The Red Wings made progress. Does that make the season a success?

This time, the end of the Detroit Red Wings’ season arrived swiftly and emotionally.

Unlike in each of the previous seven years, there was no long march to the season’s finish line — no playing out the string, and no time for everyone involved to come to terms with the finality of another season, over.

As painful as that must have made it for the Red Wings players and coaches on Tuesday night in Montreal, though, isn’t that a sign of progress? That feeling, of standing in a locker room postgame, surprised to be done, is reserved only for the teams that managed to keep hope alive to the very end.

Not elite company, sure. At least 16 teams get to feel it each year, and this season, because of how tight the wild-card race was, it will be more like 18 or 19 teams. But for the first time since their last playoff berth in 2016, that group of teams included the Red Wings.

Detroit added 11 points to its 2022-23 total, finishing the season with 91. They missed out on the playoffs by virtue of a tiebreaker. By any definition, that’s progress from where they’ve been.

The question is, though: Does that mean it was a success?

Because while clearing 90 points and coming so close to the playoffs surpassed nearly everyone’s expectations for these Red Wings, expectations change.

They went up, for example, when the team signed Patrick Kane in late November, and even more so when it became clear that he looked something like his old self, despite coming off of a nearly unprecedented hip resurfacing surgery.

They went up when, after a 16-4-2 run through January and February, the team woke up on March 1 with an eight-point cushion on the crowded playoff race.

With 22 games left to play, the Red Wings had already banked 72 points. And in hindsight, we now know what that means: to hit the 92 points they would have needed to make the playoffs, Detroit would have needed just 20 more from March 1 on — not even a .500 points pace. They could only muster 19 points.

There were mitigating factors, to be sure. The team played eight of those games without its captain and best player, Dylan Larkin, and five of the six they lost without Larkin came on the road, where opponents could easily configure matchups to exploit his absence. We now know there was also a flu bug wreaking havoc on Detroit’s locker room around the same time.

But still, after the playoffs looked not just possible, but likely, at the end of February, the Red Wings won only three out of 14 games in March.

You can call that any number of things — simple regression, a let down, even a collapse — but whatever it was, it’s not supposed to happen so dramatically to a team on the playoff bubble.

And there will be some for whom that fact alone means this season cannot be a success.

Where the question gets tricky, though, is that a season is not as simple as making the playoffs or not.

Let’s say everything played out exactly as it did for Detroit, but the Flyers had managed to beat the Capitals on Tuesday instead of losing on a desperation goalie pull in a tie game. Nothing would have changed about Detroit’s final six weeks, with all those flaws still real, but the Red Wings would nonetheless be gearing up for a playoff series in New York. Octopuses would be flying off the shelves at local fish markets.

Is that result in Philadelphia, then, really the difference between whether the Red Wings’ same 91 points represent success or not? It’s far too simplistic.

Instead, that verdict has to be broken down into smaller questions.

Did the Red Wings make the playoffs?

No. And not a single person in their locker room will have an easy time getting past that. As bleak as things looked during that miserable March, the Red Wings maintained belief that they could make it. They played accordingly, willing themselves to seven points in their final four games, despite facing third-period deficits in three of them. They damn near pulled it off.

But they didn’t. And the fact the Red Wings won’t practice this morning means this goal went unmet.

Did the team take a step forward?

Yes. The way they fought down the stretch showed that as clearly as anything.

It wasn’t just the results that drove this verdict, it was the way they repeatedly rose to the occasion in some extremely uncomfortable positions — and the people who were driving it. Larkin set a career-high in goals despite missing 14 games. If he stayed healthy for all 82, he might well have hit 40 goals. Lucas Raymond took a bona fide star turn in Detroit’s biggest games of the year. Moritz Seider looked like a playoff-style horse, throwing hits, blocking shots and scoring an early tying goal in Game 82. Simon Edvinsson scored in a must-win game in Toronto, and played tough playoff minutes despite entering the race with just 11 NHL games under his belt. All of those players are going to be pillars of the franchise for years to come.

Detroit’s team defense still isn’t good enough, and on too many nights down the stretch, neither was the goaltending. Frankly, until the final three games, even the offense, which at one point this season defined Detroit, had dried up, with not enough players willing or able to score from the hard areas of the ice.

But this was the most competitive Red Wings team Detroit has seen since the rebuild began, and that certainly counts as a step forward.

Did Detroit set up its future?

This is perhaps the toughest question to answer. Because while the playoff push certainly set a tone and a baseline for Raymond, Seider, Edvinsson and even older core pieces such as Larkin and Alex DeBrincat, it’s hard not to feel like Detroit missed some opportunities to establish young players even more.

It’s not necessarily about Jonatan Berggren, who had clearly outgrown the AHL this year but played only 12 games with Detroit. It’s about Edvinsson not getting a real run until mid-March. And to a lesser extent, not getting Albert Johansson, Carter Mazur and Marco Kasper any run all season.

In all three of those cases, the individual logic was understandable, and arguably correct. Detroit was in a playoff race and wanted to go with as much experience as possible. But zooming out, it now means all of those players will enter next season’s training camp without even a reference point beyond the preseason (and one late-season game in 2023 for Kasper).

Perhaps you can’t fault Detroit so much for making its decisions day-by-day, in a race that tight. And it’s fair to say they all continued to grow in Grand Rapids. But at year’s end, the Red Wings are left with a team that didn’t make the playoffs, and only gave meaningful ice time to one rookie all season. That has to be an itchy feeling.

Calling this aspect a success, then, rests entirely on the growth Detroit saw from its core players in those playoff-style games down the stretch. For how much those players showed, it might very well have been enough to do so.

For next year’s sake, though, the Red Wings will have to hope it is. Because as the Buffalo Sabres and New Jersey Devils can surely attest, rookies still need time to be rookies. And that time is going to need to come in Detroit sooner or later.

(Photo of Patrick Kane and Simon Edvinsson: Julian Avram / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)