For 25 straight seasons, spanning from 1990 to 2016, the Detroit Red Wings were a playoff team. The regular season was mostly a formality for over two decades in Detroit as it always ended with a postseason berth.



Until it wasn’t, and thus a new regular season formality was born. The Red Wings have missed the playoffs handily in three straight seasons and it looks extremely unlikely that the team’s new streak ends this season.



The odds? Two percent. It takes a special kind of bad to have that kind of certainty toward failure, one the Red Wings qualify for.



Last season the Red Wings finished with 74 points. The year before it was 73 points. The most likely landing spot for next season is right in the same ballpark with a 45 percent chance of landing somewhere between 70 and 80 points and an average projection right in between at 73.7 points.



It’s an extremely bleak projection, one exacerbated by the fact the team arguably plays in...