Clock Ticking on Red Wings' Playoff Hopes After 4–3 Loss to Ottawa

DETROIT—Not quite 13 minutes into the Red Wings' 4–3 loss to the Ottawa Senators Thursday night, Senators captain Brady Tkachuck caught up to Detroit forward Lucas Raymond as he rushed the puck through neutral ice, dumping Raymond to the ice, then pinning him there with an arm around his neck.  With Tkachuk and Raymond still entangled, Ottawa rushed the puck the other way until Tim Stutzle used a burst of speed to get around Moritz Seider and beat Alex Lyon with a well-placed wrist shot.  The goal made it 2–0 Senators, though the Red Wings had a 10–3 edge in shots, but that was the story of the night for the home team: Bullied away from the puck and beaten with it, even if the final score suggested a narrow margin.

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You might call that discrepancy between the shot chart and the scoreboard anomalous, if only it weren't the continuation of a month-long pattern, the clearest example a Mar. 10 loss in Ottawa in which the Red Wings outshot the Sens 49–23 and lost 2–1 anyway.  You might offer extenuating circumstances to explain each of Detroit's three springtime swoons over the last three seasons—trade deadline departures, injuries to the wrong players at the wrong times, a difficult schedule for this year's stretch run—but put together there can be no denying a pattern.

On Thursday night, the most acute cause of Detroit's undoing was its power play, a season-long strength drying up to expose underlying vulnerabilities.  The Red Wings went to five power plays in the first period (the fifth carrying over for 1:40 into the second) and failed to convert each time.  The Red Wings created their share of danger over the course of those opportunities, but with nothing to show for those chances, there could be no positives to glean from spending half a period on the power play.  After the game, Raymond said there was "more to" the loss than just that poor start on the man advantage but conceded that the 0-for-5 start was "obviously a huge part of it."

By the end of the first, Detroit trailed 2–0 despite doubling its guests in shots at 16–8.  In his post-game remarks, coach Todd McLellan stressed that winding up on the wrong side of those margins was not a matter of effort but rather defensive execution.

"We play hard, we commit, we do all that type of stuff, but that's not good enough," McLellan said, the frustration of a season slipping away thanks to familiar defensive woes evident in his voice.  "We have to get better defensively. We have to get better in the faceoff circle. We have to have better coverages. I look at the game tonight, 4–3, Wow! You almost came back, you made it close! but that might be the most outnumbered rush situations [against] I've seen this year from our team...The first goal was four-on-two, there were multiple two-on-ones, there were short breakaways where the D was just getting walked from the tops of the circles in... Until we learn to take that crap out of our game, we're gonna need six a night, and that can't happen. That's not good enough. When you use those words, sometimes people think effort or whatever. No, it's systematic, it's the mind, it's understanding the game. That's not good enough."

In the end, the game looked close, and it was: Alex DeBrincat struck the post with what could have been an equalizer in the final minute of regulation, and the rebound beckoned for a fleeting moment in front of an unattended net with Ullmark down and out, but the Sens survived the scramble.  As Raymond put it, "I think we did [make] a hell of a push in the third, but we didn't put ourselves in a good enough position coming into the third to get it done. We know that. It's on us."

For the Red Wings, the late season has made for a painfully slow death.  Detroit is just 3–10–0 in the month of March, yet there's been just enough futility elsewhere in the race for the Eastern Conference's final playoff berth to avoid mathematical elimination.  The Red Wings got help from the out-of-town scoreboard Thursday in the form of a Montreal Canadiens loss to the Philadelphia Flyers, yet with the current state of Detroit's game, there is no logical path to the postseason despite sitting just three points to the wrong side of the current playoff cut line.

"I don't know what the other scores were or anything like that yet, but our inability to win tonight and everybody else around us losing, yeah it keeps us right where we are, but the clock is ticking," said McLellan.  "So that's what ends up happening: You run out of time.  Unless you take advantage of someone else's mistakes, and we haven't been able to do that over the last little bit."

On Thursday, regardless of the statistical probability, the Red Wings appear to have neither the car, nor the nerve, to win the race to the final wild card position.  Detroit couldn't match the Sens' decisiveness in finishing or goaltending, and the Red Wings struggled to cope with the heavy, bullying brand of hockey—powerless to push back on either front until they'd fallen too far to recover.

For the second year in a row, no team seems willing or able to seize control of the race for the East's final playoff spot.  Those muddy waters leave Detroit with some semblance of hope for the time being, but they also further indict its ability to push across the finish line.

To McLellan, unpacking the Red Wings' March woes requires a consideration of the psychological.  "I think part of it, or a lot of it, was between the ears and sagging a little bit...We can't sag, so it's as much mental as it is physical and structural."  Each of the Red Wings' failed playoff pushes over the previous two springs has featured a prolonged losing streak at an inopportune moment.  This year, a six-game losing streak from late February into early March offered one more example of a mental sag, to borrow McLellan's phrase, from which Detroit has (thus far) failed to recover in sufficient time to redeem the season.

"You can say however many times you want that we're gonna do everything in our power to get there, but I think for us right now, it's just about digging in and getting it done," said Raymond. 

The Red Wings' playoff odds haven't dwindled all the way to 0% just yet, but with each passing loss, the familiar writing on the wall grows harder to ignore.

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