Wings don’t want to go to bottom to get to top

One day, the Detroit Red Wings may be forced to tank to get the player, or players, required to return to greatness. But not today. Or any day soon. As bad as it seems right now in Hockeytown, and it’s very bad with a team that can’t score to save its life, Ken Holland and Co. have no intention of waving any white towels and going down the path travelled by the Maple Leafs, Sabres, Oilers, Islanders and others.

Even if NHL history says being terrible for a time a decade ago brought Stanley Cups to Chicago, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, that’s not what the proud (stubborn?) Red Wings are planning on doing.

Not even with the team sitting with the 24th best winning percentage (.484) in the NHL after winning six of its first 18 home games this season.

Instead, the intention of the Wings, with a brand, spanking new arena set to open next fall, is to resist what seems to be the irresistible logic of the NHL in the salary cap era. Fight the system. Compete. Find another path back to being a contender, and a champion again. We’ll see if it works. You have to admire the Wings in some ways for trying to prove the NHL isn’t a league when to be really good you must first intentionally set out to be really bad.

They’re not the only team trying to do so. Boston is trying. The Rangers, too, and with a fair bit of success. Vancouver as well, although the standings suggest the Canucks are getting to the bottom of the standings anyway.

But none of those teams are the Red Wings. None of those teams have made the Stanley Cup playoffs every year since 1991. None, like the Wings, have made post-season play in every season since the cap was instituted.

None of those teams went to the Cup final six times in the last quarter-century and walked away with the big silver milk jug on four occasions.

Detroit has been a special, special franchise for all of Gary Bettman’s tenure. No wonder there’s no appetite within the organization to adopt the lose-to-win program.

Still, Detroit is nine years removed from its last Cup, four years away from taking Chicago to overtime in Game 7 of the 2013 playoffs and now sits five points out of a playoff spot, needing to play .618 hockey over the next 51 games just to match the 93-point total that barely got the club into the playoffs last spring.

So, if not to tank, what is the plan in Motown?

Read. React. Draft and develop, and hope. That’s the plan. For starters, read and react to what the current team, and more important, the current group of young players is capable of achieving. That group would include goalie Petr Mrazek, forwards Dylan Larkin, Tomas Tatar, Gustav Nyquist and Riley Sheahan, and defencemen Dan Dekeyser, Xavier Ouellet and Ryan Sproul, with the likes of Anthony Mantha, Andreas Athanasiou, Tyler Bertuzzi, Evgeny Svechnikov and Dennis Cholowski set to become more important players in the near future.

If that group isn’t good enough to make the Wings a contender again — and right now evidence suggests that may be the case — it will be proven out in the standings over the next two to three years.

If that group flops, something more drastic will be required. For now, Wings management won’t trade futures for immediate help the way it used to every spring, and will hope against hope that the scouting tandem of Tyler Wright and Jeff Finley can find gems in the later rounds of the draft, players like Shea Weber, Vladimir Tarasenko, P.K. Subban and Jamie Benn. Like Johan Franzen, Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk.

If Wright and Finley can do that, and if that group led by Larkin is good enough, and if a good free agent or two decides they want to play in the new Little Caesars Arena in a few years, then the Wings will be fine and possibly a contender.

Otherwise, they’ll have to opt for the long, agonizingly slow rebuild around 2020, and the canny Holland, who has been on the Wings scene since 1984, probably won’t be the GM doing the rebuilding.

You could argue, of course, that not drafting in the top 10 since 1991 has finally caught up to the Wings, and that they are merely postponing the inevitable. But the Wings don’t see it that way.

They see teams like Toronto get Auston Matthews, but understand there isn’t a Matthews every year, and that the draft lottery means the worst teams don’t always get the best players. A team like Winnipeg/ Atlanta is no closer to the prize than when Zach Bogosian went third overall in 2008.

Teams like San Jose, the Rangers and the Minnesota Wild, meanwhile, are contending without tumbling all the way to the bottom of the standings. None of those teams have a player like Connor McDavid that they harvested at the top of the draft after a horrible season, but have built teams with large numbers of above average players and found a star another way. New York stole Ryan McDonough from Montreal. The Sharks traded for Brent Burns. Minny got Ryan Suter and Zach Parise in free agency.

Now, it’s true none of the Sharks, Rangers or Wild have won a Cup recently. Perhaps the Wings should be trying to execute a different plan, one that involves a lot more shortterm pain.

But these are the Red Wings, folks. After selling prime rib for 25 years, there’s just no appetite to peddle hamburger, even if logic insists that’s the thing to do.

If any team can build a champion without plummeting all the way to the bottom first, it might be Detroit. Otherwise, all resistance is futile. Damien Cox is the co-host of Prime Time Sports on Sportsnet 590 The FAN. He spent nearly 30 years covering a variety of sports for The Star. Follow him @DamoSpin. His column appears Tuesday and Saturday.