It's easy to pile on. The Detroit Red Wings deserve it. Every bit of it.
Miss the playoffs for a decade; sit there and take it. Fire a general manager, pay a hiring committee, boast about sifting through numerous candidates and take months to do it, all just to slap an interim tag on an internal candidate two days before training camp?
Expect some boos – or worse: indifference.
Not that there was much of that Tuesday, Sept. 15, when news broke that owner Christopher Ilitch promoted Shawn Horcoff as his interim general manager and then released a statement saying he would find a permanent one during the season or maybe after the season or, well ... who knows?
And ain’t that grand?
Not to mention confidence-inspiring?
That Ilitch knows what he’s doing,
that his grand plan or vision – or whatever you want to call what he told The Detroit News on Tuesday – is actually going to work?
He purportedly once had a vision for District Detroit, too, yet way too much of that land around Little Caesars Arena remains tucked away behind chain-link fences and some nylon meshing meant to pretend empty dirt or deteriorating buildings aren't on the other side.
That wink-wink grows more tiresome by the season, just as the Wings' fits and starts – and ultimate collapses – grow more wearying by the year.
None of this has to do with Horcoff, of course – nothing against the new interim general manager. By all accounts, he’s earned respect as the Wings’ director of player development and later as the assistant general manager of the Wings and the general manager of the Grand Rapids Griffins.
Maybe he’s the one, and Ilitch will have stumbled onto a long-term visionary who rights this listing ship. And ex-captain Dylan Larkin will figure out how not to fade after February, or Horcoff will find a way to move him for a player that moves the needle and doesn’t mind being here.
And maybe the Wings' 2026 first-round draft pick, J.P. Hurlbert, will be a lovely parting gift from Steve Yzerman, and he’ll turn those tantalizing puck skills into something recognizably difference-making on the NHL ice.
At least Yzerman took a swing with Hurlbert, something of a departure for the Wings' former general manager, who traded back into the first round to take a chance on the slick, puck-handling winger with a nose for the net.
More unlikely things have happened, no?
But then many of you are wondering – no, seething over – why Yzerman got to make the pick in the first place, and you’d be right to wonder. All Ilitch could say, when asked, was that he’d made his determination to remove Yzerman too close to free agency and the draft, and therefore needed to leave him in.
Hey, it’s possible that Hurlbert will work out. The Kansas City Chiefs once let a general manager run the draft when they knew they were about to let him go. He used the team’s first-round pick to take Patrick Mahomes.
No, Hurlbert isn’t the hockey equivalent of the likely Hall of Fame quarterback. But sometimes a team gets lucky. And maybe it’s time the Wings were.
Or not. I hear you ... you make your own luck, and all that. But not always. In fact, almost no team in any major professional sport in this country wins at any kind of clip without a break – or four.
So, again, maybe Horcoff represents one of those breaks. Maybe he’ll get restricted free agent Simon Edvinsson under contract and re-up Alex DeBrincat and find a way to get the best out of Larkin – or at least get something for Larkin.
Maybe he’ll stabilize and analyze and bring a bit of the analytical approach Ilitch has said he loves; whatever you think of Detroit Tigers president of baseball operations Scott Harris, his lean into the numbers helped end the Tigers’ playoff drought.
The difference is that the Tigers are ahead of the Wings in terms of finding and developing young talent. Different tasks, obviously, between the two sports. It should also be mentioned that neither club has shown a deft hand at consistently acquiring established pro talent.
So what now?
None of this looks good. At all. The Wings’ ownership has bobbed in the wind like a balloon character bouncing cluelessly down Woodward Ave in the Thanksgiving parade. That may be fun in November, but not so much in April, when the season already has flamed out.
So call it a clown show if you must. Or an embarrassment, a laughingstock, the long, slow demise of an iconic franchise. Go ahead, let the air out after all those years of watching the team go nowhere, and then watching the search to replace the Hall of Fame player – who was supposed to bring back a June parade down Woodward – flail until the eve of training camp.
Dysfunctional? How else should anyone see it?
But then that doesn’t matter, at least it shouldn't
It’s all just white noise. All that matters is that Ilitch – accidentally or not – finds the right person to get this franchise back to its storied place. Maybe it’s Horcoff, going from interim to full-time. Maybe it’s someone else.
Whoever it is, the noise fades a little when the team makes the playoffs. Do that and this search and this offseason and this entire unfortunate slide disappears in a hurry.
Winning is like that. It’s time for it to start once more.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
For (preseason) openers: Blue Jackets
Matchup: Red Wings (41-31-10 in 2025-26) at Columbus (40-30-12 in 2025-26); exhibition opener.
Faceoff: 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 21; Nationwide Arena, Columbus, Ohio.
TV/radio: None.
Regular-season opener: vs. N.Y. Rangers; 6:30 p.m. Oct. 2; TNT, truTV.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Christopher Ilitch's Red Wings tenure undeniably dysfunctional
