Looking back and looking ahead for the Detroit Red Wings

 

By Dave Waddell –

Players and coaches always claim they learn more from defeats than victories.

However, the Boston Bruins exposed the Detroit Red Wings on so many levels in their five-game playoff series win it’ll take more than just one summer to act on the lessons learned.

“I don’t think we played up to our level,” Detroit coach Mike Babcock told reporters following his team’s elimination in Boston. “I’m not trying to take anything away from Boston. They’re a real good team, real heavy team, real organized, but you want to be the best you can be and I didn’t think we were.

“It was a real good experience for our kids. We had lots of kids in this series that were important parts of our team that got us into the playoffs and they found out how hard it is.”

The gap between the NHL’s best team during the regular season and a clear favorite to win the Stanley Cup and the Wings was massive.
Given that the Wings’ young players looked like kids in their first NHL playoffs, it’s reasonable to expect such a gifted group will get better with experience and as they mature physically.

However, the rest of what was witnessed in the series was troublesome.

The Wings’ propensity for not always paying attention to detail cost them dearly.

Against the Bruins it surfaced in the form of a pair of too many men-on-the-ice penalties – one of which cost Detroit a goal – and some horrific line changes that also cost them another tally.

Add in goalie Jimmy Howard’s brain cramp in misplaying the puck and handing the Bruins the first goal of Game 2 and you have three unforced errors that cost the Wings 25 percent of the goals Boston scored.

Howard and the defense in front of him have certainly left themselves open for criticism.

Statistically, Howard was solid with a .931 save percentage and a 2.02 goals against average. Wings’ fans would’ve been delighted with those numbers before the series started, but it was the timing of a couple goals and the quality of some of them that will be remembered.

Such is the life of a goalie that fans will inevitably feel backup Jonas Gustavsson played better when forced into action due to Howard getting the flu even though his numbers are actually inferior with a 2.71 GAA and a .917 save percentage.

More problematic than goalkeeping was the Wings were essentially playing with only two legitimate NHL defensive pairings.

Brian Lashoff and Jakub Kindl were simply a nightmare in this series. They finished a combined minus-five and rookie Xavier Ouellet had pushed Lashoff out of the line-up by Game 5.

That the backend must be the focus in the off-season was only reinforced by this series.

On the bright side, Brendan Smith proved a warrior against the Bruins. He was one of four Wings to finish plus-one and showed he has a taste for the battle.

Detroit could’ve used more of that quality, especially up front.

Johan Franzen, who had two assists, will be the lightning rod for the group and so he should be. Never has someone contributed so little, so consistently despite averaging nearly 19 minutes of ice time per game.

One of Detroit’s few big forwards, Franzen rarely got to the net as he hovered on the perimeter. Unfortunately the man called ‘Mule’ has become a shell of himself in terms of playoff performances since 2009-10. After getting blanked this spring, he’s scored all of seven goals and had four assists in the past four post-seasons.

Outside of Datsyuk, who scored half the team’s six goals playing on one leg, and Zetterberg, who tied for second in Wings’ scoring in the series despite a playing two games, the forwards got very little done.

Helm was minus-three with no points, Daniel Alfredsson was too injured to be useful and Gustav Nyquist, Riley Sheahan and Tomas Tatar put up bagels on the scoresheet.

David Legwand, who cost a second-round draft pick and prime prospect, looks a spent force going forward while Todd Bertuzzi, Mikael Samuelsson and Dan Cleary have lost their jobs to the youngsters.

“We weren’t a tough out at all,” Babcock said. “We were good in Game 1 and I thought we were good for a period-and-half in Game 4.
“To find out how good they are you’ve got to push them. You go back and forth and win games and you get to around (Game) 6 and 7. We never did that.”

The coaching staff doesn’t escape significant scrutiny either. Their inability to sort out the Wings’ terrible special teams in the series – actually all season against Boston – was among their biggest collective failures.

The Wings scored twice in 20 attempts, including going one-for-seven in Game 5. That equates to a conversion rate of 10 percent ranking them 13th out of the 16 playoff teams.

Detroit was even worse on the penalty kill. The Wings gave up six goals on 16 Boston power plays for a dreadful kill rate of 62.5 per cent. That ranks them dead last in the first round.

Connected to these failings was Babcock’s insistence on continuing to throw out Luke Glendening for key defensive zone face-offs both on the PK and in even-strength situations. Glendening has become a Babcock favorite, but he was by far Detroit’s worst face-off man. The Wolverines alum won only 16 of 49 draws (32.6) in the series and his losses in the circle led to three of Boston’s goals in the two games in Detroit.

It was always going to be a losing situation overall in the circle against Boston’s face-off maestro Patrice Bergeron, but Babcock had two other options who were both over 50 percent on the draw in the series in Pavel Datsyuk (52.9 percent) and Darren Helm (51.9 per cent).

You add it all up and it was easy to see why the Wings were an easy out.

With the team failing to advance past the first round for the second time in three years and having failed to reach a conference final since their last trip to the Stanley Cup Final in 2009 some tough decisions loom ahead for general manger Ken Holland this summer.

“We keep the streak going with the playoff appearances (23 seasons) but it’s getting tiring not getting deeper,” Zetterberg told reporters in Boston. “Probably would change that streak if we could go longer in one of those years. You want to go deep in the postseason and to get kicked out early is not a good feeling.

“It’s been too many times lately.”