Red Wings edged by Washington in 2-1 Easter Sunday loss
Photos by Jen Hefner/MiHockey
By @SKubus –
DETROIT – With points at a premium heading into the final week of the regular season, the Red Wings’ lack of offense haunted them in Sunday evening’s 2-1 loss to the Washington Capitals.
Darren Helm scored in regulation for Detroit, while Petr Mrazek stopped 26 of 28, but Caps netminder Braden Holtby turned away 35 of 36 to capture the win for his team.
“If we want to win games, you’ve got to score more than one goal,” captain Henrik Zetterberg said. “It’s tough, we have to find a way to produce more.”
The loss kept the Red Wings at 95 points, but dropped them to the second wild card spot in the Eastern Conference, as they caught up with Boston in games played. With the exact same record and number of regulation or overtime wins, Boston owns the head-to-head points advantage.
“You can talk to every coach in the league, all you’ve got to do is look at the standings, everyone’s been through it,” Red Wings head coach Mike Babcock said. “Suck it up and play and find a way to win a game, and that’s it.”
The Capitals owned the league’s best powerplay entering Sunday’s tilt at a conversion rate of 25.2-percent, and it didn’t take long for it to make an impact.
With Dan Cleary in the sin bin for high-sticking, Washington struck just 3:36 into the contest on Evgeny Kuznetsov’s 11th of the season. After Mrazek came up with a huge stop on Kuznetsov earlier in the man-advantage, the Red Wings netminder saw a shot from the Russian youngster take a peculiar bounce off a stick and awkwardly up over his shoulder.
In the middle frame, Mike Green wired his tenth of the season past Mrazek at 4:42, as he stepped in from the right circle and unleashed a slapper that beat Mrazek’s glove to make it 2-0 in favor of Washington.
“I didn’t see it, I don’t think it was deflected,” Mrazek said. “I think it just went through (Drew Miller’s) legs and went in.”
The Red Wings then took their third too-many men minor in three games less than a minute after the Green tally. Despite that being a potential game-changer, the Red Wings killed it off, and Helm then cut the Detroit deficit to one at 12:59 of the middle frame, as he took a brilliant feed from Pavel Datsyuk at the back door for an easy tap-in goal.
Facing a 5-on-3 opportunity for 1:31 just minutes later, Detroit’s second-ranked powerplay was unable to convert.
“We had 90 seconds, got a few opportunities, but you kind of have to get a goal there,” Zetterberg said. “If you get a goal there, it’s a different outcome.”
With no scoring the rest of the way, Detroit was forced to pull Mrazek with 2:02 to go, and the team established some hefty pressure in the Washington zone, but couldn’t find the equalizer.
“The bottom line is, you play a lot of hockey at this time of year, let’s get freshened up tomorrow and get in here for a skate and then we got a big game,” Babcock said. “That’s all that really matters, so let’s get ready for the next game.”