DETROIT --After the Detroit Red Wings' 10-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens at Bell Centre on Saturday, center Henrik Zetterberg said the players embarrassed not only themselves, but everyone who had ever worn the Winged Wheel.
It was quite a statement, considering Detroit entered the NHL in 1926 and became known as the Red Wings in 1932. But it was quite a … well, from the Detroit perspective, there is no polite word for it.
Red Wings determined to respond with grit, passion
Ability to recover from 10-1 loss to Canadiens will be tested against Jets
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"I didn't want that just to be a loss," said Zetterberg, who succeeded Nicklas Lidstrom as captain on Jan. 13, 2013 and has played for the Red Wings since 2002. "It wasn't just a loss. The way we lost, I've never been part of that before."
Up next for the Red Wings? The Winnipeg Jets at Little Caesars Arena on Tuesday (7:30 p.m. ET; FS-D, TSN3, NHL.TV). The Jets are 17-6-4 for 38 points, tied with the Tampa Bay Lightning for most in the League. They defeated the Ottawa Senators 5-0 at Bell MTS Place on Sunday.
"If we don't come out and compete," defenseman Danny DeKeyser said, "it's not going to be pretty."
So coach Jeff Blashill made quite a statement himself at practice Monday. It wasn't a bag skate. It was harder. The Red Wings did 2-on-2 battle drills the width of the ice, 1-on-1 protect-the-puck drills in the zones, 2-on-2 quick-change battle drills with the goals moved up to the tops of the slots. They did sprints the width of the ice in between.
Blashill blew his whistle. The players huffed, puffed, hunched over, dropped to one knee, dropped to two.
"You've got to keep grinding and keep finding ways to win -- and, as a coach, keep finding ways to get your message across," Blashill said. "Sometimes that's talk. Sometimes that's meetings. Sometimes that's practice. Talk can be cheap for certain. So I think if I left that ice today and I was a player, I'd know there's a real emphasis on winning puck battles and holding onto the puck."
Zetterberg said Blashill's message was still getting across.
"This is not on coaches," Zetterberg said. "This is not on the system. It's up to us in here to go out and perform better and also win your battles. You have to go out and show more passion and more grit, and we're going to do that."
The bottom line is that the Red Wings are a fine-line team: good enough to hang in the race for the Stanley Cup Playoffs if they maximize their ability, not good enough if they don't, not even close if they don't show up.
"I think for the last couple years we've been too inconsistent," forward Gustav Nyquist said. "We have good streaks and then we have a bad streak. When we play bad, we can be very bad too."
They started 4-1-0 this season, then went through an 0-5-1 slump, then went 6-2-2 over their next 10 games. A little more than two weeks ago, they seemed in relatively good shape a quarter of the way through their season, in third place in the Atlantic Division, but Blashill warned: "If you let up for a second, you will fall behind so fast you won't know what happened to you."
They have gone 0-4-3 since and fallen out of a playoff spot.
It's not like they haven't competed. On Nov. 25, they played the New Jersey Devils at Prudential Center, the second game of a back-to-back set. They fell behind 3-1 in the third period but came back to tie it before losing in 4-3 in overtime. On Nov. 28, they were tied with the Los Angeles Kings 1-1 in the second at Little Caesars Arena, had a chance to take the lead and were foiled repeatedly by goaltender Jonathan Quick. They lost 4-1. On Thursday, they had a 2-1 lead on the Canadiens after the first at Little Caesars Arena.
But the Canadiens outscored the Red Wings 15-2 over the final two periods Thursday and the three Saturday.
"The last five periods here have been awful," Zetterberg said.
In the big picture, the roster has holes, particularly a lack of elite talent. The Red Wings didn't have high draft picks for a quarter century, thanks to the 25-season playoff streak that ended in 2016-17, and haven't hit on some of the picks they've had.
The Red Wings selected forward Evgeny Svechnikov with the No. 19 pick in the 2015 NHL Draft, four picks before the Vancouver Canucks took forward Brock Boeser. Svechnikov has four points (two goals, two assists) in 17 games for Grand Rapids of the American Hockey League. Boeser leads NHL rookies with 25 points (13 goals, 12 assists) in 24 games.
In the little picture, the players know they're a fine-line team. They have worked hard and haven't gotten results too often, draining their confidence and enthusiasm. It snowballed Thursday and Saturday. It must stop Tuesday.
"Even if we don't win [against the Jets], we've just got to go out and have a good game," Zetterberg said. "We've got to go out and play well and work hard and work as a team. If we do that, eventually we will win enough games, and we'll get the confidence back."
