DETROIT, MI—”We need to figure out what we are as a team and start to gain some traction and play to an identity,” said Detroit Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin after his team fell to 4-5-1 by way of a 6-2 blowout loss on home ice at the hands of the visiting Winnipeg Jets. Despite the lopsided margin, the run of play was worse than the score, with only the Detroit power play (which struck twice in three tries) able to preserve some semblance of dignity.
Winnipeg outscored the Red Wings 5-0 at even strength. Detroit lacked cohesion and showed a tendency to allow mistakes to fester and spiral, but most disturbing of all was the sense that the Red Wings had nothing to fall back on. They created no semblance of sustained pressure, whether off the forecheck, the rush or the cycle. Their defensive zone coverage—the team’s stated emphasis from day one of pre-season—proved once more prone to lapses. Without elite goaltending (which has proved an essential component to all four Detroit wins this season), there was nothing to paper over the cracks in the foundation.
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“Probably…you see flashes of it: First period against Edmonton, second period today: Getting out of our zone, getting through the neutral zone, getting behind them, and we’re getting a little sustained O zone, some momentum,” said a weary coach Derek Lalonde after the game, dressed in an appropriately somber black suit and black tie, when asked directly about his team’s identity. “It’s tough to get things off the rush, and we have guys that wanna get it off the rush. If it’s there, we’ll take it off the rush. Early in the first, we had a couple plays on the rush…You’re gonna get that when it’s given but the other—the grind stuff. We just need more of it.”
Winnipeg’s top line of Gabe Vilardi, Kyle Connor, and Mark Scheifele dominated the early stages of the game with blistering speed and decisiveness off the rush. The trio combined for three first period goals (one for Vilardi, one for Connor, one for defenseman Neal Pionk with assists from Connor and Scheifele). After Connor and Vilardi converted a two-on-one with ease in the third minute of play, there was little doubt the puck would find the back of the net when they broke once more on a two-on-one in the 16th minute of the first to make it 3-0.
Detroit had a chance to salvage momentum late in the opening period after a Mark Scheifele tripping minor, but the power play couldn’t find its groove, and boos ushered the Red Wings to dressing room for the first intermission. In the second, the power play did come alive to score on both of its two opportunities, via goals from Larkin and Alex DeBrincat. Despite an abysmal first period, the Red Wings had an unlikely chance to snag points off the team at the top of the NHL’s standings.
That chance all but evaporated after 10 seconds, when a cartoonish defensive sequence gifted a goal to Nino Niederreiter, the puck having passed through three Red Wing sticks and off one pair of Red Wing skates on its way to the back of the net. From that point forward, Detroit never again looked competitive.
“I think we had a good mentality going into the third period against a good team,” said J.T. Compher. “It was still a good opportunity to get a point or two. I think we can work on the response. It’s a tough goal to let in, but it’s a bad bounce. That’s all it is. We’re still in a decent spot to fight back.” Winnipeg would add two more to its tally before the final horn, by which point there were hardly enough fans remaining at Little Caesars Arena to bother with more booing.
“We can’t have games like that,” said Larkin. “I think most of the forwards were passengers tonight. We didn’t help ourselves breaking the puck out, and we can’t be out-scored 5-0 [at five-on-five] on home ice, even against a good team with very skilled offensive forwards. We gave them the puck too much. We let them do what they wanted in the O zone, and [they] really exposed us.”
What Winnipeg exposed more than anything returns to Larkin’s assessment of an imperative for self-discovery. The Red Wings have now played 10 games, and it would be difficult to ascribe anything resembling a five-on-five identity to them, because there is nothing in their five-on-five game they’ve been able to rely upon consistently.
“It was just so sporadic in who was going,” Lalonde said of his team’s performance against the Jets. “I think some guys had their moments. I think collectively we were just sporadic.” That same assessment applies just as well to Detroit’s start to the season. Detroit has leveraged emotion, goaltending, and an occasionally hot power play to scrape its way to .500 entering tonight’s game, but while they might be enough to secure the occasional result, those elements do not combine to create a reliably convincing outfit.
For as long as that remains the case, the Red Wings will be susceptible to the sort of runs that un-did them Wednesday night, conceding three un-answered in both the first and third periods to a team with a much clearer sense of purpose. Where the Jets were aggressive, vertical, and decisive in forcing chances and taking them, Detroit lacked a reliable formula to fall back on, something with which to stop the game from slipping from its fingers. There are still 72 games with which to discover that formula, but if it doesn’t happen in a hurry, Hockeytown is in for another long, playoff-less Summer.
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