The Red Wings are built deeper this season. Can they emulate last year’s Kraken?

DETROIT — In July, before the Alex DeBrincat trade jolted anxious Detroit Red Wings fans into a state of pure offseason optimism, general manager Steve Yzerman was hard at work trying to scrounge up more goals.

On the first day of free agency, he brought in J.T. Compher and Daniel Sprong, two later-blooming forwards coming off career years for playoff teams. He followed it up the next day by signing Christian Fischer, known more for his heavy game and penalty killing but who quietly chipped in 13 goals last season in Arizona. And this was all after swinging a trade at the draft for Klim Kostin, another big-bodied winger with untapped offensive upside.

None of them was necessarily a splashy addition. Only Sprong had ever scored 20 goals as an NHLer, and he had only done so once. But together they helped add up to a vision for improvement.

“We need more goals,” Yzerman said that day in early July. “My expectation is we’ll get a couple more out of all these guys, and that’ll increase our scoring. I think we’re going to be a better defensive team collectively. That will help us as well. Vegas won because they had great contributions up and down their lineup, they got important goals from a lot of different people. That’s ultimately how you win. If you rely on too few guys, injury, cold spells, whatever (can happen). Generally, the teams that are winning in the NHL, going a long way, they have depth.”

Yzerman had been asked about the Vegas Golden Knights as a blueprint for his team, so he wasn’t just randomly invoking the defending Stanley Cup champions to make his point. And in fact, he began his answer with a more attainable comparable.

“I would throw Seattle into the mix there,” he said. “What a tremendous season they had. We played that team, and I’m watching them, and they had a bunch of 20-goal scorers. Guys that broke out looked really good.”

He had just signed one of those players, Sprong, a player he had noted as taking another step last year in becoming a 20-goal scorer for the Seattle Kraken. Compher, too, had jumped from 33 points to 52 in an elevated, top-six role for the Colorado Avalanche.

The hope was they would join a team that already had Dylan Larkin scoring 32 goals, David Perron scoring 24, Lucas Raymond with 17 but seemingly ready to break out, and the rest of the lineup could find just a couple more goals each.

Yzerman still alluded to the obvious appeal of adding “a couple of big-time scorers,” and the DeBrincat deal less than a week later delivered one. But even now, with the two-time 40-goal scorer in tow, the Red Wings are still built on that same Seattle-like vision, hoping all those marginal improvements add up to something greater.

We were never going to get our answer to whether it would be enough in the preseason, when lineups are inconsistent and competition is dubious. But Tuesday afternoon, one of those new additions shared an encouraging early impression through two…