Red Wings GM Ken Holland has been clear about the course the Detroit Red Wings are going to follow in the immediate future: the Red Wings are not going to engage in the classic NHL rebuild in which a team lapses into a coma of losing for a few years, in the hopes of waking up with the cupboards stocked with young and exciting talent. The Red Wings are going to try and keep winning.

There’s only one rational course of action for Detroit if this is the approach they’re going to take: they need to be willing to trade multiple first-round draft picks to rebuild the top end of their team. Historically, this hasn’t been the way that hockey teams go about rebuilding, but it may not be entirely crazy.

In order to understand how the Red Wings might reasonably compete in the future, they need to first understand why they failed in the past. The focus here is going to be 5-on-5; 5-on-4 is an entirely different problem for the Red Wings, albeit a huge one.

When you look at the Red Wings over the past few years, the decline in 5-on-5 play is apparent. In 2014-15, Mike Babcock’s final season, the Red Wings finished third in the NHL in Corsi% (53.5 percent). They didn’t do as well by goals, finishing in the middle of the league with a 51.2 GF%, though both metrics were worse in Jeff Blashill’s first season, when Detroit fell to a 51.7 Corsi%, with a 48.3 GF% at 5-on-5.

And then last year, the collapse.

Detroit finished with a 48.2% Corsi% and a 47.1 GF%, which ranked 24th and 22nd, respectively. Neither number is good enough for a team with playoff ambitions.

So how do the Wings get better?

In considering these questions, a visualization of how the team worked from a possession perspective is helpful. Possession is helpful because over time it correlates well with goals. What follows are visualizations of the twelve most commonly-used Red Wing forwards, sorted by time on ice and the six most commonly-used Red Wing defensemen, also sorted by time on ice. The shading in the box indicates how successful each forward/defense pair was relative to league average for that spot in the lineup. The greener it is, the better.

We’ll start with 2014-15:

So, for example, in 2014-15, Brendan Smith was the Red Wings fifth most-used defenseman at 5-on-5 who played at least 41 games. Pavel Datsyuk was their most-used forward at 5-on-5. Those two actually broke the scale in a good way when they were on the ice together, which is why their box is grey (It’s possible to break the scale the other way, as Luke Glendening can attest).

Outside of Glendening, Drew Miller and Joakim Andersson, there’s not much to complain about here.

Things start to come apart in the 2015-16 season. There are significant red spots for Danny DeKeyser, Niklas Kronwall and Jonathan Ericsson. Mike Green has a spectacularly-green column, which is entirely misleading – no defenseman who played at least 500 minutes had a greater offensive zone start percentage relative to his team.

While the NHL isn’t the NBA, real star players in the NHL drive teams to a degree that people don’t really appreciate. They also come with a hidden cost. Teams have a tendency to pay the people around them, which Detroit has certainly done. When the guy who’s really driving things leaves, things look ugly fast.

The Red Wings used to have a guy like that in Pavel Datsyuk. To illustrate the extent to which Datsyuk was driving things, I re-ran the 2015-16 graph for the Red Wings, excluding any time in which Datsyuk was on the ice.

It looks substantially worse without Datsyuk, even though cutting out Datsyuk’s time means cutting out a bunch of minutes where the opposition has their stars on the ice as well. If Datsyuk were to disappear entirely, as he did in this past season, we’d expect it to look worse than this because everyone’s going to have to play more minutes against the opposition’s best.

The top half of the lineup got caved-in with the four most-used defensemen, except when Mike Green was on the ice. The bottom half of the lineup was not terrible, more hit-and-miss. There’s a pretty clear hit when Datsyuk disappears from the lineup.

This year, Detroit got to see what a full season without Datsyuk looks like:

This is clearly worse than even the look at the preceding season without Datsyuk. Unlike cutting out the Datsyuk time in 2015-16, we aren’t cutting out any time against the opposition’s best players here. Everyone else has to pick up the slack and it’s pretty ugly. This isn’t a roster that is a few small adjustments away from a return to being above-average at 5-on-5.

If you’re looking for bright spots, the Red Wings weren’t terrible relative to the NHL when their bottom-three defensemen were on the ice. There’s a reasonably-even mix of red and green in there, with the top four forwards in particular doing reasonably well relative to the rest of the league’s top four forwards when on the ice with bottom three defensemen.

When the top three defensemen are on the ice though, it just did not work. Frans Nielsen/Mike Green and Thomas Vanek/Mike Green were the only guys who out-performed their slot in the lineup and even then, Vanek/Green benefitted from most of their faceoffs together happening in the offensive zone. It’s basically a river of red running through the plot, which is what Holland has to find a way to fix this summer.

If the forwards are kind of hit-and-miss, but sort of league-average when they’re on the ice with the bottom of Detroit’s defensive group, but they get run over when they’re on the ice with the top of Detroit’s defensive group, one route to getting better is pretty obvious: improve the top end of the defense. This is, unfortunately, somewhat easier said then done. Unrestricted free agency is a wasteland. Which leaves trades. Trades are all fine and well but the Red Wings aren’t really in a position to be giving up talent to get deals done. A fair trade of talent now doesn’t get the Wings out of their bind.

One advantage Detroit has over other teams that are looking for defensemen this summer is that the Red Wings have a high draft pick in the 2017 draft that they can put on the table. Most teams that would be willing to trade their first-round pick to acquire a defenseman now aren’t going to be in that position (Dallas is a notable exception). Future Red Wings picks are probably also highly valued around the league because the league probably expects that the Red Wings are going to be terrible for a while.

This creates an opportunity for the Red Wings. If they’re serious about avoiding the traditional rebuild, the only way around it that would seem to have a reasonable probability of success involves trading draft picks to rebuild the talent base of their team. Lots of draft picks. For many years into the future.

Historically, this has been anathema in hockey. Way back in the first 10-15 years of the draft, teams traded future draft picks all the time. What usually happened was that a good team traded a good but not great player to a bad team for a draft pick a few years down the road. Invariably, the good-but-not-great player didn’t really move the needle for the bad team. The bad team stayed bad and the good team got to add Guy Lafleur or Pat LaFontaine at the draft.

NHL GMs are a cagey lot who like to keep their jobs. So they stopped making trades like this and trades involving future first-round draft picks have become exceedingly rare. Nobody wants to be the guy watching the draft on TV after he got fired because the first-round pick he traded ended up being third overall or something.

A lot of things have changed in the 35 years since teams stopped trading future first-round picks. Free agency has become much more liberal. A salary cap has been introduced. And there’s a lottery for the top three slots in the draft now.

That last bit is important because it renders the path that Holland is rejecting – tanking – much less of a sure thing than it once was. The Red Wings finished in the bottom for five years in a row between 1978-78 and 1982-83. They received two second picks, a third and two fourths for their ineptitude. The same set of finishes today would be expected to net them slightly more than two top four picks instead of five.

Despite this, there are still teams that engage in the traditional-style rebuild. For those teams, Detroit’s picks should be particularly valuable because they come with a chance of turning into very high draft picks. If the Red Wings want to have a legitimate chance of getting back into the playoff picture, they should be plying those teams with offers of multiple first-round picks for any high-end defensemen that they might be willing to give up. It’s the only realistic route back to the playoffs.