Talk:Detroit Red Wings

Hall of Famers

Jack Adams is listed as a Hall of Fame builder. He was inducted as a player. If he could be inducted in multiple categories he would almost definitely be inducted for his work with the Red Wings, but he isn't in as a builder, and never played for them. This list also has Brian Kilrea, Bud Poile, and Al Arbour listed as player inductees. They were inducted as builders. Most similar to Keith Allen and Murray Costello, who have notes saying that they played for the Red Wings, are acknowledged for their affiliation, but went in as builders despite never working for the team outside of their playing days. Your mileage may vary on Bud Poile there, he did some coaching for Red Wings minor league affiliates. 99.237.222.68 (talk) 12:43, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

You may want to bring this up at WP:HOCKEY, as I suspect there's a lot of these misplaced individuals, throughout the NHL team pages. GoodDay (talk) 13:53, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Detroit Red Wings

I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Detroit Red Wings's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "HHOF":

• From Chicago Blackhawks: "Blackhawks in the Hockey Hall of Fame". Chicago Blackhawks. 2018. Retrieved April 11, 2018.
• From St. Louis Blues: "Award Winners". St. Louis Blues. 2018. Retrieved April 12, 2018.

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. Feel free to remove this comment after fixing the refs. AnomieBOT⚡ 16:25, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

Why no head coaches section?

It's usually listed, for example, see Montreal Canadiens#Head coaches or Toronto Maple Leafs#Head coaches.

It even has a page already: List of Detroit Red Wings head coaches

It's only linked to waaaay at the bottom, inside the franchise box. Sarke (talk) 04:17, 15 January 2025 (UTC)

Streaks and almost-streaks

I made a change to the article at [1] by removing some information about the team's streaks, and @Sbaio reverted it in [2] with the edit summary "rvt POV edit". I would ask Sbaio directly: please identify what the objectionable point of view of my edit was.

For reference, my edit summary was "The details about the streaks and almost-streaks of playoff appearances are trivial and subject to several biases related to the changing size of the league and the playoffs over a century-long span. Cover it at History of the Detroit Red Wings or later." When I say trivial, I mean that the facts are self-evident if true, but not particularly important from an editorial perspective. When 50% of each conference (presently) qualifies for the playoffs no matter how bad the team is, but that was handled very differently in the past (different conferences, different league size, different playoff rules), and assignment to conference has been vaguely geographic and vaguely arbitrary depending on the era, there is no expectation for a streak of a particular arbitrary size to be a good metric for the quality of the team over the long term; it is correlated, but that's as much as those figures say. It is therefore reductionist to present it so early in the article as if it is incontrovertible and basic and requires no citation.

That's why I suggested that it be covered in the history article or lower in this article. There, there would be room to expand upon, and cite sources for the opinions. (I specifically request citations, wherever these facts end up.) For example, "[t]hey struggled...only making the playoffs twice" implies a link between their struggle and ability to qualify. But the counterfactual would be, if their conference was unusually strong during that period, would it really be necessary to struggle to not qualify? So we need a reliable source to make the statement that they struggled, and to synthesize the connection to their playoff performance. (I'm pretty sure that the conference wasn't actually unreasonably strong...but are we going to cite me as the reliable source?)

As another example, who chose the delineation dates for the playoff almost-streaks, and why are they significant? (1932–1966: 30 of 34, 1967–1983: 2 of 16, and 1984–2016: 30 of 32.) Was there a change in leadership at those dates? A change in league composition? Nothing at all; that's just the mathematically simplest way to express it with a small number of outliers? As a counterfactual, if we instead grouped this performance by uniform 12-year Chinese-style periods, would the conclusion be just as evident? (If not, then the choice of dates matters, and is a matter of opinion requiring a citation.) TheFeds 22:54, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

Your edit was POV, because you for some reason picked the 1983–84 season as a cutoff. Why 1983–84? Why not 1990–91 or some other season? The part that you removed quite clearly indicates the success and downfall of Detroit's playoff appearances, which is discussed in the history section. This is not the place to nitpick what you like or do not like. You could attempt to change the wording a bit but not to remove it completely. – sbaio 18:12, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

I left the 1984–present President's Trophy (best regular-season record in the league) and Stanley Cup (league champions) mentions as-is. Instead of me picking a cutoff date, that was the cutoff date that already existed in the article—but I agree with you that it is also arbitrary and uncited. At the time, I judged that because best record and champion are very much less subjective measures of success than merely making the playoffs, and because the period was bounded by the present, that was a relatively neutral way of following the (retained) statement that the Red Wings had 11 championships in total, while also maintaining some implication of the level of their recent success in summary form at the top of the article.

It's interesting that that seemed like an ostensibly non-neutral point of view. (How would that point of view even be qualitatively described? This is not a case of picking on the Red Wings.) Also, the article talk page is specifically where editorial decisions that provoked questions—what to keep or remove or change—get discussed, so yes, I'm confident that I'm in the right place. TheFeds 20:29, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

First of all, I am not going to continue this discussion if all posts will be WP:WALLOFTEXT. Secondly, Presidents' Trophy did not exist before the 1985–86 season so please get familiar with the topic before continuing to edit. – sbaio 15:18, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

Who picked the "1983–84 season as a cutoff", and listed both the "regular season first-place finishes" (they linked to trophy, but implication of text is clear) and Stanley Cup since that date? If it wasn't me, don't accuse me of a POV or lack of familiarity.

Would you like to make a proposal for how the section should read? TheFeds 18:06, 21 May 2025 (UTC)

Paragraph is good as it is. So it stays as there is no consensus unless other editors come and give their opinions. – sbaio 03:04, 22 May 2025 (UTC)

That sounds like a case for WP:DRNC (essay). I asserted that the facts lack sources and lack intrinsic significance. So it is not good as-is, and only one of us has made serious proposals about how to improve the content. Let me assume that the call for "other editors to come and give their opinions" recognizes that there probably aren't many watchers of this page; therefore I will ask in advance, are there any complaints about WP:Canvassing, or should I just go ask at WP:3O to forestall that concern? TheFeds 16:38, 23 May 2025 (UTC)

No real proposals were made as just the part that someone did not like was removed, while the pre-1983 years were omitted suggesting the team did not exist before that. You ought to notify WP:NHL about this as editors with knowledge about this subject will comment instead of editors from WP:3O, which is the last option. – sbaio 06:40, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

@TheFeds I am responding to your very first comment. I don't know how it was considered a POV edit to remove lede material. However, the removal of such material doesn't allow the reader to see when the Red Wings struggled and succeeded. The first date is because that's when they're named the Red Wings. The second date is because that is the first of consecutive missed playoffs seasons. The 1983–84 season is where there aren't consecutive missed seasons until 2016–17. So, it's not entirely arbitrary. As for how successful a team is during a time period, that's for the reader to find out in the history section. What particularly would you like to have edited. I'm sure we can come to an agreement. Conyo14 (talk) 21:58, 24 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for identifying major events bracketing the periods. One of my concerns was that the periods could have been cherry-picked to support an original synthesis about when the team was and wasn't strong. The ESPN citation for the "Dead Wings" period is an example of what I was requesting that we follow from, because that is sourced commentary about the reasons and the duration of the period. (But note my concern that making the playoffs is not a great indicator of success in the NHL.) And this Free Press article has a slightly different formulation of the reasons their performance changed post-1983.

The 1983 draft transformed the Wings. Yzerman led the team into the playoffs in his first year, and soon he, Probert, Klima, and Kocur restored the franchise’s good name. They made the Wings a better team in the 1980s — not a Stanley Cup team, but for the most part, a playoff team. That draft class enabled the Wings to win a few playoff rounds, to sell tickets, to fill Joe Louis Arena. It took them from really bad to really competitive, from unwatchable to entertaining. The change began when Ilitch bought the team and when he hired Devellano. But it was Yzerman, Probert, Klima, and Kocur who buried the Dead Wings.

As an example of better metrics, see this commentary from Detroit Hockey Now. They talk about two streaks of not making the playoffs, but contrast several performance metrics to conclude the team was much stronger in one than in the other:

With Thursday’s 7-6 shootout loss to the Buffalo Sabres, Detroit was assured to be missing the Stanley Cup playoffs for the seventh season in a row. That equals the franchise mark previously set from 1970-71 through 1976-77. That was a time starting out from the Darkness with Harkness and concluding with arguably the worst edition of the Red Wings in the history of the franchise. And yet, this Red Wings squad feels nothing at all like that grim shadow that was cast by that 1976-77 team. [...] At the conclusion of the 1976-77 NHL season, the Red Wings were last in the NHL with a 16-55-9 record. They lost at least nine more games than every other team in the 21-team league. Detroit was last in goals scored (183) and third-last in goals against (309). The current Red Wings team has improved on last season’s club in virtually every metric. At 80 points, that’s their highest total since garnering 93 points in 2015-16, the most recent season that was ending with a Detroit playoff appearance. The club’s goals for per game (3.00) is up from last season (2.77), while the goals against per game (3.27) is lower (3.78). Both the power play (21.8%) and penalty killing (78.7%) are showing improvement (16.3%, 73.8%) from last season.

Yes, that material needs to be interpreted and qualified, and thus would bloat the summary. That's why I was saying to put it somewhere else. TheFeds 20:14, 25 May 2025 (UTC)

I agree that this stuff can be well explained in prose. However, for the lede, what is there is fine since we are not defining success as only playoffs or regular season, but rather both. In this case, success is that the Red Wings made the playoffs with such high frequency and actually won the Stanley Cup multiple times during their streaks. It is in comparison to the current active playoffs streak of the Maple Leafs, whose nine years has no playoff success. So, having that important distinction in prose is okay, whereas the reader viewing the first paragraph will have more interest in how these time periods relate to their success. Perhaps it might be best to remove the word entirely and explain what happened in these time periods, similar to how the lede of List of Detroit Red Wings seasons is formatted. @Sbaio thoughts? Conyo14 (talk) 21:13, 25 May 2025 (UTC)