Red Wings Hope Internal Growth can Make Up Lost Offense. Is that Feasible?

Red Wings general manager Steve Yzerman has been playing mathematician lately, and not just because he's been crunching the dollars and cents of expensive free agent deals. 

Instead, Yzerman has been thinking about goal totals, running the sum of goals in and goals out as his team evolved through the free agency period. On one side, his team lost 75 goals to free agency, On the other, his team gained 35 from free agents. The difference, a deficit 40 goals, is 14.5% of last season’s total production. Yeesh. 

If one takes a more analytical approach, the numbers look even worse. Using data collected by Moneypuck, Detroit’s offense shrank by 26.7% expected goals per 60 minutes and 16.7% actual goals per 60 minutes. Regardless of decimal points and percentages, the Red Wings are down a whole lot of production, and that stands to have severe impacts for a group whose abundance of scoring was the single greatest contributor to its near-miss playoff push.

Where can Detroit make up the lost goals? As much as free agency adds in Vladimir Tarasenko and Erik Gustafsson help out, Yzerman also believes that internal improvements might make up some lost ground, too.

“Just looking internally, we expect a little more out of Lucas Raymond,” Yzerman said Thursday. “Alex DeBrincat, his shooting percentage for his career was down a little bit last year and if you recall, the great scoring chances that he had hit the bar and went out, and we think that'll contribute a little bit more.” Then, he nodded to winger Jonatan Berggren adding some offense, and later emphasized how a full season of Patrick Kane could help recover some scoring, too

There are many high expectations in that passage. All in all, Yzerman's plan isn't to add scoring through additional players, but rather through more efficient scoring out of its current roster. It's about consolidation, not o much counting. In part, that comes from the necessity of such efficiency dictated by the price of free agents and trade assets. But, Yzerman believes in the inborn potential of his roster to build on elements of last season's performance. Particularly, his top six has room to grow that could prove useful to recovering some lost goal production.

How likely is this to happen? Let’s look at how Raymond, DeBrincat and Kane could make up the difference.

I. Lucas Raymond Builds on Breakout Second Half

In what he said about making up offense, Yzerman put a lot of stock in the way Raymond can become an impact player. And if you think he might just be flattering a young star, just know that Yzerman’s words are going to cost him at the negotiating table as he and Raymond work out the Swedish phenom's first contract extension.

And why shouldn’t Yzerman highlight Raymond’s significance to the offense as an area for internal growth? Raymond put together a career-best season in 2023-24, consistently providing offense with a team-leading 72-point season. 

What was particularly impressive about Raymond's season was the growth he showed in the second half when he really came into his own as an independent scorer. In the first half, a lot of Raymond’s scoring came with the assistance of two established stars in Dylan Larkin and Alex DeBrincat. Toward the end of the season, namely a struggling March with playoffs on the line and with Larkin out with an injury, Raymond started to produce more on his own. There were games when Raymond almost single-handedly carried the offense, like one week from March 12 to March 19 when he accounted for seven of Detroit’s 14 goals. And when the playoff push came down to the final games of the season, it was Raymond whose power moves and finishing ability became a frequent benefactor summing up to seven goals in eight games.

Such high production wasn’t so much out of the ordinary for Raymond, who consistently factored into the offense all season long. His takeover ability, however, showed he could be an impact player in his own right, not just a capable counterpart. That's what Yzerman is so excited about, and it's fair to believe that this mentality leaves further potential for Raymond to score even more.

For Detroit, there’s a hope that Raymond can be a bona fide star through his scoring, perhaps breaking the point-per-game plane or higher if he continues to produce with such effectiveness. 

For back-of-the-napkin estimations, let's say that Raymond scores an 82 points in 82 games with the same proportion of goals to assists as this season. The 10-point jump in his scoring would lead to four extra goals as far as Yzerman thinks of with goal totals.

What numbers and estimations can't capture is context. More so than just adding to a goal total, the timeliness and clutch factor of Raymond’s scoring can have a greater impact than season scoring totals. Ultimately, the Red Wings’ goal is not to score a lot, but to win a lot of games. While scoring is a means to that end, it’s the game-winning mentality of a scorer like Raymond that can get them there. As far as this belief goes, the end of last season put Raymond stock on high.

II. DeBrincat's Bad Luck Runs Out

Back in March, I wrote about how Alex DeBrincat was struggling through one of his worst shooting seasons in his career. Whether one blames luck, skill or a little bit of both, DeBrincat was downright snake-bit at times. He hit the post or crossbar 12 times, which was a career high. He also missed the net 32.3% of the time on unblocked shots, finishing the season with a 5.7% net miss percentage above expected. His previous worst percentage was just 0.4%. DeBrincat never missed the net so much as he did last season, and it’s why he didn’t score nearly as much as Detroit expected him to when it acquired him last offseason.

That’s why Yzerman and the Red Wings expect a rebound. For a sniper of DeBrincat’s caliber — who has so often fallen on the right side of luck and skill — it’s a reasonable expectation. But how many more goals might an average DeBrincat season add?

Let's take last season's stats and adjust them to DeBrincat's average finishing capability. Striking out his highest and lowest net miss percentages as outliers, DeBrincat averages around a -1.8% net miss rate in an average season. If he was expected to miss 26.6% of his unblocked shots in 2023-24, a season with his average miss rate would’ve seen him miss 24.8% of the time. In terms of shots that missed the net, his total shrinks from 113 to just 91. And while an extra 22 shots on net doesn’t seem like a game-changer, that calculates to around 2.5 goals based on his shooting percentage. In other words, DeBrincat hits the 30-goal mark instead of falling just short at 27.

DeBrincat might make up for some of Detroit’s lost production if he shot closer to his career average, but three extra goals isn’t enough to replace all of what the Red Wings lost. It’s unreasonable to expect a renaissance from DeBrincat to be a significant boost for Detroit next season. He might help offset some losses, this impact will have to come as part of the sum of many different contributions.

III. More Time with Showtime

Last season, Patrick Kane played just 50 games after joining Detroit as a free agent in November. Coming off a hip resurfacing surgery that no one else in the NHL had really returned successfully from, Kane became an instant impact player for the Red Wings, scoring nearly a point per game and leading the roster with 3.07 points per 60 minutes. 

Logically, more games with Kane would lead to a lot of recovered scoring. There are also ways it could lead to an even higher scoring rate.

A big question here is how exactly Kane will follow up last season. Mind you, this offseason is Kane’s first in a long time that he can train — not just rehab, but really try to make himself a better hockey player. And he also doesn’t have to jump on a moving train by entering the lineup midseason. This might allow Kane to score at an even higher rate, defying father time with an all-star level season.

To play it safe, let's assume Kane puts in the same production rate as he did in 2023-24, but across a full 82-game schedule. He would finish with roughly a 77-point season. Focusing in on scored goals as Yzerman uses in his goal math, a full season with Kane comes to about 33 goals, or otherwise an additional 13 goals. This tracks with the result if one extrapolates Kane's 1.31 goals per 60 minutes to his added ice time in a full season, which rounds out to 12.8 added goals. 

All in all, a full year of Showtime would lead to an additional 13 goals. Now that is a way to recover some offense.

The Bottom Line

All in all, four more goals from Raymond, three more from DeBrincat and 13 more from Kane leads to 20 recovered goals. In that case, Detroit would only miss out on 20 goals compared to last season, which still is significant but is not nearly as shocking as a 40-goal deficit. These results would lead to slightly higher scoring rates per 60 minutes for each player, which cuts down Detroit’s 16.7% goal loss.

There are other ways that additional goals can be recovered, too. Yzerman pointed out the effect that a full season of Jonatan Berggren in the NHL could add, and there's a chance a rookie like Carter Mazur or Marco Kasper makes the team. Those adds boost the offense, too. 

However, there's a major flaw in looking at sheer goal totals and optimizing the result: NHL seasons never go optimally. There's always going to be a player who underperforms, or someone that gets injured, or someone that unexpectedly defies expectations with a big year. As much as back-of-the-napkin estimates might quell the alarm bells that Detroit's offensive shrinkage set off, assuming a perfect result next season is a fool's errand. 

How successful Detroit can be depends on a lot of factors — health, chemistry, even luck in DeBrincat’s case. But ultimately, the Red Wings' roster construction leaves them sparse options but to lean extensively on Raymond, DeBrincat and Kane to give them more scoring oomph.

“If Lucas Raymond continues on the same trajectory that he finished the season on, he's a legit impact player,” Yzerman said. “We'll have Patrick Kane for an entire season. … We’re shaped a little bit differently, and hopefully we can build off the momentum — all of our guys — that they created throughout the season.”

There’s another way that Detroit can get better: team defense. The Red Wings can lower the number of goals they need to score to be competitive by shoring up defensively. As ole Benjamin Franklin once said, a penny saved is a penny earned, and for a guy whose face is plastered on the $100 bill that’s sage advice. By saving more goals, Detroit can lower the scoring cost to earn a win.

“We got some incredibly timely goals from players to win some of these games very dramatically,” Yzerman said. “Maybe it won't be as dramatic next year, and maybe that's not a bad thing. Maybe we'll win some games with lower scoring and not have these wild comebacks, and we also might not have some of these wild losses where we were leading, too.”

Maybe Yzerman is right. Adding goaltender Cam Talbot and checking forward Tyler Motte through free agency were clear advancements in this regard, and a full season of Simon Edvinsson should chip in as well. Offense and defense don’t exist in vacuums, and improving one phase has definitive impacts on the necessity of excellence in the other.

So while even the most optimistic goal math shows a clear loss of scoring for Detroit — and while its plan to consolidate offense might be quite hopeful — there are still ways the Red Wings can be competitive. 

As uncertain as these may be, and as impossible as it is to point out specific individual improvements in the middle of the offseason, Detroit has a path to the right side of the playoff bubble. 

Expect Raymond, DeBrincat and Kane to be at the forefront.