Detroit News - Playoff to be or not to be?

The season started with a young core of players and a young top line with Leon Draisaitl, Kyle Connor, and Kevin Fiala at the point, Micheal Mcleod, Rudolf Balcers, and Ryan Donato at the end, giving a promising look for the season ahead.

Looking to the preseason we were all happy and got more excited over the coming season as the team went 8-4-0 over the 12 pre-season games. But as we all should have learned through the years is that we can never trust a pre-season, as the regular season's first 10 games offered a 6-4-0 record and the next ten games gave us 6-3-1, making the first quarter of the season a good 12-7-1 record, but things started to shake if you scratched the surface a bit and looked closer at the numbers, then you saw things like the difference between goals for and goals against were close, 67-65 and the PIM started to accumulate, offering the opposing teams 37 one-man advantages during the first 10 games to 55 during the next 10, and here we started to see the weakness of the Wings, their PK overpowered and overrun numerous times, bearly breaking the 80% mark, having a below-average PK and taking over 110 PIM’n is not the best combination in hockey. On the other hand, the PP was doing good, scoring on nearly every 4th opportunity.

But it was not good enough for GM Lundgren, who did not like the PK record of the team at all, making some changes to the roster with a couple of minor moves, bringing in a veteran presence to the 3rd and 4th forward units, Carl Hagelin, Derek Ryan, and Lars Eller, not only these changes were made, team star Leon Draisaitl got moved out of the PK unit all together so that he could better focus on PP and the 5-on-5 game and not being overpowered by minutes played per game. With these changes, the PK did become better, with the added defensive core of the team, also the PP kept the same pace as earlier, but the 5-on-5 didn’t manage as well, 4-4-2 record over the next 10 games (21-30 of the season), this made GM Lundgren mildly annoyed, to say the least, and he pulled to plug on veteran goalie Jack Campbell who sofar had a decent start on the season, but his last 6 starts resulting in an 85,14% SvPCT, and 4,33 GAA he as let go to St Louis in exchange for upcoming Ilya Sorokin, this move was a risk as Sorokin had not put up the numbers at all for St Louis or in Colorado. But GM Lundgren believed that with the strong D-line in front of him in Detroit, (Lundgren also surprised most of the league when he just days before pulled the triger on a deal seeing Kevin Fiala leave to New York, bringing blueline star Seth Jones to Detroit) Sorokin would pick up these numbers and improve. This was soon going to show to be wrong, there was no Jones or Sorokin effect on the team as they went 3-6-1 over the next 10 games, still, the special teams were above the league average but the 5-on-5 was flat, the defense was flat, Sorokin posted 85,96% SvPCT and a 4,17 GAA in his first 6 starts for the wings, one could nearly feel the air vibrating around Little Cearsers Palace, one could nearly cut the frustration surrounding GM Lundgren as press meets, etc. Something was about to happen!

And it happened alright, on day 82 after a depressing 1-5 loss against Nashville GM Lundgren informed the team that star center John Tavares was joining the team, seeing youngster Michael Mcleod (who had spent the last couple of games in the AHL) along with a whole sack of picks and a couple of prospects leave for St Louis (a hefty price for sure), desperate times usually brings desperate actions. Everyone was excited to see what Tavares-Draisaitl-Connor would do for the team, would they be able to copy the huge success of the Chicago trio Malkin-Rantanen-Panarin? Over the next 20 games or so, the 5-on-5 game improved, but the hoped-for success of the new ”super 1st line” didn’t happen, the so successful powerplay fell apart, going from a 20% average over the past 40 games, to 12,98% only scoring 10 goals on 77 opportunities in 20 games, this, of course, lead to the break up of the ”super 1st line” placing Draisaitl back as 1st C, seeing Tavares on the 2nd line, with Marshy and Gaudreau, forcing RyJo to jump down the 3rd line. Resulting in a 13-8-1 record over the last 20 games puts us where we are today, after a fantastic start of the last 22 games for the season, a 1-3 loss to the Colorado Avalance, a team that the Wings outshoot 31 to 16. Detroit was not able to score once on 8 tries in PP, not once! This is not good enough if the team is to reach the postseason. Being 1 point out of the wildcard spot, the chance is still there, but it also means that the team must pick up their game on all ends, seeing the opposition that is up the last games, with 11 of the remaining 21 games top teams from both East and West, Tampa Bay, Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, and the other games against ”last postseason rivals” like Florida, Buffalo, Islanders, and Ottawa all teams within a 2 point gap, there are the ”have to win” games to have the chance to reach the postseason.

Well, that is all this reporter has the energy to write about this topic today!

This is as always, Mike Knowlittle, The Detroit News.