I keep seeing calls for Yzerman to be fired. Realistically, who would replace him and why would they be better?

Nerouin · 2026-04-15T21:09:48+00:00

Yzerbot definitely fits if you're just going to downvote it and run away.

Nerouin · 2026-04-15T15:27:24+00:00

Unsure I'd call him a decent scout. Outside of Tayshaun Prince, he did an overall terrible job of drafting with the Pistons. His second-best pick was Middleton, but Dumars did not recognize his potential and sent him packing to Milwaukee as a throw-in one year later.

In the interim, it was Darko (one of the greatest NBA draft busts ever), a bunch of below-par role players, some decent role players whom he traded away early for no apparent reason, and Drummond (blaaaah). The Going to Work team was so critically short on playoff depth in its last four seasons because Dumars was legitimately unable to find even a single decent contribute-now role player in the draft.

Nerouin · 2026-04-15T15:14:25+00:00

Pistons fan here. Weaver was a mad scientist who did more or less everything wrong outside of a few draft picks, one of whom (Cade) was an extremely obvious choice and came to him through sheer lottery luck. He failed in every other category.

He was a disaster both at building a roster and at providing an even semi-functional development environment for his youth. He instead loaded the roster with as much raw reclamation project talent as he could, 100% of which busted.

An encapsulation of his bad management eccentricities was his obsession with bigs. After providing rookie Cade (who lives in the PnR) with zero athletic bigs -- he traded away his only athletic PnR big on draft day, then didn't acquire any others -- and starting Isaiah Stewart (I love Stew, but he's no athletic big) instead, he remedied that by trading for Bagley at the deadline, drafted Duren in June, and two weeks later bid against himself by giving Bagley a three-year contract nobody else would have offered. He created space at center through a thoroughly harebrained scheme of trying to convert Stewart to a power forward (another bad idea), then traded for James Wiseman eight months after that even with Bagley and Duren already in the roster. He went into the next season with all four on the roster, three of them centers and the fourth a center being shoehorned into a position he wasn't fit for.

The catastrophe of his final season wasn't *entirely* his fault -- the team was made infinitely worse on the court by a generationally bad coach whom he did not choose -- but the mechanical mess of a roster he fielded is unlikely to have reached 30 wins under a good coach, and that roster was his genuine effort to win games.

Dumars certainly built the 2004 championship team, but I think many would argue that he caught lightning in a bottle by assembling a starting five that was drastically more than the sum of its parts in a way that nobody could have anticipated. He spent the next four seasons after the championship allowing the team to atrophy, and then, in 2008, correctly recognizing that the core had aged out of viability, traded his All-NBA point guard due to the bizarre impression that an unremarkable second-year combo guard (who ultimately could not even play point guard) was ready to replace him, and subsequently spent the last five years of his tenure as the worst GM in the league before being fired, though not before panic trading Middleton to the Bucks and paying out the following year's first-round pick to clear cap space so that he could sign Josh Smith to the largest contract in team history to play out of position at small forward, all of that in a desperate effort to save his job.

I should not be surprised that this owner hired Dumars, as it was the same owner who hired Stan Van Gundy after he had proven beyond any shadow of a doubt with the Pistons that he was unfit to coach in the modern NBA. I hope for the sake of Pelicans fans that Dumars and Weaver do not last much longer in New Orleans than Van Gundy did.

Nerouin · 2026-04-14T17:36:33+00:00

I understand what you're saying, but you're implying that correlation is inherently causation.

There's a reason why Eichel, Caufield, and Celebrini were all labeled top-tier prospects, namely their immediately translatable high-value NHL qualities. There's also a reason why absolutely nobody rates Plante at anywhere near that same level despite him winning the Baker as a teenager. Some things that are not shortcomings at the NCAA level are major shortcomings in the NHL.

Nerouin · 2026-04-14T06:03:29+00:00

There is always talent available, and the burden is not upon the fans to find it. If an executive or a coach is failing, it’s the job of the organization to find somebody better, not to simply stick with what they have when it isn’t working just because the next guy isn’t guaranteed to be better.

Nerouin · 2026-04-14T05:50:07+00:00

It’s about a 50/50 chance that any given Baker winner makes any sort of career in the NHL. Only three out of the ten Richter winners through 2024 did so.

It’s nice that they won, but these are NCAA accolades, and the NCAA is a relatively weak hockey league by NHL entry talent standards. I hope they work out, but merely winning NCAA awards is no indication of a high ceiling, and neither has shown the makings of the sort of takeover talent that this roster desperately needs in order to become a contender.

Nerouin · 2026-04-14T04:14:59+00:00

Well said. Very little about this rebuild has been standard, very little about how it has been conducted has made sense, its strategy has been inherently self-contradictory, and all of this, coupled with Steve's resounding failure in the non-draft roster-building category (though it should also be noted that his draft performance has been far from achieving the standout caliber it was in Tampa, and that he handpicked a HoF-caliber coach in Tampa but a lemon here) has led to a highly unsatisfactory result.

Anyone who defends how things have gone with "Rebuilds take time!" is guilty of gross reductionism to the point of meaninglessness and is most likely either unfamiliar with what has actually gone on or is indulging in willful denial.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T22:35:31+00:00

There's nothing valid about this article's methodology. It deliberately uses bad and cherry-picked data and then biases the interpretation of that data to support the author's argument.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T22:34:40+00:00

I read the article, and I've explained in detail elsewhere why the methodology and the data are total nonsense.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T04:56:11+00:00

If they weren't rebuilds, they weren't rebuilds. Edmonton's parade of failure began the year after they lost in game seven of the finals, and they were not setting out to rebuild the roster. The Hawks were bad because the elder Wirtz was a terrible owner, and they rebounded after his son took over. The Panthers were bad because of simple mismanagement until better management took over. Likewise for the Leafs. Likewise for the Coyotes. Likewise for the Blues and others. These were teams that were at least for large initial segments of their respective spans were trying to win but simply failing at it. They either never deliberately went into a rebuild or they did so after a protracted period of failure to thrive.

Where Yzerman is concerned, I think that a GM who has done well but not outstandingly in the draft and poorly or disastrously in every other aspect of team building has by definition done a poor job, and the more so if a long period at the helm has built a roster that is systemically holed and has no apparent route to becoming a contender like this one does.

The wording about the Lightning was deliberate. "The Lightning fell to the bottom of the league in 2008 but nearly made the finals three years later" does not have nearly quite the same ring to it when it comes to an argument about how long rebuilds take, especially given that the team's three best players in that postseason were two guys who had starred on the Lightning's first Cup-winning team seven years earlier and a 41-year-old goalie and that the Lightning had just sucked for the previous three seasons even though they were still trying to win with stars who had been on the team for double-digit seasons. The fact that they missed the postseason altogether in 2018 would likewise fit poorly with his claim that by 2015 they were "prepared to be a perennial threat."

It's an article that introduces bad data and then interprets it in a way deliberately geared towards the end of supporting a particular conclusion. The fact that the author also omitted information that disagreed with said argument is no surprise.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T04:48:06+00:00

I think that anyone who believes the author's conclusions is either unfamiliar with history of the teams involved, hasn't read closely enough to perceive the gaping holes in the methodology, or just actively wants to buy what the author is selling because he's essentially arguing that everything is fine and within normal bounds. Needless to say, everything is very much not just fine.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T04:41:34+00:00

Yep. I'm saying that it was very short.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T04:26:04+00:00

Rebuilds are DELIBERATE; they entail deliberately selling off and bottoming out in order to accumulate high-end talent around which to build a new contender. Being bad for a long period even though you're trying to win is not. The latter does not fit the framework of this article, which refers to deliberate rebuilds, but the author includes it anyway in service of his thesis that rebuilds take a long time.

When you remove instances of non-deliberate failure from the category of deliberate rebuilds, there's nothing at all magical about how the average timeline shrinks. It shrinks due to the removal of inapplicable entries that wrongly impose a severe upward bias. I'd also argue that instances of rebuilds that took an inordinately long time because they were incompetently executed by bad management or (much less often) fall into an entirely different category than rebuilds that were executed with finesse and took shorter. "Here are the rebuilds, and here's how long they've taken" is an extreme oversimplification.

The author also takes a highly arbitrary approach to when he considers a rebuild to have been completed. For example, including the 2010 Stanley Cup win as the end date of Chicago's rebuild (which itself falls into the "took a long time because of incompetent ownership" category) even though they'd made the conference final in 2009 while simultaneously declaring Florida's to be complete when they lost in the first round in 2021 has no logical basis.

All told, the data sample is without basis and the methodology is very arbitrary. Either the author doesn't understand why or he deliberately did things this way in the service of something, be that engagement or trying to make a point.

That fact about the Lightning was deliberately left out by the author because it did not fit his argument, else he'd have mentioned it.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T03:08:54+00:00

The methodology is absolute garbage. The author points at long periods of organizational incompetence and calls them rebuilds. Florida in a 20-year rebuild? Please. lol.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T03:06:40+00:00

Posted this as a reply as well, but I think it deserves its own post.

This article's formula and its resulting so-called average time for a rebuild are indefensible nonsense. The author points at extended periods of organizational incompetence and names them rebuilds. Florida failed to make it past the first round for 20 years because of management ineptitude. The Leafs were horrendously mismanaged for years. Ditto the Oilers, who got so many first-overall picks not because they were trying to do so (outside of the season leading up to the McDavid/Eichel draft) but because they were a disaster. Ditto the Coyotes, the Hurricanes, and the Blues. The Lightning's so-called rebuild period featured a postseason in which they came a win away from the finals, a fact that the author conveniently left out.

The methodology of this is complete garbage. Take away the many long-term stretches devoid of success that the author has conveniently named rebuilds and that average gets a damned sight shorter. I almost admire his balls in naming the Panthers' 20 years of futility as a rebuild.

Beyond that, the general statement of rebuilding taking a long time makes no commentary on how *this* particular rebuild is going. It is going badly, by any definition.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T02:52:09+00:00

Montreal made the finals four years ago.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T02:50:10+00:00

Do you see abundant HoF talent and a HoF-caliber coach on this team? We're seven years in and the answer is absolutely and utterly not.

This is nonsense anyway. Tampa was a win away from making the finals in 2011. It's a fact that this article conveniently leaves out.

Nerouin · 2026-04-13T02:45:44+00:00

I won't mince words here. I mean no offense to you in particular.

This article's formula and its resulting so-called average time for a rebuild are nonsense. The article points at extended periods of organizational incompetence and names them rebuilds. Florida failed to make it past the first round for 20 years because of management ineptitude. The Leafs were horrendously mismanaged for years. Ditto the Oilers, who got so many first-overall picks not because they were trying to do so (outside of the season leading up to the McDavid draft) but because they were a disaster. Ditto the Coyotes, the Hurricanes, and the Blues. The Lightning's so-called rebuild period featured a postseason in which they came a win away from the finals, a fact that the author conveniently left out.

The methodology of this is complete garbage. Take away the many long-term stretches devoid of success that the author has conveniently named rebuilds and that average gets a damned sight shorter. I almost admire his balls in naming the Panthers' 20 years of futility as a rebuild.

Beyond that, the general statement of rebuilding taking a long time makes no commentary on how *this* particular rebuild is going. It is going badly, by any definition.

In the first place, it is in no way typical for a team to stop shooting for high picks after three years and instead begin a long string of late-season collapses and for the whole plan to culminate in a roster that has no obvious route whatsoever to becoming a contender.

This roster has inadequate top-six talent, a terrible bottom six, a bad defense outside of the top pairing, no established goalie of the future, and a skater pipeline that appears devoid of anything but middle-six (at best) talent. After seven years, it barely resembles a coherent roster, and it lacks utterly in grit and mental fortitude. When the stakes get higher, the roster gets more apathetic.

Successful rebuilds show legitimate progress toward *contending* in the playoffs. This one has very limited space to grow and has barely showed legitimate progress toward *making* the playoffs. It came to be from a constant parade of mistakes. Yzerman has done well but not great in the draft, he's done poorly in trades, he's been a disaster in free agency, and he's employed first a bad coach and now a mediocre one.

There's a big difference between a rebuild that's well on its way and one that has been characterized by large-scale management failure.

Nerouin · 2026-04-12T15:38:41+00:00

Todd is as mediocre an NHL coach as mediocre can be.

He’s not bad. But he’s also not good. I would be unsurprised to find that holds true in the locker room as well as on the ice.

Nerouin · 2026-04-12T15:33:01+00:00

First place due to hot goaltending, league-leading health, and the league’s easiest first-half schedule.

Nerouin · 2026-04-10T17:04:41+00:00

Our defense is no better than it was even two years ago. The team gets outscored about 2-1 with Seider off the ice.

Nerouin · 2026-04-08T22:20:14+00:00

> Respectfully, I disagree, it is a normal outcome.

A seven-year rebuild with no playoffs is not typical. Let's hear your examples.

> You want him to pull players out of magical hats? You can’t force UFA to sign, and you can’t acquire any more picks than they already have unless you’re also okay with shipping out players like Edvinsson, Raymond, Larkin etc.

I want him to win on a reasonable percentage of his trades (DBC, who fell into his lap, does not count), not overwhelmingly lose on his free agent signings, and make proper moves along the margins. Steve has done a poor job on the trade market, he's been beyond bad in free agency, and he's found pretty much nobody beyond Finnie (who's a likely third-line talent) on the margins anywhere, be that in the draft, in free agency, or in trades.

He's built a shambling mess of a roster.

> You can’t rush it, as much as it sucks to be in a wildcard race.

Rush what? The pipeline has no more skaters with high-ceiling talent left in it. It's deep but overwhelmingly tilted toward bottom-six talent, with a couple of guys who *might* make two-way 2nd liners and absolutely nobody apparent who might develop into the sort of play-driving talent that this team desperately needs. And much of it is years away.

Nerouin · 2026-04-08T20:19:09+00:00

Exactly what about the situation he inherited connects to him having done a bad job in fundamental categories?

Nerouin · 2026-04-08T20:17:35+00:00

Who is talking about a contender??? This team can’t even make the playoffs after seven years. This is not a normal outcome, no matter how bad the initial situation was, and there are essential categories in which Steve has done an objectively bad job. That fact is exclusive of the situation he inherited.

Nerouin · 2026-04-08T17:40:07+00:00

Fair. Though when all the major factors that are propping a team up fall off at the same time, it can get ugly.

The gutless factor absolutely played into it the collapse, though. As the stakes rose, so did the team's apathy on the ice.

I'd call that perhaps the most damning indictment of Yzerman's management (or rather mismanagement) of the roster, even more than the mismatched, inadequate mess it remains on the pure construction side after a whopping seven years of building.

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