Month: September 2023

As MLive’s Ansar Khan notes, Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde knows all too well that his team has to prove its critics wrong:

“You try to push the noise away and that’s the media,” Lalonde said. “I stopped reading media because it’s so negative on us. … Some people have us no chance at making the playoffs. I think the highest article I read is a 14 percent chance of making the playoffs. Everyone is writing us off. I get it, it’s not a knock on our guys, it’s just the reality of the division, the conference.”

The Red Wings broke training camp Monday in Traverse City and open their eight-game preseason Tuesday against Pittsburgh at Little Caesars Arena (7 p.m., Bally Sports Detroit; WWJ-AM 950).

These exhibitions, as always, won’t reveal much about the team. Lineups will be loaded with young players looking to grow and gain experience, many of them prior to heading to AHL Grand Rapids. Questions about the Red Wings following a flurry of offseason changes will start to be answered when the regular season opens Oct. 12 at New Jersey.

“We’ll knock the noise away. It’ll be about our process and just doing things correctly,” Lalonde said. “Very similar to where we were last year. No one gave us a fighting chance and in the end they were right. But late in the season, game 57, we were in that playoff (spot). We exceeded expectations. Hopefully, it’ll look the same this year.”

Continued; I think that the exhibitions are very important unto themselves. No, the record that the Wings post during the exhibition season won’t tell the tale as to how they do this upcoming season, but the battle for jobs on the roster is real, as is establishing the pecking order for prospect and depth player call-ups. There’s much to watch during exhibition hockey.

The Detroit Red Wings began preparing for their exhibition season with a pair of hour-long practices at Centre ICE Arena on Monday, concluding their time in Traverse City. The team packs up its gear and returns to Detroit today, just in time for the exhibition season.

Detroit made its first cuts on Sunday, but the Wings still have 57 players on their roster (including Carter Mazur, Matt Luff and Ben Chiarot), and they’ll need the warm bodies, because the team’s about to embark upon an 8-games-in-12-nights exhibition game slate starting Tuesday at Little Caesars Arena vs. the Pittsburgh Penguins (7 PM on Bally Sports Detroit Extra).

On Monday, the Red Wings’ skaters took part in a pair of one-hour practices–one for Team Red, and one for Team White. The two-team situation is going to be the norm for the Red Wings from now until the end of the exhibition season, with one “team” playing one night, and the other “team” playing the next. There will be movement of players from team to team as necessary to try out line combinations and special teams formations, but the general structure of the two teams remains the same.

I asked coach Lalonde if training camp was about establishing structure, and the exhibition season, details, and he stated that that’s exactly how things work in terms of the teaching process. The Red Wings worked on a significant amount of center-tracking today, 5-on-5, 4-on-4 and 3-on-3 full-ice attack-and-regroup drills, with the emphasis on competition for pucks and bench changes to ensure that shift length was starting to come into play.

The Athletic’s Max Bultman offers 5 training camp observations this afternoon. Among them:

If there was one player I was eager to see coming into this training camp, it was Lucas Raymond. He’s likely going to be the biggest X-factor for the Red Wings season, and I’ve picked him to be the team’s breakout player. After five days, I thought his training camp reinforced that belief.

Raymond looked quick, slippery and dangerous — and just so happened to score the game-winning goal on the last small-ice three-on-three game of camp Monday morning. That goal drew a game-like celebration from his teammates, and is exactly the kind of moment you want to see from a player coming off a sophomore slump in 2022-23 into an important season.

The biggest talking point, of course, has been his added strength, up 12 pounds from his listed weight last season. Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde pointed to puck battles, staying on his feet more, and keeping plays alive as ways that added strength could show up in his game this fall.

Certainly, Raymond’s calling card is what he can do with the puck on his stick, and being able to fend off defenders to keep it or win battles to get it back both further that.

I thought Raymond was again quite noticeable in the Red and White game Sunday too, which is the closest thing to true game speed we saw here, but the preseason will offer an even better viewing. Lalonde said Raymond will start out next to Dylan Larkin and Alex DeBrincat in the exhibition opener at home Tuesday night against Pittsburgh.

Continued (paywall)

The Hockey News’s Sam Stockton wrote a lengthy article which examines the Red Wings’ Red vs. White Game while emphasizing and breaking down its second period’s worth of 1-minute power plays, and Stockton believes that the team needs to make some specific tweaks to adjust to the strengths of its own penalty-kill, never mind that of other teams:

I don’t disagree with [coach Derek] Lalonde’s assessment that the Red Wings power plays generated a solid volume of chances (especially in Clip #1 above), but they did struggle to create quality opportunities in the slot.

The Red Wing PK deserves some credit for this.  That unit jumped from a 73.8% success rate in the final year of the Jeff Blashill era to a 78.1% success rate in year one under Lalonde, and it looks well on its way to more progress this year.  

It’s no secret that Steve Yzerman has made a point of adding big bodies to his blue line, which makes quite a bit of sense in a wedge plus one.  Those big D-men can take care of either post and use their size and strength to take away net-front opportunities within that structure.

It should also be said that you’d expect a natural uptick in fluidity, timing, and chemistry from Detroit’s power plays with more time.  The Red top unit we saw above features two players new to the Detroit line-up this season, so it’s no surprise to see some growing pains as that group discovers its rhythm this early in the pre-season.

Still, the struggles with breaking down the opposing structure and moving the PK box shouldn’t be ignored either.  I’m not sure that [Shayne] Gostisbehere makes a ton of sense on the flank with the other members of the top unit.  While a proven power play performer, his strength isn’t threading passes into the interior from that position.

Continued

As the Detroit News’s Ted Kulfan notes, Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde is satisfied with the lessons he imparted to his charges over the course of training camp, and now he’s ready to get the exhibition season underway:

Monday’s practice at Centre Ice Arena concluded the training camp portion of the preseason. Although appreciating the hospitality and setup in Traverse City, the Wings were excited about returning to Detroit and beginning the eight-game exhibition season.

“It’s all part of it, anxious to get this (next) part going,” Lalonde said. “Now the game process. We had some good teaching from everything we covered (Sunday) and it’ll be good step into our game.”

Lalonde was pleased with the five-day, on-ice camp.

“Sometimes I’m focused on just being organized and everything goes smoothy,” Lalonde said. “Half of my thought process is that. The other half is how the guys look, individually how they look, and who is competing for spots.

“For the most part I’m happy with the way camp has gone.”

Continued

Dmitri Buchelnikov was the only Red Wings prospect who skated on Monday, and, in the VHL, his SKA Neva St. Petersburg team lost 4-2 to Khimik Voskresensk.

Buchelnikov finished with an assist and +1 with 5 shots, playing 18:30.

Red Wings goaltender Ville Husso will be wearing a mask by Finnish equipment manager and artist Joni Hallikainen, or “Bonhallik Customs,” this upcoming season, and it’s an evolution of his 2022-2023 season mask:

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A post shared by Joni "Bona" Hallikainen (@bonahallikainencustoms)

From the Red Wings comes this 3:43 clip of “Sights and Sounds” from the Red vs. White Game on Sunday:

Per the Red Wings:

RED WINGS TRIM ROSTER BY THREE

  … Red Wings to Host Pittsburgh on Tuesday at 7:00 p.m. at Little Caesars Arena; Game to Air on Bally Sports Detroit Extra and 950 AM … 

DETROIT – The Detroit Red Wings today assigned forward Emmitt Finnie to the Western Hockey League’s Kamloops Blazers and released forwards Dean Loukus and Nic Sima from their amateur tryouts.

The Red Wings currently have 54 players on their training camp roster: 31 forwards, 16 defensemen and seven goaltenders. Detroit begins its eight-game preseason schedule with a home game against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday, Sept. 26 at 7:00 p.m. at Little Caesars Arena. The game will air on Bally Sports Detroit Extra and 950 AM.

DobberHockey’s Tom Collins is predicting a big season for Moritz Seider. Will he hit 70 points this year? Collins thinks that Seider is one of 10 candidates to do just that:

6. Moritz Seider: The signing of [Shayne] Gostisbehere in the offseason has to be a little unsettling for Seider owners and dampens the odds of Seider hitting 70 points. Gostisbehere is never signed for his defense; it’s all for his offensive capability. And Seider owners already experienced a player usurping the top power-play role last year when Seider lost that top power-play spot to Filip Hronek. There’s a very good chance that happens again this season. The team has beefed up its forward ranks, which will help in his pursuit of 70, but he needs to stick on the top man-advantage unit all season to have a shot.

Continued