The Steve Yzerman era is over for the Red Wings. Now what?

From the moment Steve Yzerman returned to the Detroit Red Wings as general manager in 2019, the city and franchise he once led to glory as a player wanted desperately to believe he could do it all again in the front office.

He brought hope. He said the right things. And there were moments where it looked like it just might work.

But on Wednesday, the Yzerman era came to an abrupt end when the Red Wings announced he would transition from his role as executive vice president and general manager into a senior adviser to governor and CEO Chris Ilitch.

Technically, Yzerman remains in his current role while the Red Wings conduct a search for a new head of hockey operations. And it’s unclear how long that process could take. But Wednesday marks the functional end of Yzerman’s tenure, which once seemed to carry so much promise.

There are all kinds of questions that follow the news. One big one is the timing, three months after the season ended in yet another late-season collapse, and just two weeks after the busiest portion of the offseason. But the two most important questions are: What went wrong? And where do the Red Wings go from here?

The Red Wings never made the playoffs in seven seasons under Yzerman, and now their postseason drought sits at a decade. His departure comes at a time when their captain and top center, Dylan Larkin, has requested a trade from his hometown franchise. All is not well with the Red Wings, and the release announcing the leadership change acknowledged as much.

“Clearly, we are not where we and our fans expect to be as an organization,” Ilitch said. “I’m looking forward to bringing in new leadership to build the championship-caliber organization Hockeytown deserves.”

Ilitch had plenty of kind things to say about Yzerman in the release, including that his “lifetime of contributions to the Red Wings has meant more to this franchise than words can truly express, and I have the highest level of respect for his continued commitment to our organization.” That Yzerman will now apparently serve as an adviser to Ilitch himself is notable too.

But between the on-ice results and off-ice tension, something had to change. Now, it will.

There are many different lenses through which to view Yzerman’s tenure. Start with the bottom line, which is that the Red Wings still remain outside the playoffs, and have been passed by several divisional opponents who were on parallel rebuilding timelines. The Montreal Canadiens just went to the Eastern Conference final. The Buffalo Sabres — who held the mantle of the league’s longest playoff drought before Detroit — just won the Atlantic Division. The Red Wings are still on the outside looking in.

That owes to multiple factors, some in Yzerman’s control and some not. But professional sports will always be a results business above all, and Yzerman failed to deliver them.

He made some strong early draft picks, starting with his very first one in 2019. Moritz Seider was a shocking pick at the time at sixth overall, but is now the load-bearing pillar of the Red Wings’ franchise. But between rocky results in free agency and trades, an underwhelming yield outside the first round in amateur drafts and a locker room that just couldn’t seem to push through the hardest time of the year, the Red Wings had become the worst things an NHL team can be: stagnant and stuck.

Paradoxical as it may be, though, the franchise is still in a better place than it was when he arrived. Back then, the cupboard was barren of prospects — owing both to a 25-year playoff streak that cost significant draft capital, and major drafting misses at the end of previous GM Ken Holland’s tenure — and had had few assets of meaningful value to deal from, either. It was a true ground-up rebuild.

That is a very different situation than the one his soon-to-be-successor will inherit.

While the Larkin trade request still looms — and what this news means for that situation is its own interesting question — the version of the Red Wings that Yzerman is leaving behind has a clear foundation in Seider, Lucas Raymond and Simon Edvinsson, a deep pool of prospects and young players (albeit one lacking obvious future stars) and some serious tradeable assets, led by Larkin.

You can argue — and I have — that with their own outlook looking bleak in a loaded Atlantic, the Red Wings’ best path forward, even before this news, was to reset around a younger core, even if it meant the playoff drought continuing to drag on.

With a management change, that option becomes even more compelling. There are still some big decisions to make — particularly around leading scorer Alex DeBrincat, who has one year left on his contract at age 28 and is eligible for an extension — but the Red Wings as currently constructed (especially with Larkin’s future in doubt) were already a long shot to compete for a Stanley Cup in the next couple of years.

And while they cannot simply punt Seider and Raymond’s prime years — as they did with far too many of Larkin’s — the team the next GM inherits will be deeper and more equipped to pull off a shorter re-tool than Yzerman ever really had a chance to. The leadership change may even squeeze some final drops of patience from the fan base, too.

Of course, we won’t know exactly what the next manager’s vision is until one is hired. And in a changing NHL, executing a vision is always harder than it seems. Yzerman’s tenure reinforced that.

His return to Detroit won’t have the storybook ending so many dreamed of back in 2019. The once-legendary playoff streak he helped author as a player has given way to a devastating drought for the franchise. And as his tenure as general manager comes to an abrupt conclusion, the Red Wings are now left to search for a new way out.