BRUINS AT DETROIT, 8 P.M., NBCSN, 98.5

As the Boston Bruins flipped management in the summer of 2015 and embarked on a recommitment to drafting and development, team owner Jeremy Jacobs acknowledged his admiration of the Detroit Red Wings, who are trying to make the playoffs for a 26th straight year.

Arguably the National Hockey League’s model franchise of the past quarter century, the Red Wings built their powerhouse team around centers Steve Yzerman and Sergei Federov in the early 1990s. They added pieces and made the 1995 Stanley Cup final, then won a record 62 games in 1995-96 before acquiring Brendan Shanahan and finally capturing the Cup in ’97, ’98 and 2002.

Thanks to some brilliant drafting from low positions – Pavel Datsyuk 171st overall in 1998 and Henrik Zetterberg 210th in ’99 – Detroit won the Cup again in 2008 before closing out their glorious run in ’09, falling a goal short in a seven-game rematch with Pittsburgh.

The Wings, who wallow at 19-19-6 as they prepare for the Bruins’ final scheduled appearance in the Joe Louis Arena – Detroit gets a new building next season – desperately need to build off of Monday’s 1-0 shutout of first-place Montreal in order to have any shot at continuing their 25-year playoff streak.

It’s an honorable pursuit for the Red Wings, who more notably are the last team to repeat as NHL champion. The Red Wings and the Penguins are the only teams in the salary-cap era to reach consecutive Cup finals.

For three years following that last deep run into the playoffs, Detroit kept its veteran roster largely intact and reeled off 102, 104 and 102-point campaigns.

Postseason success, however, has not continued. Three times in the four years that followed the Wings’ last Cup final appearance they advanced to the second round of the playoffs. They haven’t made it back to a conference final, they haven’t won a series since 2013 and, unless they become the monkey-wrench team of the Atlantic Division, are unlikely to challenge the Bruins’ all-time-best 29 straight winning seasons/playoff appearances (1968-96).

Dylan Larkin is a fine young talent, but Henrik Zetterberg (36) and Niklas Kronwall (35) are on the downside and Pavel Datsyuk has already left to play out the string at home in Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League.

That would be six years of trying to serve two masters – the present and the future – down the drain.

So, the question, beyond the payday of two or three postseason home dates, is: Are the Red Wings’ recent 93, 100 and 93-point seasons any better than the 96- and 93-point seasons with which the Bruins happened to miss?

Monday’s was another wasted date for 17,565 TD Garden attendees, who were treated to a flu-like performance and should have been treated to refunds on their way out the door.

These are the fans who could not get their hands on tickets for far less during the Bruins’ glory days of 2008-14 when they got hooked on this team, these colors and this logo. These are the fans who can’t say no when Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, Tuukka Rask and videoboard full of fun awaits them. They say yes now that many have jumped off the bandwagon, even though the Bruins aren’t quite what they were.

So there is a distinct pressure for the Bruins to copy the Red Wings, deliver a few familiar faces and enough wins to keep the torch burning for this generation.

It’s a difficult proposition, nonetheless.

Captain Zdeno Chara, the duct tape that the blue line together, will turn 40 before the season ends and, except for budding star David Pastrnak, the Bruins’ core hovers around age 30.

Is Boston in that much better shape than Detroit or are both teams, to borrow a phrase used last spring by Bruins president Cam Neely when contemplating a third straight miss, spinning their wheels?

The NHL is not the NBA, where teams get locked into the illusion of championship contention only to hit an impenetrable wall minus a superstar. Hockey is more about the team, more about its relationship with its coach, more about how they play. The star attractions invariably fit that mold.

The Red Wings made the transition from their 2002 championship to another title in ’08 on the shoulders of Datsyuk, Zetterberg and Nick Lidstrom. Bergeron, David Krejci and Rask lend credence to General Manager Don Sweeney’s like-minded plan, but all three may be in a career stage similar to Datsyuk’s and Zetterberg’s by the time Boston’s supporting cast is ready for another run at the Cup.

I once talked with Harry Sinden, who made the many decisions that made the Bruins’ major-pro-sports record 29 straight winning seasons/playoff appearances possible, and he said, “You never try to lose.”

However strewn with potholes, the path the Red Wings and Bruins are taking is the only viable road.

It is not unreasonable to envision the remaining peak years of Bergeron, Krejci, Marchand and Rask going up in the smoke of younger players’ rookie mistakes.

So what’s the solution?

Not the ’94 champion New York Rangers, who spent the rest of the decade trying to buy back an encore. Even when they put Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier together, they ended up not as close as they thought when the Eric Lindros Flyers, their seventh-game conquerors in the ’97 Eastern Conference final, were swept aside by Detroit.

The only team to rise, fall and rise again in the salary-cap era is Pittsburgh, and the Penguins did it by holding onto their core and developing a new supporting cast, which is exactly what the Bruins are trying to do now.

How many series did Pittsburgh win in the six seasons between their 2009 and 2016 championships? Four, including two the year they were swept by the Bruins (2013) in the conference finals. Yes, there was an in-season coaching change, but it came only after a dreadful start.

Even if the Bruins fill up the papers with quotes that incriminate their coach, it would be asking for even more travail to consider firing Claude Julien, one of the best in the business. Even a day after Jack Capuano, whose team beat his 4-0 on Monday at TD Garden, lost his job.

Especially after a run to glory, these in-between years are arduous. They test the patience of ownership and fandom alike, and the remedy makes no guarantees. But what the Bruins are doing now is the only reasonable approach.

The key for fans is not to mistake any extreme along the way, positive or negative, for the final destination and allow those extremes to drastically change their expectations and demands.

Sweeney has apparently done a good job securing a better long-range future for his team, and there may be a move or two he can make for his blue line that can make more probable the playoff appearance that the organization badly wants.

I wouldn’t mind seeing the Bruins take a couple of chances and whittle down their short list of prospects, gritting their teeth and dealing some of the others for one or two really good stabilizing influences. It’s got to be a bigger catch than the Stempniak and Liles variety that Sweeney acquired at last season’s deadline. Gotta go bigger if you’re going there at all.

Off the ice, while it might be too much to ask that the Bruins disavow their unholy alliance with ticket scalpers (street and sanitized alike), the key for them is not to take their fans for granted. Five minutes of sports radio, including their own flagship, should tell us that 2006 isn’t that long ago or far away.