Here’s what’s so wild about the Detroit Red Wings:

Everyone agrees they’re bad. Everyone agrees they’re rebuilding. Everyone agrees they’ve got a ton of dead money on the books for years to come; they have the highest payroll in the league right now (albeit before they LTIR Johan Franzen for another season).

So the idea that they would now be even thinking about jerking around one of the few promising young players they actually have on the NHL roster is a sign of just how poorly run they are.

There’s a lot to like about Andreas Athanasiou. Thanks to his incredible speed and skill level, he’s very fun to watch, which for a team that’s about to spend several seasons losing a hell of a lot of hockey games in a brand new rink, should be important to the club first and foremost. From that perspective it’s almost immaterial that he’s actually good; even if he were only okay and an entertainment draw, that would still be something this team could market.

But Athanasiou also happens to be good: He was fifth on a pretty dismal team in points per 60 last year (nearly 2.0 at 5-on-5), and even free of context that feels like something you take. More important, he was first in goals per 60, scoring more than one-and-a-quarter every hour he was on the ice.

He got a nice little spot playing primarily with Frans Nielsen and Thomas Vanek, who were decent performers on the team, though they seem to have gotten the benefit of playing mostly second- and third-line talent for a good chunk of the season (which makes sense given the line’s collective quality). His underlying numbers were pretty rotten, but one suspects that this has more to do with the quality of the defensemen behind him than the forwards on his wing. Xavier Ouellet and Danny DeKeyser aren’t exactly world-beaters even against middling competition.

But as always, when viewing stats contextually, you have to say that if guys seem to do well against lower-level competition, that might portend better results if he were to be moved up the depth chart. Is he going to supplant Gustav Nyquist on the top line? Of course not, but he should be getting more time on the power play. However, Detroit ceded Justin Abdelkader more than a minute of extra TOI on the man advantage than Athanasiou.

That’s borderline negligence, but you gotta pay your, ahem, “stars.”

Which, frankly, that’s the whole issue here. Detroit’s “culture,” such as it is, seems geared toward ensuring older guys who aren’t very good get first crack at everything. That’s certainly true of cap dollars, because guys like Abdelkader, Darren Helm, DeKeyser, Jonathan Ericsson — guys who clearly aren’t worth their AAV and clearly weren’t worth it the day those contracts were signed — take up a huge chunk of the team’s cap and seem to have no actual accountability there. Maybe that’s fair enough, because you can’t expect guys who aren’t good to not-take contracts that overpay them, and you can’t blame them when they don’t live up to the deals because, well, they were never going to. But the problem persists.

The Red Wings are over the cap right now. With this roster. And that’s why they probably feel like they need to squeeze Athanasiou. The argument against the player, in this case, is that he’s only played 101 NHL games, and only scored 27 goals and 43 points in them. But again, when you average fewer than 12 minutes a night for your career, with little to no power play time, you’re not being put in a position to rack up points in the first place, especially given who he’s had to play with.

Story continues