Fear, Imagining, and the State of the "Yzer-plan"

Fair is foul, and foul is fair, as anxiety permeates the Hockeytown air.

Today is Halloween, October 31st, the last day of the first month of the NHL season, and the Detroit Red Wings sit at 4-5-1. It’s not a dreadful record, but there is a spooky mood about the Red Wings that has nothing to do with the calendar, nor even the standings. Instead, the eerie feeling emerges from a nagging sense that this year’s team has regressed from last year—a team that couldn’t find the consistency to get its playoff chase over the finish line—and the potential implications of such regression.

Oct 30, 2024; Detroit, Michigan, USA; Detroit Red Wings defenseman Ben Chiarot (8) catches the puck as Winnipeg Jets center Cole Perfetti (91) defends during the first period at Little Caesars Arena<p><button class= — Oct 30, 2024; Detroit, Michigan, USA; Detroit Red Wings defenseman Ben Chiarot (8) catches the puck as Winnipeg Jets center Cole Perfetti (91) defends during the first period at Little Caesars Arena

© Tim Fuller-Imagn Images

The record alone is not cause for alarm; it’s the context. Detroit entered the season with management still reluctant to name the playoffs as a destination of paramount importance for the spring time, but considering that only a tiebreaker held the Red Wings out of last year’s postseason, it would be difficult to imagine progress without a playoff berth. The topic of contending for a Stanley Cup remains off the table. Based on early season form, both are fanciful destinations.

Last night, Detroit was booed off the ice at the end of the first period after being overwhelmed by the Jets’ lethal rush attack to the tune of an 0-3 deficit, only to rally on the strength of its power play in the second period, before collapsing anew for three goals against in the third. At the final horn, there would have been more boos if only more fans had stuck around to see the final result, a 6-2 defeat.

The Red Wings’ present futility was best expressed by the opening 10 seconds of the third period, a sequence evoking Keystone Kops rather than Shakespearean drama. For the third straight game, a puck caromed off a Red Wing defensemen and into the back of the net, having passed through two d-men and a goaltender on its way to finding the target. Coach Derek Lalonde referred to the goal as a “back-breaker” after the game, while forward J.T. Compher pointed out the need for greater resilience, saying “I think we had a good mentality going into the third period against a good team. It was still a good opportunity to get a point or two. I think we can work on the response. It’s a tough goal to let in, but it’s a bad bounce. That’s all it is. We’re still in a decent spot to fight back.”

But, still, a record just south of NHL .500 and a loss to the league leaders don’t sufficiently explain the source of today’s anxiety. For a clearer sense of the origin of Hockeytown’s ambient and mounting fear, let’s consider the following soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, a play appropriate for any occasion but most of all for reckoning with spooky feelings spiraling from a sense that the old rules no longer apply and whatever social order there was has become perilous:

“Two truths are told / As happy prologues to the swelling act / Of the imperial theme. –I thank you, gentlemen– / This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill, cannot be good. If ill, / Why hath it given me earnest of success / Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor. / If good, why do I yield to that suggestion / Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair / And make my seated heart knock at my ribs / Against the use of nature? Present fears / Are less than horrible imaginings. / My thought, whose murder yet is but fantastical, / Shakes so my single state of man that function / Is smothered in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not.” -Macbeth, Act I, Scene iii, lines 237-253 (spelling modernized)

Macbeth has just heard a prophecy from three witches, the play’s infamous “weird sisters,” that he—presently Thane of Glamis—will become Thane of Cawdor, then King of Scotland. It would be easy to dismiss as vacuous mysticism if he did not immediately receive news that he has been named Thane of Glamis, prompting his first (intrusive) thoughts of regicide. In this aside, Macbeth points out that he can’t simply dismiss the witches’ prophecy, since its first prediction came true straight away, but the possibility that the witches speak the truth evokes a “horrid image [that] doth unfix [his] hair”—killing King Duncan to fast-track his own path to the crown.

“Present fears are less than horrible imaginings,” Macbeth says. In other words, the fear posed by actual danger isn’t so scary as anxiety produced by considering the possibility of what might soon come to pass and come to pass by his own hands. At this point you would be well within your right to wonder what any of this has to do with the Red Wings. Allow me to explain:

Five years on from his return as general manager, Steve Yzerman’s credibility is built not on results but on faith. Faith in old number 19, who won three Stanley Cups. Faith that the results the Tampa Bay Lightning achieved on a foundation Yzerman built could transfer to Detroit. Faith that the United States of America’s most successful NHL team wouldn’t and couldn’t stay down for long.

This is where the present fears and the horrible imaginings fit in. There’s nothing too scary about sitting two points back of the playoff cut line with 72 games in which to make up the deficit. What is scary is confronting the possibility that the franchise icon and savior who came back to Hockeytown in 2019 to pull a proud franchise out of an irrelevance less than mediocrity might be running out of ideas. The path from Detroit’s present state to a Stanley Cup championship is only muddier than it was before the Yzerman-led rebuild began. Then, the imperative for a teardown and fresh start was clear. Now, the path forward is far less certain.

Last night, captain Dylan Larkin pointed to the scope of the Red Wings problems, while insisting the answers lie within the Detroit dressing room. “We haven’t scored enough five-on-five,” Larkin said. “We haven’t been hard enough. You’ve seen glimpses of it…In my opinion it’s all fixable, and I think we have the personnel to do it, but…we need to figure out what we are as a team and start to gain some traction and play to an identity.”

It’s worth stressing that there is still time to flip the season’s script and wash away today’s anxieties, and perhaps Larkin is correct that the present roster can deliver the desired reversal, but once again, that possibility rests more on faith than anything tangible the Red Wings have shown on the ice in the season’s early going. To be 10 games into the third year of Lalonde’s tenure and the fifth of Yzerman’s, yet still in search of an identity to play to is far from an encouraging state of affairs. It will be Lalonde who has to pay for that state of affairs with his job before Yzerman will, but to bastardize another of the Bard’s most famous lines: Would a general manager by any other name receive such faith and leeway?

At this point, the answer is clear enough as to hardly merit spelling out. The moniker “Yzer-plan” has gone from a source of comfort to a site of anxiety, with the nostalgia of three Cup runs a more distant memory than ever and the possibility that number 19 might not guide the Red Wings to the end of another championship drought too looming a specter to ignore any longer.

So, on this All Hallows’ Eve, the scariest sight in Hockeytown isn’t that of the Atlantic Division standings. It’s the imagined future in which Yzerman isn’t the one to resurrect the Red Wings again. Like Macbeth, Detroit fans don’t want to see envision such a future, but thanks to the team’s early season mediocrity, it is inescapable. From all of which the question begs: If not him, then who? It is a question that makes seated hearts knock at ribs around the state of Michigan, for all those with affection for the Winged Wheel.