Buddy, our opening night roster without Hank/Franzen and with Hronek/Rasmussen/Zadina/Frk making the team and Witter sent down our average age is less than 27 years old. In 2 years we'll have 2 over 35 contracts without Howie re-signing - Hank and Nielsen - Big E, Daley, Kronner, (and Franzen off the books) should all be gone for sure.
The average age thing you love to hate is nothing more than a meaningless talking point for this rebuilding team.
There are quite a few meaningless hills that people want to die on (Highest Average age, highest cap hit, etc.) that are completely irrelevant to anything about the actual state of the team. When we dealt Tatar, we weren't the most expensive roster in hockey. Had we moved Green too, we probably would have dove near the bottom. Any TDL trades we made (having signed guys like Vanek, Green this time, Ott, etc. for the expressed purpose of maybe having a TDL asset in addition to a legit NHL player to play with our young guys till then.), automatically invalidate both those things you want to complain about.
How is Chicago like the redwings in 2014? Kane is still on their roster under 30 and a league MVP along with a host of other young players. They had one down year.All we have is HOPE about our prospects.
The Wings had a league MVP level player in Datsyuk, a bona-fide hockey IQ two-way stud 2C in Zetterberg, they had Mantha and Larkin coming in, Tatar and Nyquist hadn't shown themselves to 100% be passengers yet. 2014 Nyquist was still "NYQUIST EXPLOSION" era where he was the best goal scoring wing in hockey for about a 60 game period.
The Wings in 2014 are one HELL of a lot more like the Blackhawks are now than you want to give them credit for. They are severely limited from big time additions that they'd need to actually compete. Toews isn't a 70p C anymore and is more likely to get worse than he is to get better. Scoring almost 30 once is not a guarantee that you'll go on to keep doing it (see Nyquist + Tatar), so you can't just assume Debrincat will continue to be that player.
Also... the Wings had 102 points in 11-12, ~96 equivalent points in the lockout year, 93, 100 in 12, 13, 14. If you pay attention at all, this is not one down year for Chicago. It's them running headlong into a wall. Unless they can move significant money (like Seabrook to Florida), they aren't in a position to materially add to their team outside of getting lucky in the draft and they're not the new hotness anymore like they were in the early 2010s, when they landed a top 10 LW in Panarin because he thought Patrick Kane was sick and the team was loaded. That type of guy is going to Washington, Tampa, Vegas, or Toronto now.