Red Wings Start Break One Day Too Soon

We’ve all been at the place where the Detroit Red Wings found themselves on Saturday afternoon. Last shift before vacation. Looking ahead, dreaming of sunny skies and sandy beaches.

The heck with the company, we’re mailing this one in today.

By the time they awoke from their vacation daydream, four first-period goals had found a way into the Detroit net. The Tampa Bay Lightning were well on their way to a 6-3 victory.

The result brought a halt to the Red Wings’ second seven-game win streak under coach Todd McLellan. More significantly, it brought cause for concern as the team enters the two-week break for the upcoming 4 Nations Face-Off.

It was an outcome that was also leaving the coach somewhat flummoxed.

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told them between the first and second period,” McLellan was explaining afterwards. “Usually the coach is coming in and losing his marbles because of lack of effort and no energy and bad body language and all those types of things.

“I thought we had that, but we didn’t have any game management skills at all. A number of turnovers, the gifts that we gave them, I didn’t see that part coming. I thought the game management may be there, but we might not have the drive or the jump that we might need. So it worked out exact opposite as I thought it could for our team.

“So that’s disappointing. We worked hard to develop a way that we needed to play. And it didn’t exist in the first period.”

Red Wings Goaltending Lets Them Down

Surprisingly, McLellan wasn’t throwing his netminders under the bus of blame for this setback. It would’ve been warranted.

Starter Alex Lyon was given the hook 2:56 into the game after allowing two goals on three shots. The first one would leak between his arm and body into the net.

Hags comin' in hot 🔥 pic.twitter.com/uYhcEKkJQY

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) February 8, 2025

His replacement Cam Talbot wasn’t exactly covering himself in glory. Brayden Point beat him short side. Brandon Hagel went five-hole on a breakaway for the fourth goal.

“Two of the first three went in two minutes into the game,” McLellan said. “Here’s the thing about pulling a goaltender. When you pull a goaltender, he leaves the game and he’s not heard of or seen anymore. And everybody asks questions.

“When a coach has a shitty night, he doesn’t get pulled. He just stays in the game and he stands there. And when a player has a shitty night, they continue on. So it’s so magnified for the goaltenders.

“It’s a tough position to play, but we had given up four goals on our first six shots. By no means is that on the two guys that wear the pads, because as I alluded to earlier, we were so careless that maybe if they got us one save out of the four, but it’s a team loss tonight, not just on the targets.”

Hard To Glean Positives From This Setback

Normally, a coach would gather his team the day following such a dismal performance and dissect what went wrong. That won’t happen here. The majority of Red Wings players will be somewhere tropical by the time they normally would be practicing Monday.

“They’re going to forget about this one quickly and it’s going to be hard for us to take them emotionally back to tonight, two weeks from now,” McLellan admitted.

It wasn’t as if the Red Wings had grown full of themselves, or were reading their press clippings and allowing their heads to swell.

Gonzo to Pointer 🤩 pic.twitter.com/01ICCdlaRg

— Tampa Bay Lightning (@TBLightning) February 8, 2025

Quite simply, they were just a sloppy bunch that gave away a game they needed to win.

“Obviously not very good,” defenseman Ben Chiarot said. “Can’t start like that slow against a good team like that.”

“I don’t think we crossed the line of being overconfident and cocky, arrogant,” McLellan added. “We crossed the line of being careless and reckless, and there’s a significant difference in that.”