The Detroit Red Wings are looking for a better finish when they close out a home stand Saturday, but the work they’ve shown is getting good marks from their teacher.
They’ve shown growth the past two games, whittling away at three-goal deficits to at least be able to hold their heads high. Wednesday against the Sabres, they scored three goals in the third period to force a shootout, squeezing out a point.
“Our guys are maturing a little bit, to judge ourselves on how we are playing, not what the score is,” coach Derek Lalonde said after the 5-4 loss at Little Caesars Arena. “Great push from the boys, little maturity there knowing we’re playing fine, it’s just not going in for us and we stuck with it.”
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Oskar Sundqvist scored twice, off a draw and off a forecheck, in just under two minutes.
“I think we battled back in a fantastic way,” he said. “Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it all the way.”
Things had been going the Wings’ way for four games until the Toronto Maple Leafs spoiled the fun Monday with a 4-2 victory. In both games, the Wings played well five-on-five. Neither Ville Husso against the Leafs nor Alex Nedeljkovic against the Sabres were at the top of their games, and the power play was an eyesore especially against the Sabres, when it went 0-for-7 on a stretch that included 1:27 with a two-man advantage, but the Wings never quit.
“Really proud of the guys,” Lalonde said. “You just don’t come back from three goals in this league, and the way we did it, I really thought the fight back started at the end of the second. Down 4-1 and it obviously wasn’t going our way and our guys just dug in. I asked them after the second to just keep that same effort from the last four or five minutes into the third and they did that. They got rewarded. This is a huge point we’ll tap back into throughout the season.”
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The Wings lost, 8-3, when the Sabres built a lead on them on Halloween, and dropped an 8-2 game to the New York Rangers on Nov. 10. To not let it get out of hand Wednesday was progress, even as players weren’t pleased with settling for one point.
“You’re supposed to be happy with the way we came back and battled from 4-1 down, that’s a good sign,” Andrew Copp said after contributing two assists. “But we had a couple chances to put it away, and that makes it sting.”
When the Wings (11-7-4) were winning, their goaltending and special teams were a big of that. They’re scoreless on their last 10 power plays, and while they’ve gotten looks, it hasn’t been a difference-maker.
“I think we just need to shoot the puck a little bit more,” Sundqvist said. “It feels like we’re passing a little bit too much right now. Just shoot the puck and retrieve and break them down that way.”
Lalonde called the lack of man-advantage conversions, “frustrating. You need your power play to be successful. We get it either of these last two games, we’re probably sitting here with more than one point. But the effort, the five-on-five play, the compete from the guys, was really impressive.
“We were in this situation a couple times earlier, and it got away from us. Now we’re sitting here, 2-1-1, with a chance to have a really good home stand on Saturday.”
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 latest book, “On the Clock: Behind the Scenes with the Detroit Red Wings at the NHL Draft,” is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Triumph Books. Personalized copies available via her e-mail.