Detroit opened camp with an ugly picture: one of the best young players on its blue line skating in a non-contact practice, no contract in hand, cracking jokes about it.
"I'm on a PTO (professional tryout) actually. I'm not stressed at all," Simon Edvinsson said Friday, Sept. 18. He was laughing about it. He didn't have to be.
Understand what a PTO is. It's the deal a fringe veteran signs to earn a roster spot he isn't guaranteed. Edvinsson is not that. He's the sixth-overall pick from 2021, coming off a season in which he put up nine goals and 25 points in 72 games while averaging more than 22 minutes a night. That's a top-pairing workload for a player still on the right side of his prime. And he showed up to camp treated, on paper, like a guy hoping to make the team.
None of that is on him. The front office let this happen.
The front office left the chair empty for two months
Detroit removed Steve Yzerman as general manager on July 15, ending a run that began in 2019. Then the seat sat empty. For roughly two months, with the roster in flux and one of its most valuable young players an unsigned restricted free agent, the Red Wings had nobody with the authority to negotiate a contract. Owner Chris Ilitch ran the search himself, brought in an outside firm hunting for an analytics-driven executive, and still didn't have a permanent hire when camp opened.
The search wasn't just slow. It got messy. A leading external candidate, Tigers GM Jeff Greenberg, withdrew from consideration. Detroit finally named Shawn Horcoff interim GM in the middle of September, and only then did anyone have the power to actually make Edvinsson an offer. His agent, J.P. Barry, told Expressen bluntly that Horcoff "now has the authority to negotiate on behalf of the club."
The player's own representative had to announce, in September, that there was finally someone on the other end of the phone. This is a rebuild in year ten of a playoff drought that's the longest in franchise history and the longest active one in the NHL. You'd think Detroit, of all teams, understood that competence in the front office is the whole job.
The coach isn't hiding from it
When a coach publicly takes the blame off his player and hands it to management, that's not spin. Todd McLellan said it plainly: "He's not signed right now but it's not his fault. We haven't had a lot of ability in the organization to get that stuff done... Give him credit, he's come over and now it's time for our organization to work fast with him and fair."
That's a head coach conceding, on the record, that his employer couldn't finish a basic piece of business. Horcoff isn't pretending otherwise either. "Simon is a fantastic player and a bright spot in our organization," he said, "so we're going to get to work on that contract as soon as we can and hopefully have something done here shortly." Fine. But "as soon as we can" would have landed a lot better in June.
The GM vacuum cost more than one player
The Edvinsson delay didn't happen in isolation. The same vacancy swallowed the Dylan Larkin situation, too. Larkin requested a trade this summer, the Minnesota Wild reportedly tried to acquire him, and the talks stalled with no GM to run them. Detroit then stripped Larkin of the captaincy and announced it would open the 2026-27 season without naming a new one. ESPN went further, tying Patrick Kane's free-agent departure back to Chicago in part to the uncertainty hanging over the organization.
So the tally on a summer without a decision-maker: a top young defenseman left dangling, a captaincy blown up without a plan, a trade request frozen, and a veteran walking out the door. That's a lot of self-inflicted damage for a team that can't afford any.
The clock is real
Edvinsson can practice, but he can't play a game until he signs. The Red Wings open the season Oct. 2 against the Rangers, which gives both sides a short runway if they want him available for opening night. There's also a league deadline in the background: restricted free agents have until Dec. 1 to sign or they can't sign until the new league year. Neither side sounds panicked, and a projection floating around of a seven-year deal worth as much as $63 million should be treated as exactly that, a rumor, not a signed term sheet.
The contract will probably get done, and when it does, plenty of people will shrug and say no harm, no foul. Don't buy it. The harm was making a 22-minute-a-night defenseman audition for a job he already earned, because the people above him couldn't hire a general manager in a reasonable amount of time. Edvinsson handled it with a grin. The organization doesn't get to hide behind his patience.
