The Hockey News’s Connor Eargood wrote an incredibly thorough article in which he discusses the Red Wings’ hopes for more goals from Lucas Raymond, Alex DeBrincat, and whoever plays with Patrick Kane in order to offset the offense lost through free agency.
Eargood believes that two factors will play into the Red Wings’ success or failure in terms of overcoming their net offensive deficit:
How successful Detroit can be depends on a lot of factors — health, chemistry, even luck in DeBrincat’s case. But ultimately, the Red Wings’ roster construction leaves them sparse options but to lean extensively on Raymond, DeBrincat and Kane to give them more scoring oomph.
“If Lucas Raymond continues on the same trajectory that he finished the season on, he’s a legit impact player,” Yzerman said. “We’ll have Patrick Kane for an entire season. … We’re shaped a little bit differently, and hopefully we can build off the momentum — all of our guys — that they created throughout the season.”
There’s another way that Detroit can get better: team defense. The Red Wings can lower the number of goals they need to score to be competitive by shoring up defensively. As ole Benjamin Franklin once said, a penny saved is a penny earned, and for a guy whose face is plastered on the $100 bill that’s sage advice. By saving more goals, Detroit can lower the scoring cost to earn a win.
“We got some incredibly timely goals from players to win some of these games very dramatically,” Yzerman said. “Maybe it won’t be as dramatic next year, and maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe we’ll win some games with lower scoring and not have these wild comebacks, and we also might not have some of these wild losses where we were leading, too.”
Continued at length (it’s a good read); the necessity of dramatic comebacks and overcoming multi-goal deficits in the 2nd and 3rd periods made for entertaining hockey this past season, but it also gave both the Red Wings and their fans panic attacks and probably a couple of cardiac emergencies.
If the Red Wings are able to cut down on their goals against, be a little less leaky on the PK and generally play more consistent hockey from the start of games to their conclusions, a less dramatic Wings team may emerge, and that won’t just calm the fan base’s nerves–it will make winning with a slightly less potent offense much more likely.
