Detroit, MI—On Thursday night at Little Caesars Arena, the visiting New York Rangers trounced the Detroit Red Wings 5-2, a lopsided three-goal margin that did not accurately reflect an even greater divide between the two sides. More than anything, on Thursday, the Red Wings were a team without answers: powerless to re-claim momentum from New York’s special teams, listless in attack, lackadaisical in defense. For more on where things went awry, let’s dive in deeper:
© Rick Osentoski-Imagn Images
The Game in One Quote
“Playing in our own end, defending the rush, sorting things out when we’re coming back into our own end, these are all things that we work on every day…Those are the most important things for us right now. It’s just how we defend. The rest of the stuff…the goals and everything will kind of stem from getting the puck back.” -Ben Chiarot
As my colleague Connor Earegood highlighted, among the scariest takeaways from last night from a Detroit perspective is the sense that the issues that arose weren’t surprising ones. A daunting early season schedule and the challenge posed by the Ranger power play both help explain Thursday’s result, but both were easily identifiable as obstacles to overcome from a long way out on the horizon. Over the course of last night’s game, the lapses that arose from a Red Wings perspective were predictable ones, most notably a collective lack of defensive urgency. As Chiarot noted, that difficulty manifested all over the ice: defending in zone, defending the blue line, even applying forechecking pressure. None of it went well Thursday, and the end result was a ton of zone time for the visitors and an ugly final score.
Number to Know: 114 Seconds
It took 114 seconds for the Rangers to score three goals on their first three power plays. In other words, before the Red Wings killed off two minutes of power play time, New York struck three times. The first (from Artemi Panarin, just 11 seconds after an Alex DeBrincat trip) stretched the Ranger lead from 1-0 to 2-0 before the end of the first period, while the second (off the stick of Vincent Trocheck, 47 seconds into a Jonatan Berggren hold) and third (from Panarin again, 56 seconds after an Erik Gustafsson high stick) combine to all but end the game at 4-1 with less than 30 minutes of hockey remaining.
In the end, it was not a difficult night to parse: Detroit simply didn’t hold up on the penalty kill to a degree that made everything else all but irrelevant. “Special teams tonight, 100% special teams,” assessed coach Derek Lalonde after the game. “The outburst was obviously their power play goals, which was three of ’em to extend the lead. A big part of the game, and we didn’t execute. That was it. There were some things within our five-on-five that we can take away from this that were fairly positive. This game got away from us on special teams.”
Observations
–Passive PK Invites Pressure, Yields
By now, the Rangers man advantage is well established as one of the NHL’s best. It’s the sort of power play that, as Thursday made painfully obvious, can take over a game. However, in the estimation of J.T. Compher (Detroit’s third busiest PK forward on the evening), the Red Wings made life a bit too easy for New York with their passivity while short-handed. “When you play a team back-to-back, you try to make a couple adjustments, that didn’t really work and got away from being aggressive, giving them a little too much time to set up, and those guys are pretty crafty when they have time and made us pay,” he observed. “That’s a learning lesson, and we’re better when we’re a little more aggressive on the PK, and we were missing that tonight.”
That passivity was perhaps clearest on the second PPG against, a deflection from Trocheck. As you can see in the clip below, the goal came at the end of an extended stay in the offensive zone for the Rangers, while the Detroit killers appear content to afford their guests perimeter possession with minimal intervention. Even if it starts from a harmless-looking point shot, New York’s high-end PP playmakers clearly managed to take advantage of the time and space the Red Wings afforded them.
“We just got slow on it,” said Lalonde of the PK’s struggles. “You get a little gun-shy when you lose some confidence in your penalty kill, and you lose your pace…A little slow with our pace, a little slow with our rotation, and gave them a little time to move the puck around the perimeter and get their looks.”
–Scoring Lines Struggle to Provide Offensive Thrust
I would agree with both Chiarot and Lalonde’s assessment that at it’s core, Thursday’s loss came down to defense and special teams, or to combine those two, perhaps it came down to no more than the penalty kill. However, it’s worth noting that the Red Wings largely lacked attacking thrust Thursday as well.
Detroit stuck to the Patrick Kane-Dylan Larkin-Alex DeBrincat top line it has used throughout the season but opted for a slightly different look in the middle six, with Michael Rasmussen joining Compher and Lucas Raymond on line two and Andrew Copp centering Vladimir Tarasenko and Jonatan Berggren on line three.
Within that arrangement, it’s clear that a lot of the creative responsibility falls to the first and third lines, and neither managed to produce much. That Larkin unit managed just 0.171 xG in 8:14 together, while the Tarasenko-Copp-Berggren trio put together just 0.154 xG in 7:32 (both stats courtesy of MoneyPuck). xG aren’t everything, and those are players who can out-perform expected goals estimates because of their skill and finishing ability. Nonetheless, the fact is Detroit’s two ostensible scoring lines produced precious little Thursday.
It’s easy to identify that the Red Wings didn’t defend well enough to win yesterday, but that also points to a potential vulnerability in construction. Detroit aspires to be a team that wins with defense and the forecheck, but it’s attacking players skew a bit more toward a chance-trading, rush heavy game. Over the last two years, that has paid dividends but not exactly consistent ones, and when the offense isn’t connecting on or producing chances, the players responsible for a lot of that creativity need to be able to hold their own in the defensive zone. Regardless of individual performances within that schema, the formula clearly didn’t work Thursday against one of the Eastern Conference’s best.
