The Red Wings have had, by all accounts, one of their worst seasons ever, and by far their worst year with a 30-team league. Projected to finish in the bottom five or six teams in the league since, maybe there were six teams in the league, the Wings are having a bittersweet end to the season.

Leaving the only home many fans have ever known in the Joe Louis Arena, many fans are likely upset that Detroit’s leaving “the Joe” on a sour note. Next season, the doesn’t look particularly peachy either, with a bunch of confusing contracts still on for the long term and no real desire for any top free agents to come by either. While the draft will yield the Wings a top-10 pick for the first time in most of their team’s lifetime, it’s no guarantee they’ll be able to snag a future star in what’s been described as a “weak draft”.

That being said, perhaps it’s fitting that the Red Wings are crashing and burning while also saying goodbye to their rink. Here’s three reasons why it’s okay that the Red Wings are having a dismal season in their final season in the Joe.

The Red Wings need a kick in the rear to get things REALLY going in their rebuild. Considering it took the Wings a few seasons of playing cat-and-mouse with Tomas Jurco before trading him for an underwhelming return as perhaps the official move that kicked off the rebuild, the Wings are in need of a symbolic gesture to get themselves in gear.

While it’s no guarantee that the Wings will be able to recreate the atmosphere of the Joe, it at least provides some sort of incentive to give fans a good return on their investment.

Do you remember Pavel Datsyuk’s last home game on April 19, 2016? Do you remember the last time he walked off the ice? Waved goodbye to the fans?

The truth is, you probably don’t, and if you do, it wasn’t much of a goodbye. After all, he still had another game left as a member of the Wings, and if he won that won, well, he’d be back again for Game 6 of Detroit’s first round series with the Tampa Bay Lightning. As we all know, the Wings lost that Game 5 and with it dropped the series 4-1, making Datsyuk’s last playoff game as a Red Wing also the last at the Joe.

While it was a real possibility that Datsyuk would be gone for this season, we didn’t actually find out he was gone until a little after the season ended. The brief period of the back-and-forth will he/won’t he drama was no fun for the Wings fanbase, and even though most respected his decision to leave, it still left a sour taste in everyone’s mouth.

So how does this connect to the Joe’s final season?

Well, it’ll give Detroit the opportunity to have a proper goodbye.

Had the Wings hypothetically been involved in a playoff game in the latter half  of a series this year, it probably would have ended quite similar to the 2016 series. It’s hard to imagine the Wings getting out of the first round if they did manage a playoff series this year, giving them about a 50/50 chance they’d play their final playoff game of the season away from the Joe.

When the arena finally does host its last game on April 9th, you can bet there will be a standing ovation (or several) and loud noises coming throughout the entirety of the evening. There will be proper ceremonies and festivities, and it’ll be a celebration of the rink, rather than a hush-hush anxiety about whether the Wings would be able to win another game.

The Joe Louis Arena was home to four Red Wings Stanley Cup Championships in 1997, 1998, 2002, and 2008, with three of them being played with the same core for the most part.

It’s obvious, but this team is not those teams. Mike Babcock, Scotty Bowman, Steve Yzerman, Nicklas Lidstrom, Chris Osgood, Sergei Fedorov, Pavel Datsyuk and so many more legendary names… don’t exactly equate with Riley Sheahan, Justin Abdelkader, Luke Glendenning and Danny DeKeyser.

If Dylan Larkin, Andreas Athanasiou and Anthony Mantha are to be the future of this franchise, let them make their own history in a new rink. Perhaps we’ll stop being able to compare them from the teams of the past and judge the Red Wings against the NHL of the present.