BUFFALO, NY – They lose at home to a team that’s chasing them in the playoff race. Then they go on the road and rattle the top team in their own Atlantic Division.
There are less than three weeks left in the Detroit Red Wings’ regular season, and advancing to the NHL playoffs hinges on mirroring the emotion and energy that spurred their victories against the Buffalo Sabres (on Friday, March 27) and Montreal Canadiens (on March 19), and not the lackluster performance that marred their loss to the Ottawa Senators (on March 24). So how is that accomplished?
“Well, I would be coach of the year, every year, if I could figure that out,” Todd McLellan said.
The Wings were angry, said captain Dylan Larkin, after losing at home to the Senators – a loss that pushed the Wings out of the playoff picture. Given how incredibly snug the standings are in the Eastern Conference, taking a night off is costly. The core group that had to accept missing out on the playoffs by a tiebreaker two years ago is still around, and knows the value of every point.
There are so many teams fighting for positioning around the wild cards – the Senators, the Boston Bruins, the New York Islanders, even Saturday’s foe, the Philadelphia Flyers – that there is no margin for error.
The Wings managed to go 3-3-1 while Larkin, their captain and top-line center, recovered from an injury, sliding down but not slipping past the eight-team cutoff. Then the Senators loss happened – at Little Caesars Arena, no less – but that was balanced by going into Buffalo and winning on the road.
“I hink we’ve had some really good moments, to be honest with you,” Patrick Kane said. “Even when Larks was out, I mean, maybe we weren’t getting some production, but playing pretty well. I think we know the way we need to play and to be successful, and that just might be playing stingy, taking advantage of our opportunities, scoring on the power play. And then keep building off that, get confidence.
“I think we play better when we have confidence and swagger and play like a team that knows how to win.”
The Wings will need swagger in spades to overcome a two-month span, from Jan. 25-March 25, during which their 6-9-3 record was second-worst in the NHL, complete with a minus-11 goal differential. Even after beating the Sabres, 5-2, Friday, they entered Saturday with a minus-1 goal differential on the the season. (The two teams leading the East’s divisions entering Saturday’s games, the Sabres and Carolina Hurricanes, were in the plus-40 range.)
Defenseman Moritz Seider pointed to the positives over the past stretch – especially the start in the Sabres game, in which the Wings built a 3-0 lead in the first period – as a springboard for the success it’ll take to climb the standings.
“There are still a lot of good things in the last couple of games,” he said Friday. “We only lost by one [to the Senators]. There are a lot of positives.
“Hopefully, this is a start to make it count here until the end. We got away there a little bit in the second period. Obviously, they’re a good team. They’re first in the standings for a reason, but we battled through. I think overall, we can be really happy with the performance. Hopefully, that can give us a little bit of a boost here for confidence.”
Teams can’t control when an opposing goalie steals a game, as Boston’s Jeremy Swayman did at LCA on March 21. But playing with emotion and energy? That is controllable.
“There’s ups and downs, and ebbs and flows with the players, the way they feel,” McLellan said. “The opposition always has a say in the game. I talk about the wonders of sport, that’s how it goes. … We expect to come out and have energy and play like we did in the first. But there’s always variables that come into play. And we’ll control as many of them as we can.”
Contact Helene St. James at hstjames@freepress.com.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Win vs Sabres shows key to Red Wings hopes: Swagger, consistency
Reporting by Helene St. James, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
