The Detroit Red Wings defeated the Vancouver Canucks 3-2 in overtime last night, and this morning, the Hockey News’s Sam Stockton has posted his customary morning-after-the-game notebook. Stockton discusses the fact that the Red Wings did not play an elegant game given their mental and physical fatigue after playing their 2nd game in less than 24 hours, as well as their 3rd game in 4 nights:
The schedule provides a clear reason for Detroit’s play to have been something short of its best, having played consecutive games in a 24-hour span with travel between. As Patrick Kane—who returned to the lineup against Vancouver for the first time since Jan. 21—observed, “Obviously it’s a tough back-to-back. Eight o’clock game for the boys last night and then coming in here for a five o’clock game, we knew it was going to be a little bit of a grind. Found a way to get it done.”
Kane described his performance as “a little rusty,” while adding that it was “nice to get back into one and get the first one out of the way and hopefully be better next game for the team.”
Meanwhile, coach Todd McLellan—whose post-Christmas arrival could hardly have changed the trajectory of the season more—insisted that it’s taken an entire organization’s buy-in to achieve the present results.
“Not just the players, training staff and the coaching staff and everybody around the team has a sense of belief now,” he told reporters. “When you come in and you try to create an environment and you try to introduce new concepts for the players, they’re either going to accept them or making it work, or they’re gonna poke holes in it and basically say it doesn’t work. All of our players have chosen to make it work. The longer it goes, the more they believe.”
