The Free Press’s Helene St. James discusses the Red Wings’ opportunity to respond to the chaos surrounding the team by winning hockey games, duly noting that the “weirdness” surrounding the team remains a roar of white noise:

“As simple as it is, I think that just calms everything,” Moritz Seider said. “Calms a lot of noise, calms a lot of weirdness that maybe came with the summer. Points on the board is a really good answer to a lot of those things.”

…

“Since camp has started, it’s been pretty normal for us,” Andrew Copp said. “We’ve been worried about our systems, figuring out linemate chemistry, how our own individual games are going, our team game, all that kind of stuff. I would say that it was tumultuous for a while there in the summer, but since we had Larks talk to the team, and [Shawn Horcoff] was named GM and he talked to the team, and since then training camp started, it’s been pretty normal.

“Now we need to get off to a fast start and build confidence and get everything focused on hockey.”

St. James quotes coach Todd McLellan extensively in her long article, and his bottom line is the team’s bottom line:

“We, being the group that I’ve been around for 18 months now, should have learned a bunch of valuable lessons,” McLellan said. “It doesn’t mean we’re not going to make the same mistake over again, it just means that we should cut them down. Game management is often a read or sometimes just being delinquent. If it’s the delinquent part, we’d better be fixing that. If it’s a read and a react situation and we make the wrong play at the wrong time, then we’ve got to keep working on things. But the delinquency has to be eliminated, and I think we’re doing a good job of addressing it and working toward that. It’s also a work in progress. We’re growing.”

The Wings play seven of their first eight games at Little Caesars Arena, offering a friendly opportunity to show that growth, that hunger, that desire to follow weirdness with winning and building towards that elusive goal: a playoff berth.

“It’s really important to build a little confidence, a little momentum, and kind of go from there,” Copp said. “I mean, there’s no one little thing that’s going to just change absolutely everything, but for 75% of last year, we were really good, and then 25%, obviously not good enough. We need to improve that, and it’s the crunch time of year. But our process was pretty good for a long time. We think we have a lot of good players and that we can play a sound team game, and that’s how we’ll win.”

Continued (paywall); give this one a read if you can.