Twice this season the Detroit Red Wings have gotten into a bit of a slide, and both times they’ve righted themselves before the damage festered.
That’s a sign of growth from a team where the core group ranges from early-to-mid 20s, and signs of a close-knit group in the locker room. The Wings (10-9-3) take on the Bruins in Boston Tuesday having strung together two victories following a four-game winless skid, similarly to how they rebounded from a l slump at the start of November by winning three in a row.
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“I think for the first time in a while here we’ve really bought into playing for each other and doing everything to close games out,” captain Dylan Larkin said. “It’s not going to be pretty every time but we did it. And when things don’t go well, we get back to home ice, we get back to playing our game. We really tried to focus on an identity early in the season and we know what that is and we know that when we do that, it makes us successful.”
The biggest key to Saturday’s 3-2 overtime victory over the Buffalo Sabres was tightening up defensively after a stretch of relying on the goaltenders to deal with too manyscoring opportunities. The other key was what has been in evidence all season: There are flat-out better players on the roster than in previous years. Specifically, 19-year-old Lucas Raymond — who scored in overtime — and 20-year-old Moritz Seider.
“I think it’s guys coming in with their attitudes,” Larkin said when asked to elaborate. “We have guys that have been here for a little bit that are still young players, we have new young players that came in with a fresh start and a hunger to help the team and an excitement to be in Detroit and be a Red Wing. We have older players that have been there and done that, and they really guide the young players. It’s been a special feeling and we need to keep it going and we need to continue to get better.”
Higher-ups in the organization don’t expect the Wings to advance to the playoffs, but they do expect to see progress. General manager Steve Yzerman shaped the roster by adding goaltender Alex Nedeljkovic and defenseman Nick Leddy and bringing back veterans Marc Staal and Sam Gagner. They’ve all made the Wings better, in ways big or small. Seider was expected to be a difference-maker. Raymond less so, because he had yet to play in North America, but both have been fantastic. With his latest goal, Raymond became the second teenager in franchise history to score in overtime; the other was Yzerman. (After abandoning regular-season overtime in 1942, the NHL brought it back for the 1983-84 season, Yzerman’s rookie year.)
What that has added up to is a team that’s been able to find a way out of rough waters.
“There’s a number of sides to being able to be resilient,” coach Jeff Blashill said. “Part of it is just having a little bit more infusion of talent. But that’s not everything. Part of it is the care level of our guys is extremely high. Our guys want to get our organization’s train on the right path. They want to have a really good season.
“There’s a lot of guys who are committed to trying to do everything they can to try to win hockey games. That might sound trivial, but it’s not.
In any sport, I don’t care if it’s pro sports or what, or college, or youth sports, there are times you have teams that are selfish and maybe aren’t totally committed to the No. 1 goal being winning, and there’s times, which I think this team has, where the No. 1 goal is winning. Certainly everybody wants to have a big piece of it and everybody wants to play a lot, but in the end, we’re willing to kind of put aside some of those personal things to try to win hockey games. I think that’s been part of the reason we’ve been able to be resilient.”
Contact Helene St. James at hstjames@freepress.com. Follow her on Twitter @helenestjames. Read more on the Detroit Red Wings and sign up for our Red Wings newsletter. Her book, The Big 50: The Detroit Red Wings is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Triumph Books. Personalized copies available via her e-mail.