The Hockey News’s Sam Stockton weighs in on the Red Wings’ 5-2 loss to the New York Rangers via a morning-after notebook, and this stood out for me:
It took 114 seconds for the Rangers to score three goals on their first three power plays. In other words, before the Red Wings killed off two minutes of power play time, New York struck three times. The first (from Artemi Panarin, just 11 seconds after an Alex DeBrincat trip) stretched the Ranger lead from 1-0 to 2-0 before the end of the first period, while the second (off the stick of Vincent Trocheck, 47 seconds into a Jonatan Berggren hold) and third (from Panarin again, 56 seconds after an Erik Gustafsson high stick) combine to all but end the game at 4-1 with less than 30 minutes of hockey remaining.
In the end, it was not a difficult night to parse: Detroit simply didn’t hold up on the penalty kill to a degree that made everything else all but irrelevant. “Special teams tonight, 100% special teams,” assessed coach Derek Lalonde after the game. “The outburst was obviously their power play goals, which was three of ’em to extend the lead. A big part of the game, and we didn’t execute. That was it. There were some things within our five-on-five that we can take away from this that were fairly positive. This game got away from us on special teams.”
Continued at length…
