Detroit ranks 3rd, behind Tampa and Colorado.

from Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic,

Another year, another edition of the annual front office confidence rankings. How much faith does each fan base put in their front office? That’s what we try to uncover every offseason using the wisdom of the crowd to inform the process.

Each front office has its ability graded in six categories: roster building, cap management, drafting and development, trading, free agency and vision....

People know this team is still terrible right?

Kidding aside, there is a lot of deserved belief in the Yzerplan which has been careful, slow, and methodical with no immediate rush or hurry to take the next step. That’s fine, this team is far from ready and that patient approach has been extremely beloved by Red Wings fans. There is hope here that the man in charge can take the team back to where it needs to go with incredible faith in Steve Yzerman’s ability to make trades, signings, draft, develop and navigate the cap. The vision is crystal clear and the future looks bright.

Where this is warranted disagreement is in the first category which is roster building. Yzerman and friends have done the easy part so far — actually building a roster is where things get difficult. I can see why there’s a difference as it comes to the philosophy of what this survey even tries to answer. The public may not be confident in the team’s roster building because the roster itself is still currently in its flaming wreckage state. But with how good everything else is going, it’s also completely fair for fans to have complete unwavering faith in management that the roster building part of the process will go just as smoothly as everything else. It’s the team doing things from the ground up and fans appreciating that even if there are no tangible results yet.

Red Wings fans have been patient and a rebuild deserves that trust. Detroit’s management team belongs in this spot, but I do wonder if the lustre begins to dim the longer the rebuild goes on. At some point, the results have to be tangible and not theoretical.

more ($$$) teams...

from Ted Kulfan of the Detroit News,