Thoughts on the Red Wings’ Alternate Captaincy

We’re ten games into the Red Wings’ season, the point where one might want to be able to make some assessments.  I’m not sure I can, though.

The play of this Wings team is confusing.  And perhaps confused?  I don’t know what to say about it.

Also confusing: Their unprecedented alternate captaincy rotation.  That is a little easier to talk about.

That Detroit is rotating it’s alternate captains is not out of the ordinary.  At the start of the 2022-23 season, when seeking to replace the departed Danny DeKeyser and Marc Staal as alternates, the team very pointedly did not name any specific players.  I said at the time that it sure looked like then-new arrivals David Perron, Ben Chiarot, and Andrew Copp were being tapped for veteran leadership (and that combination did wear the A for the vast majority of games for that season and the next).

That said, we also saw Moritz Seider was an alternate early in the 2022-23 campaign and Michael Rasmussen get a letter twice that year.  Last season, Rasmussen got one more game with an A and Patrick Kane got one as well, along with four games where the Red Wings only assigned two letters.  Perron, Chiarot, and Copp may have been the de facto alternates but they were never named as such and the team seemed perfectly comfortable giving the A to someone else at their expense.

Coming into this season, Connor Earegood of The Hockey News noted Detroit head coach Derek Lalonde’s thoughts on replacing Perron as an alternate.

“We ask guys to lead whether they wear a letter or not wear a letter. We’ve done a really good job inside that locker room of building our leadership core. Many different guys into it. No rush on that by any means. We’ll probably take a look at a lot of different things.”

Thus far, “different” describes it.

The Red Wings have rolled out Dylan Larkin wearing the C for all nine games thus far, as would be expected.  Aiding him has been a single alternate.  Chiarot, Copp, and Kane have each worn the A twice (never in consecutive games) while Seider, J.T. Compher, and Lucas Raymond have each worn it once.

The Wings have gone with two (or fewer) captains in a game plenty of times.  As I noted, they did it four times in the 2023-24 season.  They went without the full set of captains 38 times in 2021-22 and 25 times in the pandemic-shortened 2021 season.  Those cases were all due to injury.  This time they seem to be doing it just because they can.

Much like I can’t say why the Red Wings are playing at the level they have been, I also don’t know why they’re doing this with their alternate captaincy.

I know it’s unimportant.  Officials – despite the rulebook – don’t seem to have a problem talking to a guy who doesn’t have a letter on his jersey and that’s the only reason to name captains anyway.  Maybe my frustration with it is simply a relic of when I became a fan, when Steve Yzerman was The Captain – capitalization intentional – and that meant something.

These days, teams go multiple consecutive seasons without even naming a captain.  The Wings did that between the LTIRetirement of Henrik Zetterberg and the ascension of Dylan Larkin to the captaincy.  They didn’t formally name alternates in 2022.  Maybe not even bothering to roll out two alternates is just the next logical step.