Vegas’ bullying of Larkin. Important Perron isn’t going to instantly fix that, and Yzerman needs to make another move before today’s trade deadline, but culturally speaking he improved the state of the team and what that room needs by acquiring Perron very little risk.

When Perron left, the Red Wings exported a bit of their culture, some of the identity of the room and a voice that some of the younger players relied on. Ben Chiarot last season told me Perron wasn’t just missed on the ice, but also on the team plane and in meetings where he pushed guys on a daily basis, sometimes challenging others with a mix of healthy criticism and positivity at the same time.

Now, really needing that playoff payoff, Yzerman is signaling not that he was wrong to let Perron walk, but he needs to import back some of what the player provided. That maybe, just maybe, Perron’s presence ratchets up that playoff one percent for certain players and some of that fieriness rubs off on a group that just sat and watched when their captain was manhandled by Vegas.

To be clear, this can’t be the Red Wings only move, standing pat before the deadline is going to be very detrimental to this group’s psyche in my view, but if Perron is a supporting piece and is able to have any impact on the off-ice culture of the team, it could have a ripple effect that you won’t necessarily see on the stat sheet.