How well do the Red Wings actually know how to scout North American players?

As Detroit enters year nine without the playoffs, it's something worth discussing.

For the ninth straight season, the Detroit Red Wings will miss the playoffs.

It’s the second-longest active drought in the NHL behind the Buffalo Sabres 14 years of mediocrity. It’s also been 12 years since the Red Wings won a playoff series, again, only “bettered” by the Sabres 18 years without a series win.

When you lay out those stats, the lengthy droughts, you start to realize how, perception wise, the Sabres have been the Red Wings greatest asset — you can’t be the butt end of a joke because Buffalo exists.

Steve Yzerman is currently completing his sixth season as the Red Wings general manager. In his eight years as the Tampa Bay Lightning GM, the program many Red Wings fans point to as the reason he’ll fix things in Detroit, he reached the playoffs five times and his teams won nine playoff series.

So résumé-wise, as an NHL GM, Yzerman has 14 years in the role and has only reached the playoffs five times. When his teams do get in they typically win at least a series or two.

His record as a GM is 521-442-111 heading into tonight’s game against the Dallas Stars, a career .537 points percentage.

These are facts, not narratives.

It’s important to establish those before we dive into the narratives and reasonings. This is where it’s OK to point out the situation Yzerman inherited when Ken Holland left, a franchise that valued a playoff streak over actual playoff success, and it’s also where we acknowledge that after six seasons and zero playoff appearances, most NHL GM would have been fired if their name didn’t happen to hang prominently in the rafters at their place of employment.

The Yzerman discourse is messy and it only got messier with the Red Wings mid-season coaching change, which did better the team, but ultimately wasn’t enough for a playoff destination this season.

I don’t want to argue whether Yzerman is or isn’t the man for the job right now in Detroit, but I do want to talk about a Red Wings element that needs to be deeply examined this summer by the organization.

North American scouting.

Let’s look at the current Red Wings roster, the players that are making an impact and reason for long-term success.

They typically fall into two categories

1. Young Europeans that the Yzerman regime drafted, like Lucas Raymond, Moritz Seider, Marco Kasper, Simon Edvinsson, Moritz Seider, and Albert Johansson.

2. Established North American veterans with track record who weren’t asked to elevate to higher roles in Detroit, like Dylan Larkin, Alex DeBrincat, Andrew Copp, and Patrick Kane.

That’s it. The rest of the Red Wings fall into that mushy middle. Players that have failed to elevate into larger roles/different situations like J.T. Compher, or were simply bad bets for the team he built like Erik Gustafsson.

The Red Wings project transition well, the switch from Europe to North America. It’s why there is so much excitement this week about Michael Brandsegg-Nygård and Axel Sandin Pellikka, but it seems, to me, they forget that North American players don’t really evolve that much.

This is something that was eating at me watching the Grand Rapids Griffins in person this weekend. Nate Danielson, I believe, is a fine and viable NHL player, but I struggle to see how he’ll ever be a reliable point producer at the NHL level.

Maybe Danielson can make the jump like Marco Kasper did, but Kasper has even told me this season that offense comes easier for him in the NHL than it did in Europe. For Kasper, switching leagues and styles paid off, he said he probably would never be a big-time scorer in Europe, but can be one in North America because of a style that he adjusted.

Danielson, for argument sake here, has been playing North American style his entire life. Aside from more chaos and speed in the AHL, there really isn’t too much of an adjustment.

The same can be said for decisions Yzerman has made with veterans at the NHL level.

Justin Holl and Jeff Petry for example, have established track records of who they are. Good, but not great NHL defenders. Players that in recent years had slowed a bit. They weren’t going to get better, there wasn’t a magic elixir, but the Red Wings signed them thinking they’d reverse current history.

If you could pick and choose, you’d want the Red Wings running the European operations of your team. You’d want them identifying talent currently playing in Europe, they’ve proven they can do that, but when it comes to domestic scouting in North America, I believe the Red Wings are typically looking for more when there really isn’t too much more to give.

Again, this is a sticky and difficult concept to tackle. Red Wings assistant GM Kris Draper, for example, I think is a pretty good talent evaluator. But I’m not sure how often his input and decisions actually impact Yzerman, who has a reputation of having his own way of thinking about things.

It’s also not amateur vs. pro scouting, it’s more geographical and continental. It’s almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy, if the Red Wings take notice in a player in Europe, you’re probably excited about them. If that player is from North America, you tend to find the warts.

With an organization that operates like Detroit, things are kept close to the vest, there is no way any outside voice can truly diagnose what happens on the inside. There are no “insiders” when it comes to the Red Wings, myself included, who will properly publish the tell-all plan.

So instead we have to pose questions and wait for the evidence to show us one thing or the other.

So, in Detroit, do they know how to scout North American players? Do they understand how players properly progress when playing their entire careers on North American ice?

That’s something Yzerman and his staff will have to discuss this summer, because for better or worse, a decade without a playoff appearance is going to be harder and harder for anyone, even the most ardent Yzerplanner, to defend.