The Detroit Red Wings won 4-2 over the Montreal Canadiens last night at Little Caesars Arena.
The Red Wings now sit only 3 points behind Montreal, 5 points behind the Wild Card-holding Tampa Bay Lightning, and 6 points behind the Boston Bruins, who sit 3rd in the Atlantic.
This morning, four Red Wings pundits discuss last night’s result:
- The Free Press’s Helene St. James discusses the Wings’ ability to “not be too cute” over the course of a strong start to last night’s game:
“I think we can skate with anybody,” defenseman Moritz Seider said after the Wings’ 4-2 victory over the Montreal Canadiens on Thursday. “We have to have a shooting mentality. Don’t necessarily be too cute, and at the start, really focus on playing north-south hockey — get pucks to the net, really grind their D out. I think that’s stuff we can do over and over again.”
The Wings (22-21-5) will need to do it over and over again: Even when they had won seven in a row earlier this month, the closest they got to the playoff picture was two points out, with two teams ahead of them. Since that streak, they’ve gone 2-3-1, and now there are a handful of teams ahead of them.
That’s where Thursday’s game can help. The Wings had jump from the get-go, they scored first, and they scored five-on-five, with a man advantage — and with a man disadvantage. It wasn’t hard for McLellan to answer what he liked best.
“I liked our start,” McLellan said. “I thought everybody got into the game. We were aggressive, we looked fast. I challenged the group before the game, because part of the pre-scout was the two games that they had played against Montreal pre-Christmas. In that game, we looked slower and a little indecisive, and wanted them to give us a guideline of whether we’ve made progress.
“We were aggressive, we were quicker, we played faster. For the most part, that was how we looked 10 days, two weeks ago, so that’s a good sign for us.”
2. MLive’s Ansar Khan focused on Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin’s 700th game and 650th and 651st points:
Continue reading Morning news round-up: Wings-Habs recaps, and praise for Larkin and the penalty-kill