Red Wings Senior VP Jim Devellano talks opposition to tanking, future plans

The Detroit Red Wings are going to miss the playoffs for a second consecutive season after 25 consecutive years of qualifying for the annual tournament. Although they hesitate to use the term “rebuild”, it’s painfully obvious that it’s exactly what they’re going through now.

The team did make moves to try and extend their playoff streak, only to become first round fodder for stronger teams. They haven’t won a playoff series since the lockout shortened 2012-13 season. Additionally, it doesn’t look like a new playoff streak will be starting any time soon.

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Senior VP Jim Devellano recently spoke at length with NHL.com about the unusual state of the team. Though he didn’t outright say so, columnist Nicholas J. Cotsonika wrote the sentence that fans were dreading – “Devellano declined to comment on the futures of Holland and coach Jeff Blashill in a wide-ranging interview with NHL.com, but Holland and Blashill are expected to return.”

“Certainly I’m not in denial, and I would say to you Ken probably isn’t in denial either,” he said. “We know where we’re at. We understand the state of our team.”We are not surprised. We knew that it would eventually happen.”

Devellano has been in Detroit’s front office since 1982, and has seen the days of the Dead Wings turn into the glory years. Now that the team has come full circle and is back to the NHL’s basement, he’s looking to the future and knows the team must rebuild through the draft.

For the Red Wings to rebuild, we need a lot of kicks at the can,” Devellano said. “They certainly all don’t come through, but if you have 10 or 11 picks, if three come through real good for you, that’s what counts.”“You have to understand that while that playoff streak was intact, this was the criticism we started to get: ‘Oh, the Red Wings are starting to fade. They can’t even get out of the first round now. Yeah, you make the playoffs, but big deal. You go out in the first round.’

He also talked about the teams’ drive to keep “the streak” alive, despite it not necessarily being the best thing for the organization’s future. The outright opposition to blowing up the team in an effort to get the best possible draft pick wasn’t a thought that crossed management’s mind.

“Ken would address that sometimes with me to discuss it, and this is what I would say: ‘Ken, playoffs in the National Hockey League are very, very important to a lot of people. First of all, it’s important to ownership. There’s revenue involved. It’s important. It’s important to the coach, because they make their living on winning. They have to win to eat, OK?’

“I said, ‘How do we all of a sudden collapse this thing because we don’t win in the first round of the playoffs? How do we look [center Pavel] Datsyuk in the eye? How do we look [center Henrik] Zetterberg in the eye? They want to win.’ We had culture in our room. And by the way, as bad as we are now, guess what? There’s still culture, thanks to [Zetterberg], thanks to [defenseman Niklas] Kronwall. I’m telling you: It’s there.

“I said, ‘There’s too much importance to making the playoffs.’ I said, ‘Ken, the [criticism] will be four times as great if you miss the playoffs. Four times.’ And I’ve been right about that. “Look, the National Hockey League is the best hockey league in the world, and it is a business. Do we deny that? It has to be a business when you charge $100 for hockey tickets. It has to be a business when you pay players seven, eight, nine million. So to just say, ‘Oh, we’re just going to collapse the team,’ we weren’t going to do that.”

“As Ken always says — and he’s right — we do have to try to put a team on the ice. People pay good money to see us play. We have a coach that wants to win. He’s trying to keep his career alive and going. You’ve got character people like Zetterberg and Kronwall, just as an example. I’ll put [goaltender] Jimmy Howard in that mix. You owe them that you have to try to try, and we’ve done that.

“But if you look at the job Ken did the last two years, once the team fell out, he was active in going out to pick up additional draft choices to give us a chance to get rebuilding and get some real good talent in the system. Ken’s done a terrific job in picking up draft picks.

There have been calls for head coach Jeff Blashill to be replaced. However, Detroit’s management doesn’t appear ready to pull the trigger on such a move just yet. They still believe the coach who has won at every level before entering the NHL is the man for the job.

To be fair to our coach, Jeff Blashill, he came in at a tough time. He was following Mike Babcock, and the team was starting to decline. We knew that. Jeff knew that. So it’s been hard taking over a team that’s used to being so good and yet being on the decline. But that’s not Jeff Blashill’s fault. It’s just where the team’s at.”

And to be fair to Jeff, he’s pushed the team hard to try to compete. Most nights, we do. I know we lose a lot now, but if you watch the Red Wings play, for the most part, they play hard, they compete and we lose a lot of close games. We don’t get whipped out, so to speak.”

Of course, the teams who have been left standing at the end of the season raising the Stanley Cup (with the exception of the Red Wing in 2008) have had the benefit of a high draft pick they used to draft a superstar. Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin for Pittsburgh, Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews for Chicago, and Drew Doughty for Los Angeles all came to their respective teams after they bottomed out in the standings. The Red Wings are reluctant to outright “tank”, and are hoping they can get lucky as they did with later draft picks who turned into stars.

“I can’t answer it, because I don’t know the answer to it. What I will tell you is, if they were worried about us bottoming out, it’s happening right now. Fortunately or unfortunately, we are bottoming out. [Laughs] “Look it, it is what it is, and people are just going to try to have patience. I think the real good fans will have some understanding of what the process is, what we were able to accomplish. We’re not trying to live on what we accomplished all those years. We know now, as we have for a few years that, hey, we’ve got to draft.

“We haven’t been in a position for a quarter of a century to really draft difference-makers. We got lucky in some rounds. Notice I say lucky with Zetterberg (seventh round, No. 210, 1999 NHL Draft) and Datsyuk (sixth round, No. 171, 1998 NHL Draft). I said lucky, OK, because if we were really that bright, we’re honest enough to admit, we would have taken them in the first round, not six or seven. So we’re not going to [mislead] anybody about that. “We know what the business is like, and it’s getting even harder and harder to steal guys in the later rounds. [Director of European scouting] Hakan Andersson would tell you, when Jimmy D first started his European scouting program — and we were the first in; back in ’84 I started it — we had the territory virtually to ourselves. Those days are over.

They’ve been over for a long time. Hakan said, ‘I’ll go to a game in Sweden or in [the Czech Republic] or in Finland, and where there might have been two, three teams with me, Chicago’s got two people there, the [Toronto] Maple Leafs have got three people there, the [New York] Rangers got two people there …’ I mean, everybody’s seeing everybody. There are no secrets.

“Hey, we’ve got 11 picks this year in a seven-round draft, three in the third round. Now, when we go to the third round with three picks, we’re not hitting on all three. We’re not [misleading anyone]. Can we hit on one big-time?”