Detroit Red Wings Showing Their Incredible Ability to Reload in 2014-15

I’m young for a hockey fan, not yet 30 years old, but I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of changes in the NHL. Lockouts, a salary cap, the start and end of the dead-puck era, the demise of the enforcer, shootouts. When I start making a list, the game has seen some pretty dramatic shifts in the time I’ve been a fan of it.

But there have been a few constants, too. One of them is that the Detroit Red Wings are old, and they’re going to be in real trouble when their current stars decline and retire.

I’m not sure when I first became aware that the Red Wings were an old team—probably sometime in the late 1990s when they were still coached by Scotty Bowman. The defence was leaning on old-timers such as Larry Murphy, Dmitri Mironov and Slava Fetisov. Steve Yzerman was closing in on 35, and guys like Igor Larionov and Doug Brown were important secondary pieces.  

Duane Burleson/Associated Press

The names have changed over the years, and with each loss, hockey punditry has wondered if this would be the one that would end Detroit’s reign as an NHL power. The departures of Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov were seen as critical blows, but they were muffled by the emergence of Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg.

When Nicklas Lidstrom retired a little over two years ago, many saw that as the blow that would finally break the Red Wings and force the team to enter a retooling/rebuilding cycle.

While each of those losses hurt—Lidstrom especially—Detroit has been stubbornly immune to the cyclical nature of NHL team-building. Incredibly, despite years of competence, the team is still finding ways to replenish its ranks internally.

Nowhere is that more evident than at the forward position. With the exception of a few holdovers from the old guard (notably Datsyuk, Zetterberg and Johan Franzen), the majority of the team’s core players are either in the prime of their careers or just entering them. The list is impressive:

Player	Age	Games	Points	TOI/G
Justin Abdelkader	27	37	24	17:43
Gustav Nyquist	25	44	30	17:11
Tomas Tatar	24	44	29	15:24
Riley Sheahan	23	44	19	15:21
Darren Helm	27	44	20	14:26
Luke Glendening	25	44	7	14:06
Tomas Jurco	22	37	12	12:12

That’s more than half of the team’s top 12 forwards who are still years away from age 30 (or, in Red Wings terms, at least a decade away from retirement). Gustav Nyquist, Tomas Tatar, Riley Sheahan and Tomas Jurco represent the future of the team; Justin Abdelkader and Darren Helm are the kind of young veterans that form the backbone of most NHL rosters.   

Gerry Thomas/Getty Images

The defence is older, but it too has some hopeful signs. The club’s No. 2 defender is 24-year-old Danny DeKeyser, while 25-year-old Brendan Smith also plays significant minutes. Significantly, the team also has some important prospects maturing in the AHL; between Xavier Ouellet, Ryan Sproul and Alexey Marchenko, the Red Wings have a trio of solid prospects who aren’t far from being NHL-ready. (For more on the players in the system, see our review of the team’s top 10 prospects).

In net, Jimmy Howard is only 30 and signed to a long-term contract, and behind him, 22-year-old Petr Mrazek shows all the signs of developing into an NHL starter.

It’s a truly remarkable pattern that's indicative of an organization that just gets things right at every level. That’s not to say that the Red Wings don’t make mistakes (Stephen Weiss still has three years left to go on his contract), but they’re built to withstand them.

When Detroit picked Dylan Larkin 15th overall last summer, it was the team’s highest selection in more than two decades, but despite this disadvantage, the team’s scouting staff has consistently been able to find serviceable NHL players in the depths of the draft.

Some of that is owed to a strong developmental system; the Red Wings have more patience with their prospects than any other NHL team, and as a result, they always seem to have good players just waiting for an opportunity. Head coach Mike Babcock is acknowledged as one of the best in the game, and along the way, the team has developed a number of excellent NHL coaches, with Jeff Blashill, the current head coach of the Wings' AHL affiliate in Grand Rapids, likely to join that group in the near future.

From top to bottom, the organization is built the right way, and it has been able to defy the typical oscillation between success and failure that most NHL clubs go through. As of this writing, the club is only three points out of first place in the Eastern Conference, rebounding nicely from an injury-plagued 2013-14 campaign that saw it barely make the playoffs.

It’s been a remarkable run and isn’t over yet.

Statistics courtesy of NHL.com. 

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.