Red Wings ‘down’ after elimination extends playoff drought to 10 years

DETROIT -- The fans booed as the clock expired at Little Caesars Arena on Saturday.

In their home finale, on “Fan Appreciation Night,” the Detroit Red Wings were eliminated from Stanley Cup Playoff contention in fitting fashion. They blew yet another third-period lead and lost in regulation, this time to the New Jersey Devils, 5-3.

In their Centennial season, their playoff drought reached 10 years. That’s the longest in their history and the longest active drought in the NHL, now that the Buffalo Sabres have reached the playoffs for the first time since 2011.

“This is Detroit,” said coach Todd McLellan, who was an assistant in 2008, when the Red Wings won the most recent of their 11 championships. “This is Hockeytown. I’ve been lucky enough to be on the other side of it when they couldn’t stop cheering for this team, and they’re dying for that. They crave that. That’s what they want.

“And I don’t even know if they want a Stanley Cup championship anymore. They just want a team that’s going to come and give them something to cheer about.

“And this ‘outside noise’ stuff or whatever (the players bring up about media criticism), that’s inside noise. Those are our fans in our building, and they pay to watch us play, and we get paid well to perform for them, and they’re fully entitled to their opinion, and we deserve their opinion. There’s no other way to sugarcoat it. That’s what we earned.”

The Red Wings (41-30-9) needed one point to avoid elimination Saturday.

They had a chance to earn two points when Emmitt Finnie gave them a 3-2 lead at 7:00 of the third period, and they still had a chance to earn one point after Cody Glass tied the game 3-3 at 11:18.

But they ended up with no points after Jesper Bratt put the Devils ahead at 16:26 and Dawson Mercer added an empty-net goal at 19:00.

“It’s just a microcosm of the year, really, and where we are as an organization,” McLellan said. “We have to get better top to bottom.”

This is the third straight season Detroit has struggled down the stretch, fallen out of a playoff spot and failed to qualify for the postseason, but this is the most painful.

On Jan. 24, the Red Wings were tied with the Carolina Hurricanes for first in the Eastern Conference and had a 12-point cushion in the playoff race. Since then, they have gone 9-14-4, ranking 28th in points percentage (.407), 30th in goals per game (2.59) and last in 5-on-5 goals (41).

“When we went to training camp, we had three goals in mind,” McLellan said. “One was to get physically harder to play against. The second was to build up the resilience and the mental toughness, and the third one was game management. I thought we were making gains in those areas.

“But since the Olympic break, we didn’t have much of that, and it ended up costing us.”

Detroit let too many points slip away.

The Red Wings blew a 3-1 third-period lead and lost to the Vegas Golden Knights 4-3 in overtime March 4. They blew a 3-2 lead with 1:30 left in the third and lost to the Florida Panthers 4-3 on March 10.

After rallying from a 4-1 deficit to tie the Minnesota Wild 4-4 in the third period April 5, they gave up a goal with 1:51 to go and lost 5-4. They blew a 3-2 lead with 16.2 seconds left in the third and lost to the Columbus Blue Jackets 4-3 in a shootout April 7.

Then came Saturday.

“You can accept the pressure as a challenge, or you can succumb to it, and we seem to choose the second one,” McLellan said. “So that’s the way it is, and the only way to get out of it is, you work your way out of it.”

After the game, the players stood at center ice to salute Paul Woods, the longtime radio analyst who is retiring after this season. Amid cheers for Woods, there were more boos.

“It stinks, obviously,” forward Lucas Raymond said. “We had a clear goal coming into this year, and we didn’t do it, and we had plenty of opportunities throughout this season and especially down the stretch here to seize different moments. That’s disappointing for us.”

Captain Dylan Larkin grew up in the Detroit area and has played all his youth, college and pro hockey in Michigan. He is the only one on the Red Wings roster who has appeared in a playoff game for them. He got a taste of five playoff games as a rookie in 2015-16.

“It’s extremely difficult,” Larkin said. “I mean, our fans are great. They’re passionate. They care. They care about winning. There’s been some great years here, and they want us back to that, and that’s what they expect here, and to hear that, very difficult. We’re down. I’m down, as down as I could be right now.”

It’s going to be a long offseason.

“It’s been too many years in a row now where we’ve been right there and just haven’t been able to get it done, and we’ve got to figure it out, and we’ve got to figure it out fast and take that next step,” Raymond said. “We’ve got to look ourselves in the mirror, everyone here in this building, and we’ve got to be better than this.

“It’s tough right after a game like this. But we put ourselves in a great spot this year to do something good, and we didn’t.”