ESPN’s Ryan S. Clark and Kristen Shilton posted a set of “Quarter Mark” grades for each and every one of the NHL’s 32 teams. You would assume correctly that the Red Wings earn a middling mark in the Insider-only article:
Detroit Red Wings
Preseason over/under: 90.5
Current points pace: 78.1What’s gone right? The Red Wings have benefited from an (unexpected?) youth movement headlined by Marco Kasper, Simon Edvinsson and a (suddenly!) striking Jonatan Berggren. The 20-year-old Kasper has been so reliable as a physical force up front that coach Derek Lalonde recently promoted him to play on a line with Patrick Kane and Alex DeBrincat. And the 21-year-old Edvinsson had been terrific patrolling Detroit’s blue line before suffering a lower-body injury. The Red Wings have also received solid goaltending from offseason signee Cam Talbot (.921 SV%, 2.62 GAA) and their power play is excellent, sitting just outside the top 5 at 28.1%. Detroit is good in one-goal games, too, posting a 4-1-2 record in those outings this season.
What’s gone wrong? Detroit has been so strong on the man advantage its nearly overshadowed how poor their 5-on-5 scoring is. The Red Wings are 31st in even-strength goals — only Nashville is worse. Detroit’s inability to generate offense has robbed them of too many wins already this season. The Red Wings’ penalty kill is a league-worst now (66.7%), which is another constant hurdle holding them back. And, as has been the case for several years, Detroit simply can’t deliver a full-team by-in on defense — they’re giving up the fourth-most shots on net (31.9 per game, fifth-most in the league), and allowing 3.15 goals against per game.
Grade: C+. Detroit is running out of excuses. The Red Wings have been maturing throughout this extended rebuild and yet the purported progress simply isn’t showing. And it feels like Lalonde is increasingly closer to paying the price with his job. The Red Wings are by all accounts a quiet group, and it could be the lack of vocal veteran leadership keeping them in a rut. Captain Dylan Larkin must be the change there, and veterans like Kane, Vladimir Tarasenko and J.T. Compher can help too (some added offense from those three wouldn’t hurt, either). The Red Wings have been shuffling the deck up front lately and maybe that’ll help jumpstart Detroit in the next quarter of this season.
Continued (paywall); A “C+” seems a little generous to me, but I wouldn’t give them a much lower grade despite the team’s systemic difficulties.
Aside from giving up fewer goals against and shot attempts against, I’d love to see the Wings crank up their secondary scoring, and Tarasenko at least is warming up (and it turned out that Patrick Kane’s slow-down was injury-related), but the Wings are far too regularly a one-(line)-and-done team…
And that concerns me as much as any of the other deficiencies the team must rectify in order to succeed over the course of the second 20 games of the season.
