The Red Wings hit the 20-game mark in last night’s 2-1 OT loss to the Arizona Coyotes, and, at 8-9-and-3, I’d suggest this much:
In terms of progress when compared to last year’s team, the Red Wings are one game short of where I expected them to be–at NHL-level .500–and 4 games short of where I hope they finish this season, at .500, overtime and shootout losses included.
As stated in the HSJ post, the Red Wings got to the 20-game mark earlier than any other team in the NHL not named the Montreal Canadiens, and the vast majority of the NHL’s teams have played between 14 and 18 games, not 20 over the course of 37 nights, as coach Blashill told Bally Sports Detroit’s Trevor Thompson last night.
The last stretch has been particularly difficult for the Wings in terms of the ratio of games vs. practices–the Wings played 11 times in 17 nights–and as the Wings aren’t very good on the road, you and I could probably see the team’s 0-3-and-1 stint away from Little Caesars Arena (over a stretch of 4 games played in 6 nights) coming.
Long story long, for this year’s Wings team, going 0-3-and-1 on the road is unacceptable, and there’s a lot of room for improvement as we look for this year’s Wings to at least hit .500, if not exceed it, but those kinds of expectations not being met by a total of a “lost week” ain’t bad, in my opinion.
This is a very long way of leading into The Athletic’s Max Bultman’s take on the Wings’ status at the “quarter pole” as being a sign that this year’s team isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, star rookies named Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider included:
All of a sudden, in the lead-up to Thanksgiving, the Red Wings are back in the league’s bottom quartile by points percentage. They face a schedule that’s going to get harder in terms of its opponents, even if the pacing offers a little more mercy (they’ll play 16 games over the next 41 days, after ripping through 20 in 38).
And during that stretch — though they can’t afford to think much about it — they now face the question of just how different this season will really be than last.
The pieces are there, certainly, for the answer to be “significantly.” Those aforementioned rookies, Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider, have every ability to keep making a big difference for Detroit. The Red Wings’ best players — Dylan Larkin and Tyler Bertuzzi — have largely played like it. Alex Nedeljkovic (who deserved a better fate than he got Saturday) looks like the real deal.
Even if the Red Wings were never likely to be a playoff team, that all could be enough to take meaningful strides in the franchise’s broader trajectory.
But for the purposes of the next 62 games — more than all of last season contained — all of that is as good as prologue if it doesn’t also lead to a team taking the needed steps to learn to win on the road (where Detroit is now 3-7-1) or close out late leads against a team like Arizona.
Continued; Bultman isn’t wrong about the Wings’ schedule making up for the lack of quantity of games with significant increases in the quality of their opponents.
St. Louis, surprising Buffalo and a road game in Boston (where the Wings never win) will wrap up November, and December includes another game vs. St. Louis, 3 games vs. the Islanders, 2 games vs. the Avs, and games vs. Seattle, Nashville, Carolina, New Jersey and Minnesota, all before the team wraps up 2021 with a New Year’s Eve game vs. Washington.
One thing I do agree with Bultman on is the fact that the Wings are probably thinking too much these days, in no small part because the team hasn’t practiced enough. And he’s also right regarding the fact that the Wings need to step up their road game significantly to truly step forward as an organization.
But this idea that the “shine is off” is one I can’t quite get behind, because this team was never bright and shiny to me. It was plucky, and I expect to see more pluck and more fight going forward, win, lose or draw.
