The vast majority of the Red Wings’ players have the next week off, with the Four Nations Face-Off break extending until February 18th, when practices will resume across the NHL.
DetroitRedWings.com’s Jonathan Mills spoke to several Red Wings players and coach Todd McLellan regarding the rest and recuperation that the Wings will indulge in over the next week:
“It’s a long year,” Talbot said. “This helps reset not only physically, but mentally as well. We have a few days of practice when we get back from the break, but there can’t be any kind of letdown. We have to continue to build off what we’ve built up here, but I think for the most part it’s getting healthy, resetting and coming back ready to go.”
Detroit certainly wants to start what is shaping up to be an exciting final stretch of the season with some momentum, especially after seeing both its seven-game winning streak and eight-game point streak end with a 6-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday.
“We can take some time to breathe,” Red Wings head coach Todd McLellan said. “As a staff, we’ll review where we’ve been and what we need to work on. Some of the things we saw [Saturday] are important. Game-management skills are really hard to work on in practice because there is no score or fatigue and not a lot of line-matching. It’s hard to recreate stressful situations, so game-management skills just have to keep coming through video and experience. For us to move forward, those are going to have to improve.”
Detroit will resume game action on Feb. 22, when the club hosts the Minnesota Wild for Kids Day at Little Caesars Arena. Erik Gustafsson pointed out that the Red Wings have “a lot of road games coming up” — 15 of their final 27, to be exact – and he also believes the players should try to enjoy this rare breather in the regular-season schedule.
“I’m going to rest as much as I can,” Gustafsson said. “Spend time with the family. We all need to enjoy the time off because we know it’s going to be a battle when we come back. We’ve worked hard to be in this position in the standings, but we obviously got to keep going.”
