The Red Wings are amidst an 0-2-and-2 streak as they prepare to play the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday night, and it feels like last night’s 2-1 loss to Ottawa will be an inflection point somewhere down the line.
As Detroit Hockey Now’s Kevin Allen notes, a good chunk of you were watching the Lions-Packers game last night, so Allen gets us up to speed regarding some pertinent Red Wings-related stats this morning:
If you want the abridged version of what’s happening to the Red Wings, it goes like this: Detroit was ninth in the NHL scoring last season at 3.35 goals per game. The team is 27th this season at 2.54.
When you are scoring two or fewer goals in 53.8% of your games, you aren’t to win enough games to qualify for the playoffs. That’s true, even if your defensive play and goaltending are improved.
The hard truth: Dylan Larkin and Lucas Raymond are playing well. But on the nights they don’t score, winning becomes far less probable. Larkin has one goal in his past seven games and Detroit is 0-2-2 in the last four.
Continued; my “elephant in the room” is the Wings’ lack of secondary scoring.
We know that the penalty-kill is awful, that goaltending has been spotty when Cam Talbot hasn’t been in net, that the PP hasn’t been spectacular, and that the team seems to collapse when bad things happen, but the inability to receive secondary scoring just stings like hell right now.
Vlad Tarasenko has started slowly, as has Patrick Kane (though Kane was injured at least), Erik Gustafsson’s being scratched for Albert Johansson and Justin Holl’s sake, and Marco Kasper may not be putting up points, but he’s been driving play and making offensive players around him better.
The Wings miss David Perron and Shayne Gostisbehere about as much as I thought they would miss them.
