Red Wings' latest playoff miss reveals fatal flaws as drought reaches 9 seasons
DETROIT — When the Detroit Red Wings returned from the NHL's midseason break in February, head coach Todd McLellan posed a public challenge to his team: 'Who are we?'
'Are we (the team from) October to December?' he asked. 'Or are we December to February?'
The December-to-February Red Wings were the NHL's hottest team, going 15-5-1 since McLellan was brought in the day after Christmas as a midseason replacement for previous head coach Derek Lalonde up until the 4 Nations Face-Off break.
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Things were much less rosy from October to December. Detroit had stumbled mightily to start the season, limping to a 13-17-4 opening record, second-worst in the Eastern Conference, and prompting Lalonde's firing.
The turnaround under McLellan raised a natural blend of hope and skepticism about how long the hot streak could continue.
Over the next two months, the Red Wings delivered the answer to McLellan's 'Who are we?' question — sort of.
After Thursday's season-ending 4-3 overtime loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, the story of the 2024-25 Red Wings is complete. And it is complicated.
Under McLellan, they'd become more assertive. They battled. They improved from the beginning of the season. But their fatal flaws still caught up with them. It was the return of a too-familiar trope for the Red Wings in the last three seasons: working themselves into a playoff race by late February, only to wither at the most important time of year.
The playoff drought in Detroit — a franchise that made the Stanley Cup Playoffs every year from 1991 to 2016 — is up to nine years, tied for the fourth-longest in NHL history.
And what's left of this latest season ended too soon are hard truths about what went wrong and what it will take to finally break through.
Here's an astonishing fact about the Red Wings before Christmas: In 34 games, only two of Detroit's 13 wins came against teams that went on to make the playoffs.
In the season's first month, the Red Wings lost at home on opening night to the lottery-bound Pittsburgh Penguins; they lost to the only team whose playoff drought is longer than their own, the Buffalo Sabres; and they lost three times — all by three or more goals — to the New York Rangers, who ended the season as possibly the NHL's most disappointing team.
By late November, with the Red Wings coming off three straight losses to the Anaheim Ducks, Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks, a coaching change already seemed possible. In hindsight, it's hard not to wonder what might have been if general manager Steve Yzerman had made the switch then.
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But Detroit waited until the decision became virtually unavoidable. The Red Wings lost five straight from Nov. 29 through Dec. 7, then three more into the Christmas break, culminating with a 4-0 home loss to the St. Louis Blues on Dec. 23 with fans booing the team off the ice.
That night, Red Wings captain Dylan Larkin spoke of 'a lot of disconnect' from his team on the ice. 'A lot of skating, a lot of hard work, but we're not getting anything accomplished.'
The writing was on the wall.
'At Christmas, it was not good,' Larkin said recently. 'It was bad. We struggled, and felt like it was going to be the longest four months to the end of the season that could be possible. And we were just going to put our equipment on and go out there and play, and suck it up.'
McLellan was introduced on Dec. 27, a game day against Toronto. His first game behind the bench came before his first practice.
Coming in, McLellan spoke of improving the team's spirit. He wanted Detroit to play 'harder, to play faster, and a little bit smarter.' And after his first game, a 5-2 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs, he observed that the team looked 'mechanical.'
At the next day's practice, McLellan told his team to 'play f—ing hockey, you've done it your whole lives.' The quote went viral, inspiring T-shirts, and spoke to Detroit's need to play freer and more instinctively.
It also illustrated how McLellan's presence energized a team that needed it. Validation came quickly. After that first practice, the Red Wings went on a seven-game win streak from Dec. 29 through Jan. 12. A second seven-game win streak starting a week and a half later made the resurgence look like more than just a new coach bump.
In many ways, it was. Under McLellan, the Red Wings shot more. They gave up fewer shots the other way. They had better starts. Promising rookies, such as 21-year-old center Marco Kasper and 24-year-old defenseman Albert Johansson, seized roles in the top half of their lineup and succeeded. Kasper excelled as the first-line left wing and second-line center. Another young forward, Elmer Söderblom, got a midseason call-up and proved he learned to make better use of his 6-foot-8 frame.
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Star left wing Lucas Raymond took another step forward after a breakout campaign a year ago. Right wing Alex DeBrincat found more consistency, both as the team's top goal scorer and in his off-puck tenacity. Detroit's power play was among the league's best.
There was real reason for optimism.
'I feel like we're really gelling as a team, togetherness and all that sort of thing,' forward Andrew Copp said in late February. 'That will be really important to keep as we head down the stretch here. There's just so many games, and it could be any one line, or any given player on any given night. And we're going to need everybody.'
But the momentum stopped there – and needing everybody was a big reason why. In the first game back from the two-week 4 Nations break, Copp suffered a season-ending pectoral injury. And with that, Detroit's depth issues came roaring back to the forefront.
Without Copp between Kane and DeBrincat, Detroit moved Kasper from top-line wing next to Larkin and Raymond into Copp's second-line center spot. The Red Wings never managed to fill the top-line void, despite trying multiple options and disrupting an already-thin bottom six in the process.
At the same time, Larkin and Raymond didn't look like themselves after returning from the 4 Nations, where both had been top players for their countries.
On nights when the Red Wings' elite power play didn't convert, their inability to generate five-on-five scoring re-emerged. The penalty kill, worst in the league, did not meaningfully improve. And the goaltending took a turn for the worse at the wrong time.
A six-game losing streak from Feb. 27 through March 10 began with two consecutive losses to the Columbus Blue Jackets, one of Detroit's biggest opponents in the Eastern Conference wild-card race.
'You look back to those two Columbus games … those were big games for us,' DeBrincat said. 'And losing both of those … it's tough to get the confidence back when you're in a good position and you drop out of it. But there's no excuses. I think we just didn't play well enough throughout that stretch, and it really cost us.'
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The Red Wings lost 11 out of 14 games starting with the two losses to Columbus. Some nights they couldn't score enough, others they didn't get stops and sometimes they just got goalied.
Taken all together — and lumping in the Red Wings' pattern of struggling at the same point in the last two seasons — a concerning underlying issue emerges: Detroit's inability to stop the bleeding when adversity hits.
That was true within games and over losing streaks. It calls into question their mental toughness.
'Once you hit three (losses), you've got to really get yourself out of the ditch quick,' McLellan said recently. 'And we can be mentally firmer upstairs in fighting our way out of that. Maintaining the positive streaks wasn't difficult for us for the most part. … It's when it goes bad, can we dig ourselves out of the ditch quicker to make it stop at three instead of it getting to four or five? And we didn't do that down the stretch.'
The best teams find ways to snap those losing streaks before they spiral. And they do it in part through another hard-to-quantify trait: consistency.
'Whether it's preseason Game 1, or Game 82, or Game 5 of the Eastern Conference playoffs, the best players that I've been around — and there's a lot of them here, all of them, I mean we have a lot of great players here — the guys who have been to the top, those guys played the same way,' Detroit goaltender Alex Lyon said. 'And they're just as competitive in preseason Game 1, and they take it very seriously. And guys here do as well. It's just the fruits haven't (bore) themselves.'
Detroit looked closer to achieving that aim this season than in years past, even during its slide. Some of the losses, such as the Stadium Series defeat on March 1 in Columbus and a 2-1 loss to Ottawa in mid-March, came when they had tilted the ice in their favor but couldn't solve an elite goaltending performance on the other side.
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It's natural to wonder if the playoff drought and hyperfixation on ending it amplified the pressure during those hard times. Frankly, it feels impossible that it wouldn't.
Now that drought continues and the noise from outside grows louder by the day.
Some changes to the group are expected this offseason, Yzerman's seventh as Detroit GM, but the core of the roster will likely remain the same. That core will share the burden of ensuring the Red Wings are prepared to take control next February.
On April 12, with Detroit's fate in another team's hands, McLellan watched the Toronto-Montreal game that would mathematically eliminate the Red Wings.
'I was swearing at the TV again, going like, Toronto, you've had so many chances, put them in, put them in,' McLellan said. 'But then I'm thinking, 'This is insane. I'm sitting there cheering for another team.' We had complete control — or not complete control, but we started with the same amount of available points as every other team at the beginning of the year. And we didn't get enough.'
The game went into overtime, Montreal earned the point that officially eliminated the Red Wings, and McLellan turned off the TV.
With that, the page turned on Detroit's season, and the work began again.
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