Motor City Fans Bid Wings Adieu

On the morning of February 21, the Detroit Red Wings sat atop the National Hockey League standings with 84 points.  Today, two months to the day later, they stand not at all, the first team eliminated from the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

How did they fall so hard, so far and so fast?  

There were nights last season, several of them in fact, when from my seat in the Press Box they looked so good, so dominant that it was actually hard to believe that they team they were playing against was a fellow member club in the NHL.

That seems so long ago now.  

Since that day only two months ago when the Wings were first overall—a date which perhaps not so incidentally coincides with the day Pavel Datsyuk underwent knee surgery—Detroit, including playoffs, went 8-16-3 (.352).  Up until that point, the Wings had been 41-17-2 (.700).

Datsuk missed 11 games after getting his knee scoped.  He would score, including the post-season when he had one, only 4 goals the rest of the way.

 

Not that he was alone, exactly. 

In the series against the Nashville Predators the Red Wings scored 9 goals in 5 games.  Their leading scorers, Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg, each had 3 points.  Three.  Five others had 2 points, which means that of the other 12 Wings who appeared in the series, none had more than a single (stinking) point.  And six of them had no points at all. (7 if you count Darren Helm, but you shouldn’t since he was injured in Game 1.)  Niklas Lidstrom, Todd Bertuzzi, Dan Cleary, Justin Abdelkader were among those who failed to get their name on Detroit’s playoff scoresheet.  

No Red Wing not named Juri Hudler scored in the final two games of the Nashville series.  That’s how bad it was.

I’ll say this much.  It wasn’t from lack of trying.  Detroit outshot Nashville 160-116 in the series.  The problem was that Predators goalie Pekke Rinne stopped 94.4% of those Detroit shots.  At the other end, Detroit’s Jimmy Howard stopped 88.8% of the shots he faced. (His regular season save percentage had been 92%.)

But, you know how sports are.  Trying don’t much matter.  Winning does and only that. 

Fortunately, the solution for Detroit is simple: all the Wings’ players have to do —guys like Holmstom and Zetterberg and Franzen and Lidstrom—is to get younger and bigger.  If they work on that in the off-season, getting younger and bigger, they’ll be just fine.