POSTGAME: A SCEVIOUR WAS BORN

The Wings six game win streak came to a screeching halt saturday against the Bruins. Both teams put on a clinic in icing and errant passes and the slop fest was eventually capped off with a 1-0 loss. The Wings found themselves in another important divisional game against the Panthers on home ice and their poor inter-divisional play looked like it was going to continue. 

Danny DeKeyser has been a real issue for the Detroit Red Wings. His CORSI has been an absolutely atrocious at 5v5 clocking in at only 36%. That’s more than 10% lower than Jonathon Ericsson’s 47%. He’s well on the wrong side of scoring chances with the opposition averaging 59% more chances when he’s on the ice. That’s also accounting for a lot of his ice time being with the teams best defenceman Mike Green whose possession has fallen off a cliff since having to carry DeKeyser this year. We saw more of DeKeyser’s poor play early in this one. Twelve seconds into their first PP of the game, the Panthers found themselves on the board:

That goal was off a face-off loss. DeKeyser has absolutely no excuse for why he wasn’t with his man Colton Sceviour. Why was he so high? How did he not know his man would go directly to the net? There’s no explanation there, he was just way out of position vs. a power-play that did damage to this team already this year. 

But DeKeyser wasn’t done yet. Not even a minute later, again, he fails to contain his man. Sceviour has time to kick the puck THREE TIMES to himself. When that puck was in Sceviour’s feet, DeKeyser should have flattened him. Instead his weak play in front only helped Sceviour get in a better position to score:

Hey Mrazek, you’ve done nothing but bail us out so far this season. I know we’ve hung you out to dry twice already but whatever, here’s another one we couldn’t possibly expect you to save: 

That’s both Athanasiou and Helm back well before Brendan Smith, the guy who’s supposed to be on the blue line. 

That was a brutal first period. Florida’s speed has made a mockery of this team before and here it is again. This one looks like a game finished after one. 

The second period was a showcase of things that just don’t work that Detroit loves doing. Let’s start with shooting from behind the attacking goal line. Why does Zetterberg only shoot from the worst angles possible? Cycle-cycle-cycle, shoot off goalies shoulder, act surprised when it doesn’t go in, get three forwards trapped deep because you were cycling as play goes the other way. Another team favourite applies only to players like Helm, Abdelkader, the entire fourth line and other less skilled forwards. Going into the corner and just blindly throwing the puck to the front of the night seemed to generate more odd-man rushes for Florida than they did scoring chances for Detroit. The Florida defence isn’t even chasing those forwards into the corner anymore because they know what’s coming. 

Detroit’s power-play finally broke it’s draught but wow does it ever look chaotic without Vanek:

Before the Wings could get any momentum though, they decided to look around blindly in their own end and cover each other instead of the Panthers players:

After getting a power-play goal though, the Wings decided they needed to slow things down a bit and give up a shorty. Completing the trifecta of poor play at 5v5, on the power play and on the penalty kill:

Sceviour with the hattrick. Another thing that doesn’t work: Brendan Smith on the power-play. He doesn’t have the vision or the composure, he can’t get pucks through the lanes and he can’t get his men on either side open one-timers. Now if only the Wings had a large, right-handed defenceman who was offensively minded and did well on the power play who wasn’t just slamming nachos in the press box. Oh well. 

Another brutal period. Mrazek gets tugged. If you’re still reading this god bless. 

The pain continued. This was just another period of running around not getting much done. DeKeyser played too much, Zetterberg played too much, despite Smith scoring a PP goal in the third it was still one of the worst games he’s had in a while. At least they managed not to get scored on again in the third. All around though this one capped off a weekend I’m sure both players and fanbase alike would soon rather forget. Four big points given up to division rivals. 

Next stop is Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love where the Red Wings haven’t won a game since 1997. Fantastic. They only have the Flyers and the Jets during the week so lots of time to figure out what went wrong before facing Edmonton the following Sunday. They also get NJ, Calgary, Vancouver, Buffalo and the Flyers again this month. This should be a good month for them to start banking points because going in a slide now could be disasters for this team in the longterm.