How the Hockey World Has Changed Since the Red Wings Last Missed the Playoffs

For the first time in 26 seasons, the Detroit Red Wings won't be skating in the NHL's postseason dance. This is weird. So weird.

Before the Wings were officially eliminated from playoff contention on Tuesday, the team held the longest active playoff streak in all of professional sports, and the third longest in NHL history. The ending of the quarter-century-long run ensures that the Red Wings won't challenge for the NHL record of 29 consecutive playoff appearances set by the Bruins from 1980-1997.

The NBA's San Antonio Spurs are now the playoff kings of the North American sports scene, recently sealing their 20th consecutive trip to the postseason. The Penguins now have the longest active NHL mark with 11 straight appearances, while the Los Angeles Dodgers own the MLB mark, reaching the postseason each of the last four years.

Over the Red Wings' remarkable run, the team has finished under .500 just once in 26 seasons, while capturing 14 division titles and four Stanley Cups. Most remarkable, perhaps, is how the organization has managed to maintain its consistency for such a long time while having so few high-end assets to work with on draft day. In the last 25 years, the club has never drafted lower than No. 10 overall and has only selected in the top-20 five times.

As consistently great as the Red Wings have been, the NHL has seen some tremendous changes over the 26 years (9,865 days) since Detroit last missed the playoffs in 1990:

• Craig MacTavish was still playing without a helmet. In fact, he played seven seasons without a bucket after the Red Wings last missed the postseason, retiring in 1997 after the league made helmets mandatory for incoming players in 1979.

• You couldn't stream highlights or live tweet during the Wings' last playoff-less season because, well, the internet was still five months away from existing. At the time, trolls were forced to actually go to games and heckle a player's family in person, rather than through the safety of their smartphones.

• The NHL added nine new franchises since 1991, beginning with the addition of the San Jose Sharks, marking the start of the NHL's infiltration of non-traditional hockey markets. Teams like Tampa Bay, Florida, Anaheim, and Nashville have been successful for the most part, while the experiment in Atlanta resulted in a franchise eventually returning to Winnipeg, which lost the Jets to Phoenix in 1996.

• Jaromir Jagr, who has now skated in over 1,700 NHL games, wasn't even in the league yet the last time Detroit missed out on the postseason, joining the Penguins after getting selected No. 5 overall in the 1990 draft and making his debut the same year the Red Wings' streak started.

• Another Penguins legend and one of the all-time greats, Mario Lemieux was in the midst of his sixth straight 100-plus point season while the GOAT, Wayne Gretzky, led the NHL in scoring in 1989-90 in his second season with the Kings, and was still a full decade away from retirement.

• Some goalies still looked like this:

• The NHL shut down over collective bargaining issues three times since Detroit last missed, with lockouts stealing half-seasons in 1994-95 and 2012-13, and a whole season in 2004-05. A salary cap, revenue sharing, and increased arbitration rights for players are just a few of the major changes the work stoppages brought to the league.

• Two of the greatest players to ever rock the winged-wheel, Sergei Fedorov and Nicklas Lidstrom, both started with the organization right around the time the historic streak began. Lidstrom put up 60 points in his rookie season in 1991-92, while Fedorov made his debut a season prior, tallying 79 points in his first NHL campaign, helping the Red Wings begin their run of dominance.

• Players have made a lot of bank the past 25 years, with the average NHL salary ballooning more than tenfold since the Wings last spent springtime at home. In 1990, the league's average annual salary was between $160,000-$180,000 per year, while it shot up to around $2.4 million as of 2014.

• In 1990, Red Wings legend Pavel Datsyuk was only 11 years old, head coach Jeff Blashill was 16, and Dylan Larkin was still six years away from birth. Actually, 486 current players, or 57 percent of the NHL, weren't even born the last time the Red Wings missed the playoffs.

The Red Wings' streak spanned an entire era of hockey, and then some. When it all began, 100-plus point seasons and fighting were the norm, players actually scored unlike this dead-puck era we are experiencing now, and Gary Bettman wasn't even commissioner yet. The one thing that remained constant, though, was the Red Wings in the playoffs fighting for another Cup. Welcome to a new era.