Author: George Malik

My name is George Malik, and I'm the Malik Report's editor/blogger/poster. I have been blogging about the Red Wings since 2006, and have worked with MLive and Kukla's Korner. Thank you for reading!

Tweets from Friday’s practice: Kasper arrives, Copp and Motte absent

The Detroit Red Wings will attempt to rebound from Thursday’s 5-2 loss to the New York Rangers when the Wings head to Nashville to battle the 0-and-4 Predators tomorrow afternoon (2 PM EDT start on Bally Sports Detroit).

The Red Wings will then head to Long Island to play Patrick Roy’s Islanders on Tuesday before coming home to play the Devils next Thursday, and heading to Buffalo to battle the Sabres next Saturday(and then host the Oilers in a back-to-back weekend), all before ending October with a home game against the Jets.

As far as the Predators are concerned, Nashville’s most recent loss came at the hands of the Edmonton Oilers, who defeated the Preds 4-2 on Thursday evening in Nashville. Nashville is 0-and-3 at home this season, and they host the Bruins after Detroit comes to town.

While Ville Husso warmed up for tonight’s Griffins-Moose game (to be streamed on FloHockey.tv) in Grand Rapids…

And while Marco Kasper was recalled under emergency conditions (which means that the Red Wings can’t dress 12 forwards), you may take this for what you will:

The Red Wings hit the ice at Little Caesars Arena’s BELFOR Training Center just before noon EDT, and the Wings did so short a couple of forwards:

Continue reading Tweets from Friday’s practice: Kasper arrives, Copp and Motte absent

Marco Kasper recalled under emergency conditions

From the Red Wings on Twitter:

Emergency conditions = the team can’t dress a full roster. Must be the flu bug going through the locker room.

Mini catch-up post of doom

Aunt Annie and I have been battling a flu bug for the last two weeks, and it persists, so Wednesday’s “maintenance day” ended up yielding a full day-and-a-half’s worth of missed time.

As such, here’s a round-up of the articles I missed during my absence:

MLive: On Wednesday, MLive’s Ansar Khan reported that the Red Wings tinkered with their power play units, hoping to bring some life into the stagnant power play;

Khan also discussed the Red Wings’ rough opening 5-game schedule with coach Lalonde, and he noted that Erik Gustafsson was well aware of the fact that he hasn’t played up to par as of yet;

Free Press: Helene St. James spoke with Patrick Kane and Lalonde regarding the power play, and she spoke with Erik Gustafsson and Lalonde about #56’s play thus far;

St. James also posted videos of Kane and Lalonde and Gustafsson speaking with her:

Detroit News: Ted Kulfan discussed the Wings’ power play struggles, and yesterday, Kulfan talked about the brutal October schedule;

The Detroit News’s Tony Paul reports that Bally Sports networks are going to be purchased by FanDuel Sports;

Detroit Hockey Now: Bob Duff discussed Axel Sandin Pellikka chasing a Swedish scoring record;

Continue reading Mini catch-up post of doom

Reminder: FloHockey.tv will stream tonight’s Griffins-Moose game

FloHockey.tv is going to stream tonight’s Grand Rapids Griffins-Manitoba Moose game (7 PM EDT start), and Patrick Williams posted a game preview:

Grand Rapids Griffins – What To Watch For

Grand Rapids is off to a 1-1-0-0 start, winning the home opener last Friday behind 35 saves from top prospect Sebastian Cossa against Milwaukee before falling a night later at Rockford.

The Grand Rapids crease is crowded at the moment after NHL veteran Ville Husso cleared waivers and was sent to the Griffins by the Detroit Red Wings. Husso joins Cossa and AHL veteran Malcolm Subban, who signed a PTO with the team earlier. The Griffins also have goaltender Gage Alexander on recall from their ECHL affiliate, the Toledo Walleye. Always active in building out the Grand Rapids roster via free agency, the Red Wings have brought in forwards Sheldon Dries, Joe Snively, and Austin Watson to surround a young core of prospects.

This game will be the last one before the Griffins face a stretch of seven of their next eight games on the road.

Manitoba Moose – What To Watch For

The Moose have taken the Central Division lead after sweeping a two-game set at Iowa last weekend in which they picked up nine goals. This weekend will conclude a season-opening four-game road trip before they are back in Winnipeg next weekend for their home opener against Rockford.

Only 21 years old, Lucius is a 2021 first-rounder who has faced several significant injuries that have delayed his development. He was limited to 17 games with the Moose last season. Another first-rounder is Lambert, who ended up ranking second among AHL rookies last season with 21-34-55. Chibrikov, who had a strong first AHL season with 17-30-47, is off to a strong start with 1-3-4 through his first two games. Salomonsson, who just turned 20 on Aug. 31, is now with Manitoba after spending all of last season in the SHL with Skelleftea. Simon Lundmark and Dmitry Kuzmin.

Continued

‘100% special teams’

The Hockey News’s Sam Stockton weighs in on the Red Wings’ 5-2 loss to the New York Rangers via a morning-after notebook, and this stood out for me:

It took 114 seconds for the Rangers to score three goals on their first three power plays.  In other words, before the Red Wings killed off two minutes of power play time, New York struck three times.  The first (from Artemi Panarin, just 11 seconds after an Alex DeBrincat trip) stretched the Ranger lead from 1-0 to 2-0 before the end of the first period, while the second (off the stick of Vincent Trocheck, 47 seconds into a Jonatan Berggren hold) and third (from Panarin again, 56 seconds after an Erik Gustafsson high stick) combine to all but end the game at 4-1 with less than 30 minutes of hockey remaining.  

In the end, it was not a difficult night to parse: Detroit simply didn’t hold up on the penalty kill to a degree that made everything else all but irrelevant.  “Special teams tonight, 100% special teams,” assessed coach Derek Lalonde after the game.  “The outburst was obviously their power play goals, which was three of ’em to extend the lead.  A big part of the game, and we didn’t execute.  That was it.  There were some things within our five-on-five that we can take away from this that were fairly positive.  This game got away from us on special teams.”

Continued at length…

Three sets of power rankings

In the power rankings department:

  1. ESPN’s Sean Allen and Victoria Matiash focus on a fantasy hockey player to pick up from each team:

27. Detroit Red Wings

Previous ranking: 16
Points percentage: 25.0%

J.T. Compher, F (93.4% available, 1.6 FPPG, 4.9 fantasy points): It might not last because it’s currently at the expense of both Alex DeBrincat and Vladimir Tarasenko, but Compher is rolling on the top power-play unit. It’s his only access to ice time with Dylan Larkin, which is key in Detroit.

Next seven days: @ NSH (Oct. 19), @ NYI (Oct. 22), vs. NJ (Oct. 24)

2. Sportsnet’s Ryan Dixon went with “32 scorers who need to start scoring“…

27. Detroit Red Wings (1-2-0) After inking his huge contract before the season, Lucas Raymond would surely like to find the net and get on with it.

3. And here’s Bleacher Report’s Lyle Fitzsimmons:

25. Detroit Red Wings

Previous Ranking: 16

Overall Record: [1-3-and-0]

A [1-3-and-0] start to the season isn’t disastrous by any measure, but it’s easy to identify an anemic power play as an issue so far. The Red Wings were 0-for-4 against the New York Rangers on Monday and have scored just once with a man-advantage in 11 tries in three games.

Morning news: recaps, the blame game and an unpleasant statistic

Of Red Wings-related note this morning:

  1. MLive’s Ansar Khan filed a morning recap of last night’s 5-1 loss to the New York Rangers:

“Our start felt really good,” [coach Derek] Lalonde said. “I was very confident the momentum of that start is going to lead to a good night. And then even despite being down 2-0, our second period start again, we had pop, we had energy. We get the early goal (from Moritz Seider at 1:27), we have some looks, and then bang, bang on the power play and you’re down 4-1. It turns into a bit of a frustrating night.”

It’s early, but the Red Wings haven’t looked like the improved defensive team they need to be to progress this season.

“It’s not something you just flip a switch and it happens,” Ben Chiarot said. “It’s not just guys knowing the structure. We have a lot of offensive-minded players, guys that want to go on offense, to get those kind of guys to buy into playing defense, it takes time. Talk about buying into what the coaches are preaching and we’re in that process right now. It doesn’t just happen one night, two nights. It takes time. And you got to have lessons like tonight to make you change in a hurry.”

2. The Free Press’s Helene St. James also filed a morning recap:

As tough as the early schedule looked, the Detroit Red Wings have made it even tougher on themselves.

They head to Nashville, Tennessee, on Saturday to play the Predators smarting from two straight losses, the latter of which exposed their special teams and their team defense. The Wings are 1-3-0, their sole victory coming against the Predators a week ago at home. Like the New York Rangers, who beat the Wings twice in a four-day span, the Predators were a preseason Stanley Cup favorite, though they’ve started the season winless in four. But the Wings can’t be worried about the Predators’ problems — they have too many of their own.

“We’re playing stiff competition, which is good for us early in the season,” defenseman Ben Chiarot said after Thursday’s 5-2 stinker. “It’s a good measuring stick. It shows us where we have to get to, and we have a lot of work to do. Thankfully it’s early in the season and we can kind of learn our lesson early as opposed to fooling ourselves early on, winning a couple easy ones, and then facing teams like this down the stretch when we really need those points.”

3. The Athletic’s Max Bultman is already laying blame at the feet of GM Steve Yzerman’s roster-building, or the lack thereof:

But when general manager Steve Yzerman went into the offseason, he did little to address it, at least with respect to the roster. When offense-minded defenseman Shayne Gostisbehere left in free agency, Detroit replaced him with a similar player in Erik Gustafsson, who has already been scratched twice in this young season. It brought in a new defense-minded forward in Tyler Motte, but he’s not used high enough in the lineup to make a major difference. The Red Wings did bring in a heavier top-nine scoring forward in Vladimir Tarasenko — at the expense of an even heavier top-nine forward in David Perron, who was also one of the team’s core leaders the past two seasons.

On paper, after the dust had settled on the Red Wings’ offseason, it didn’t look like much had changed.

And on the ice, so far, it’s looked the same way.

Again, it’s early in an 82-game season. And Thursday night, as coach Derek Lalonde made a point to emphasize, the biggest culprit of the latest lopsided loss was special teams. The Rangers scored on their first three power-play attempts and raced out to a 4-1 lead by the middle of the second period. The score was 5-1 soon after.

4. Detroit Hockey Now’s Bob Duff reports the following…

Their 1-3 record is the worst start to a Red Wings season since the 2018-19 campaign. That year saw Detroit stumble from the gates 0-5-2. The team ended up 32-40-10, missing the playoffs.

It’s just the second time in 30 years that the club has found itself with a losing record four games into a season. In 1993-94, the Wings opened 1-5.

Red Wings-Rangers wrap-up: Wings’ emphasis is on defense after Panarin, Rangers sweep home-and-home series

What a mess. The Detroit Red Wings are 0-and-3 heading into a Saturday matinee against the winless Nashville Predators–in Nashville–after sustaining another body blow in the form of a 5-1 loss to the New York Rangers on Thursday night.

The Rangers ended up sweeping the home-and-home series, having won 4-1 on Monday night (so that’s an aggregate score of 9-2 Rangers), and after the Red Wings head to Nashville, they face a gauntlet of three Wild Card rivals in the Islanders, Devils and Atlantic Division-rival Sabres next week, all before wrapping up October against the Oilers and Jets.

If the Red Wings aren’t making changes to their roster in short order, perhaps we’ll see more movement by Halloween, because the Wings’ efforts over the past two nights have been largely inexcusable.

In any case, the Red Wings’ opponent simply let the good times roll on Thursday night, and Artemi Panarin, who scored a hat trick and added an assist, has posted a total of 11 points over the course of only 4 games. He told the New York Post’s Mollie Walker that he’s having a delightful time thus far:

Continue reading Red Wings-Rangers wrap-up: Wings’ emphasis is on defense after Panarin, Rangers sweep home-and-home series