2025-26 Prospects Thread

[Hongbit]

38 minutes ago, buddha said:

EP40 - Larkin - Raymond

Debrincat - Copp - Kane

Lombardi - Kasper - Mazur

James - Compher - MBN

you lose danielson in the trade plus a pick and ras.  re-sign kane.

That’s such a soft lineup.  Bottom 6 still lacking any toughness or ability to make life difficult for another team.    
 

They won’t be able to get them but maybe someone like Colorado’s Logan O’Connor or Columbus Mathieu Olivier would be perfect for this team.  Much better at filling a need than another questionable skill guy like EP40

[buddha]

51 minutes ago, Hongbit said:

That’s such a soft lineup.  Bottom 6 still lacking any toughness or ability to make life difficult for another team.    
 

They won’t be able to get them but maybe someone like Colorado’s Logan O’Connor or Columbus Mathieu Olivier would be perfect for this team.  Much better at filling a need than another questionable skill guy like EP40

i dont want ep40.  but the amount of smoke there means they are interested.

[slothfacekilla]

You're all going to feel silly when Brady Cleveland makes the team and beats up the entire league

[Shinzaki]

If you trade for EP...2nd line C between Cat and Kane.  Mantha is a FA...bring him home to give Larkin and Raymond a bodyguard on the 1st line.

Or get Bert back from the Blackhawks..proven chemistry with Larkin and Raymond

[Jason_R]

The way I see it there are two paths forward. One is to stay the course. Continue to introduce the kids gradually. Hope for incremental improvement until CCR (or I guess I should say CCCR) are off your books. Sign free agents to fill whatever gaps are left over and hope for the best. 

The other is to make your own luck, maybe on a reclamation project like EP40. As I said in another post, if they took the last two years of Compher and Rasmussen (maybe also Danielson or Kasper or a goalie), that would make the effective annual value of EP40 just under $9 million. If his knee is right, and his head got right playing with a bunch of fellow Swedes and freed from the Canadian hockey media that is often harsh with non-Canadian players, you could end up with another center capable of putting up Dylan Larkin numbers at effectively a Dylan Larkin salary.

No, you would not be getting around the criticism that your team is soft, but yes you would be making a dent in the even strength scoring situation. But there are still a lot of years on that contract so your Swedish brain trust needs to be 100% sure that EP can be resurrected in Detroit. 

[lordstanley]

EP would pass a physical but he'd fail a mental. I really want nothing to do with Petersson in the salary cap era. I'd much rather give up way more assets for 2 years of Auston Matthews.

[Jason_R]

40 minutes ago, lordstanley said:

EP would pass a physical but he'd fail a mental. I really want nothing to do with Petersson in the salary cap era. I'd much rather give up way more assets for 2 years of Auston Matthews.

Stevie needs to be calling on everyone. 

[buddha]

https://open.substack.com/pub/mystaes/p/drafting-and-development-in-the-modern?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=7ecc7

great read on the red wings' prospects woes.  doesnt leave yzerman blameless, but does note late-kenny's extreme failings.

"At last we come to it. The root of the Red Wings’ drafting and development hell. The reason that for seemingly a decade Red Wings fans have pointed to their prospects as a sign that things would turn around, only to be left disappointed. 2013 was a banner year for Detroit, where they found several impactful players that many will be familiar: Anthony Mantha, Tyler Bertuzzi, and Matthias-Janmark (even if he was traded before ever playing for the wings). What followed, however, was a half-decade of drafting darkness from which the Red Wings have still not emerged. It is my hope, not only to convey the scale of this disaster, but that others will use it as a precautionary tale: if you are about to enter a rebuild, you need to have your scouting and development system in order. Just as the Red Wings were beginning to falter at the NHL level, they entered a period of five years where the only notable NHL players that they managed to draft and develop were Dylan Larkin, and Filip Hronek - impactful and useful NHL players to be sure, but not enough to mitigate the missed opportunities elsewhere. During this 2014-2018 period, the Red Wings would under-perform the value expected of draft picks by a cumulative 5 average WAR per season. The 2017 and 2018 draft classes - in which the Wings walked away with Michael Rasmussen, Filip Zadina, and Joe Veleno - are particularly painful for Detroit Red Wings fans."

[buddha]

on the red wings' prospects' penchants for sophomore slumps: its much more prevalent here than elsewhere in the league:

"Now, this is peculiar. The median data fails to capture the Sophomore slump, implying that while this phenomenon seems fairly common among Red Wings’ young stars, it is not so for the leagues’ sophomores as a whole. This implies that there are environmental factors at play potentially more important than other teams finally having detailed pro-scouting or the mental weight of newfound expectations. For example, in the case of Moritz Seider, as soon as he demonstrated what he was capable of in his rookie campaign he was thrown off the deep end in the following season, logging some of the hardest minutes in the NHL at the young age of 21. This, of course, could potentially help to explain Kasper’s season - he was written in as the second line center at the beginning of the campaign, a position he clearly wasn’t ready for full time (despite rather positive underlying numbers for the first month). The subsequent loss of confidence and line juggling that he dealt with throughout the 2025-2026 season cannot have helped."

[gehringer_2]

42 minutes ago, buddha said:

he was written in as the second line center at the beginning of the campaign, a position he clearly wasn’t ready for full time (despite rather positive underlying numbers for the first month). The subsequent loss of confidence and line juggling that he dealt with throughout the 2025-2026 season cannot have helped."

the natural consequence of the overall lack of talent on the team.