Raymond Is a Top-20 Winger in the NHL. He's Also Increasingly Alone.

The NHL just confirmed what the box score spent all season saying: Lucas Raymond belongs among the league's best wingers. Fifty-two points in 47 games, a plus-9, named to the top-20 list published this week. The validation is real. So is the problem it exposes.

Here is the number that matters more right now than any ranking: three. Three goaltenders connected to this organization have exited since late June — Sebastian Cossa traded, Jack Campbell retired, Michael Hutchinson retired. The netminding architecture that was already a liability when Detroit allowed 4.5 goals per game in its final 10 games — nearly double the rate from the prior 20-game stretch — has been stripped to the studs. The defensive collapse that ended the season isn't a wound that healed over the summer. It's a wound with no surgeon assigned to close it.

And that's before you account for what happened above the goaltenders. Patrick Kane, who had 30 points in 33 regular-season games and was the veteran presence in a locker room that needed one, is gone to Chicago on a two-year deal. Kane himself said he thought he was on track to re-sign before something changed — which means this wasn't a clean mutual parting, it was an organizational rupture that happened to a player who was producing. Viktor Arvidsson, signed specifically to address the depth scoring failures that plagued the final month, landed on injured reserve 17 days after putting pen to paper. Three forwards — Arvidsson, Mason Appleton, Michael Rasmussen — are sidelined heading into August. The roster the new general manager will eventually evaluate bears almost no resemblance to the one that finished 41–41.

That's the third consecutive season at or near .500 for Detroit, and the trajectory has been pointing down, not up. The 2025–26 finish — 10 wins in the last 30 games — wasn't a fluke or a bad bounce. It was a structural unraveling. Moritz Seider logged over 25 minutes a night and finished a plus-13, which tells you the team's best defensive player was doing his job. The problem was systemic, not individual, and the offseason has done nothing to address the system. It has only removed people from it.

Steve Yzerman's departure as general manager — after more than two decades — would be the headline in any normal offseason. This is not a normal offseason. The GM seat is empty while Dylan Larkin's future remains unresolved, while the goaltending situation is genuinely unclear, and while the team's marquee offseason signing is on injured reserve. Whoever takes that chair inherits a franchise in a more compromised state than the 41–41 record suggests. Raymond's top-20 winger designation is a genuine organizational asset. My read is that it's also a flashing warning sign — because elite individual players on fractured rosters don't stay patient forever, and right now, Raymond is the clearest proof that Detroit has something worth building around, surrounded by mounting evidence that nobody is currently doing the building.