Detroit Red Wings weren't as good as January suggested. But are they 6-game-skid bad?
The Detroit Red Wings are a month out from the end of the regular season, and desperately seeking measures of success and stability.
They've endured the most turbulent stretch of the season since emerging from the All-Star break that took up the first week of February, enjoying a six-game winning streak that got them all the way to 13 games above .500 only to come crashing back down and jeopardize all the good work they did in January to gain footing in the Eastern Conference playoff race.
"It’s been too shaky when you look at the whole season," defenseman Moritz Seider said. "We had a terrible December, followed up by a really strong January and now we’re struggling a little bit. We just have to come together as a team and really dig in to make it a great season because everything we worked for so hard is right there for us. Now we just have to dig in even deeper and find solutions to come up here with as many wins."
The hope is that Dylan Larkin will be able to practice next week and then his status from a lower-body injury that has sidelined him since March 2 will be day-to-day. Ville Husso (lower body, Feb. 13) is still in the week-to-week range, but there's still hope that he returns before the April 16 finale.
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It's only been a week since general manager Steve Yzerman endorsed the roster by not bringing in any newcomers at the trade deadline, putting his faith in the group he has built and in the organizational depth. The Wings couldn't have thwarted that vote of confidence any more than they did by losing, 4-0, hours after the deadline passed, to the lottery-bound Arizona Coyotes. But that wasn't even the ugliest performance of the 0-4 trip: That was saved for the end, when the Wings hand-delivered the Buffalo Sabres at 7-3 victory.
It's hard to comprehend how a team that was rolling over opponents with such efficiency just a few weeks ago suddenly became a team that rattles so easily. Veteran forward David Perron has one explanation, which came to him as he was driving to work this week.
"I think at times during the six-game winning streak, we weren’t playing as good as it seemed," Perron said. "Everyone was pumping us up, and I had some conversations with coaches, other players — I just felt like we were outscoring our problems and that at one point, it was going to turn around and bite us a little bit, and it did.
"I had a coach, Ken Hitchcock, he was hard on me. Didn’t always seem to have the greatest time with him. I think a lot of the players felt he was tough on us. He always said that — when you have to find your game, you think you are better than you are, you play better; you get results that maybe you don’t deserve. It takes usually two, three weeks to get it back. That’s exactly what is happening right now. I just couldn’t help driving in, have his voice in my ear again, thinking about that."
More than drawing strength from the winning streak that spanned Feb. 17-27, the Wings can look to how they went 9-2-2 record in January, when they played to the identity they crave: Play with pace, and use solid team defense to spark offense.
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"When you outwork and outcompete your opponent, you have a good chance to win," Patrick Kane said. ".We still pretty much control our own fate. It’s a good situation to be in. We just can’t wait around too long to get out of it."
Contact Helene St. James at hstjames@freepress.com. Follow her @helenestjames.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Red Wings weren't as good as January suggested. But are they this bad?
