MLive’s Ansar Khan suggests that this season’s Detroit Red Wings team needs to find more “mental fortitude” and consistency of effort if they are to make a playoff push over the course of the 2025-2026 season:
“I can’t speak for what has happened in the past, but from the time I got here, this team was very streaky,” coach Todd McLellan said. “When it goes good for this group, coaches included, we can get ahead of things. But it doesn’t take much for us to start taking on water. And when that happens, it takes a long time for us to get out of it. For me, that’s mental fortitude, some resiliency that’s built into the group that’s driven by us as a coaching staff to put them through it in practice and put them in stressful situations.
“You could see that we could sustain the good for a number of games, find different ways to win when it was going well. When it didn’t go well, we scrambled and struggled to get ourselves breathing again. It happened over days, it happened within games, within periods. I could list a number of games where that happened, and we couldn’t recover. So, mental fortitude, resiliency has to come from us.
“You probably hear me talk about game management until you’re sick of it. That has to get better. We can’t just put our skates on and play the game. We have to manage our way through the game.”
Barring any more moves, the Red Wings will head into the season with much the same roster that finished last season. The biggest addition is goaltender John Gibson. They added complementary pieces in wingers James van Riemsdyk and Mason Appleton and defenseman Jacob Bernard-Docker.
Most of their improvement must come from within, younger players continuing to grow and veterans producing more.
“I think we need more depth,” general manager Steve Yzerman said before free agency. “Looking at this year in particular, we relied heavily on our power play. We did not score five-on-five. We didn’t get enough offense from our bottom six group, but we also didn’t get enough five-on-five scoring from our top six.
“So how do we address that? Try to get better players, try to make our players better and demand that the players be better. How do they do that? They work hard in the offseason, they get in better shape, they work at whatever they need to work on. We’ve had some players really work at different parts of their game and really show improvement over the last two or three years.”
Continued (paywall); the Wings haven’t necessarily gotten better players, so they’re going to have to improve from within.
