DETROIT — When the Detroit Red Wings look back on all the issues that have led them to a 6-7-1 record to begin the season, the way they played Saturday will not have much to do with it.
They outshot the New York Rangers 37-24, their highest total (and, by far, best margin) of the season. They controlled play for much of the game, getting out of their own zone quickly and getting ample opportunities in transition and the offensive zone.
But all of that will ring hollow on a night when the Red Wings just could not finish. Detroit lost yet again, falling by a score of 4-0 and dropping below .500 on the season.
“I don’t know if I’ve been in a more frustrating hockey game,” Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde said. “I’ve coached 30-plus years.”
Certainly, it’s easy to understand why he’d feel that way: In addition to the dramatic shot margin, the Red Wings hit at least three posts and had plenty of grade-A opportunities to beat Rangers goaltender Jonathan Quick on Saturday night. It sounds strange to say after a night when they did not score, but it might have been their most dangerous offensive display of the season.
With how this season has gone through the first month, though, getting shut out while playing that well only further twisted the knife. A team trying to break an eight-year playoff drought — and just months removed from coming up a tiebreaker short of the playoffs — has come out of the gate slow and just can’t seem to find consistent footing.
And now the Red Wings are at an early, frustrating crossroads with few easy answers.
Take, for example, the third line of Vladimir Tarasenko, Marco Kasper and Jonatan Berggren.
At times, the trio has looked like a potentially dangerous grouping, with Kasper a pace-setting young puck transporter who is willing to throw his body around a bit, Berggren a crafty playmaker who has started to better round out his game, and Tarasenko a proven veteran scorer.
They combined Saturday for nine shots on goal, and they weren’t cheap ones: Kasper set up Tarasenko for a grade-A look in the slot in the second period, and then Tarasenko fed Berggren the puck with a seemingly open net on a two-on-one in the third. Both stayed out of the net.
That’s been the story of their season: looking like they’re just about to break through, but not producing. Kasper and Berggren have only one point each. Tarasenko has just three.
And Saturday, despite the multiple grade-A chances they created, they also were the shift out there for the most avoidable goal Detroit gave up to the Rangers — and perhaps the backbreaker. Down 1-0 in the second period but generally controlling play, Detroit broke up a Rangers rush but didn’t recover the resulting loose puck. All three forwards got clustered together around the left circle, but none were on the puck. And no one was on Jimmy Vesey out front, where Vesey banged home an insurance goal that quickly took some air out of the game.
“That’s some young players not arriving, unfortunately,” Lalonde said. “That was on us. It’s just unfortunate. The old loop.”
Jimmy Vesey doubles the New York lead to 2 with his first goal of the year!#NYR pic.twitter.com/KIEpfzkUPW
— Hockey Daily 365 l NHL Highlights & News (@HockeyDaily365) November 10, 2024
So if you’re Lalonde, do you stick with them as a trio, trusting the visible fit between them will eventually lead to offense? Or do you try to shake things up, knowing the urgent need to start finding answers in a season that is rapidly approaching the 20 percent mark?
It’s not an easy question. Nor is the matter of what, exactly, to do about a penalty kill that just keeps costing the Red Wings.
In two games this weekend against the Toronto Maple Leafs and Rangers, Detroit gave up three goals on four short-handed opportunities. For the season, its 65 percent success rate ranked 31st in the NHL as of late Saturday night.
Of course, not all goals against are the same from a coach’s perspective. In Toronto, Lalonde felt both goals Detroit’s penalty kill allowed were “off broken plays,” and Saturday, the Rangers’ lone power-play tally came on a classic tip at the net front.
“But there’s probably some things,” Lalonde said. “Can we get the faceoff win? We had a chance to get some clears. It’s frustrating, but the bottom line is it hasn’t executed. … When we were struggling on the penalty kill early, there were some clear reasons why — some routes, some lack of execution on things within our structure. But these last three were very frustrating.
“But (the) bottom line is they’re going in and we’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
The question, simply, is how?
Certainly, the Red Wings need to clear the puck better when they have the chance. That’s true at all phases of the game, not just the penalty kill. But to Lalonde’s point, the Rangers’ power-play goal didn’t offer a chance for a clear. They scored seven seconds into the penalty. The only way to remedy it would have been to win the faceoff, which of course they’re trying to do already.
And those are just two examples, with a roster that leaves so little room for tinkering.
Detroit has some skill high in the lineup, as evidenced by a power play featuring Patrick Kane, Lucas Raymond, Dylan Larkin, Alex DeBrincat and Moritz Seider. Their underlying numbers (and even real success rates) have been strong all season. Saturday, that unit played every second of Detroit’s four minutes of power-play time. It had its chances.
But on the whole, the team still looks like it’s feeling the losses it suffered this offseason, losing reliable depth scorers like David Perron, Robby Fabbri and Daniel Sprong. Lalonde has tried all kinds of combinations with the cast he has, but few of his options are producing outside of the typical top line of Larkin, Raymond and DeBrincat.
On defense, the Red Wings look to have found their long-term top pair of Seider and Simon Edvinsson, but they’re remarkably thin behind them, with Ben Chiarot and Jeff Petry struggling in second-pair duty (and Petry, in particular, struggling to spur clean exits) and Erik Gustafsson struggling mightily in the early season.
And as solid as that top pair has been on most nights, it’s still a young duo that makes young mistakes. Edvinsson took the penalty that led to the Rangers’ first goal. Seider, in Toronto, turned the puck over in his own zone with Detroit’s goalie pulled, leading to a dagger goal in that loss.
In past seasons, in the earlier days of this Red Wings rebuild, there was an understanding that tough nights would come with the territory. In those days, a night like Saturday — when the Red Wings played reasonably well and came up empty — would have been hand-waved away rather easily.
After so much time waiting to return to relevance, though, that patience is running thin.
Fourteen games in, the season is still young, and there is time for Detroit to find its groove. Saturday might well have been a step in that direction.
But beyond looking to replicate Saturday’s process and hoping for better results, there’s no clear fix for the Red Wings’ slow start.
And that might be the most concerning fact of all.
(Photo: Dave Reginek / NHLI via Getty Images)
