Last year, it was Henrik Zetterberg moving to long-term injured reserve on the first morning of training camp. This year, Niklas Kronwall announced his retirement just a week before the beginning of the season.



With each passing year, the Red Wings are looking less and less like the teams that defined the last eras of hockey in Detroit. And left in place of all those storied players is … well, we don’t really know yet, do we?



Right now, there is so much haze surrounding the future of the Red Wings. There are already some faces who look like they’ll headline the new generation in Detroit — none brighter than that of Dylan Larkin, the team’s presumptive next captain and franchise player — but there is also so much uncertainty on what, exactly, that next era of contention is going to look like. Or how long it will take to arrive.



But if the team’s ongoing rebuild needed a jolt, it got one last April, when another of...