How a road map, "harder, faster, smarter" practices, work boots, and forgetting have powered the Red Wings renaissance under Todd McLellan

“It feels like a new season,” overtime hero Alex DeBrincat told reporters after the Detroit Red Wings beat the Vancouver Canucks 3–2 Sunday evening. Two nights later, the Red Wings completed their Western swing with a shootout win in Seattle. It wasn’t a perfect road trip in each performance, but it was just that by results, the team’s first clean four-game road sweep since March of 1996.

It’s not hard to see where DeBrincat’s feeling comes from. When coach Todd McLellan got to Detroit, he inherited a languid team that sat second from the bottom in the Eastern Conference at 13–17–4. Just over a month later, the Red Wings have rattled off a 15–4–1 record in the 20 games under McLellan’s guidance, elevating them into the first wild card position in the East in exuberant style.

The triumph of McLellan’s takeover is neither tactical nor technical. It’s something more ephemeral, not even really to do with the results since his arrival. McLellan’s real magic lies in the forgetting, the way it’s taken him barely a month to render Detroit’s ugly past moot. Now in the thick of the wild card race, it’s not just McLellan who can dissociate himself from the first 34 games of the season; it’s the entire team.

So how did the new coach pull it off?

The answer is not by remaking the team from top to bottom. McLellan himself made clear from the jump that a strip-it-down-to-the-studs in-season rebuild would be self-defeating. 

The underlying numbers bear out the idea that the present iteration of the Red Wings is not so different from the one that began the season.  Per Natural Stat Trick, the Red Wings averaged 2.07 expected goals for per 60 minutes at five-on-five prior to the change behind the bench and 2.49 xG against per 60. Since the change, they are up to 2.37 xGF per 60, but the xGA has also risen to 2.72 per 60. In other words, Detroit plays a bit more high-event style since McLellan's arrival but is not a radically different five-on-five team.

Where McLellan has irrefutably excelled has been in diagnostics and in managing emotion. After his first game behind the bench, a home loss to the Maple Leafs, McLellan identified his team as “mechanical” and “tentative.” “We have work to do,” he said. “We have a road map now.”

It was at the following day’s practice when Detroit set about the work of doing that work, following that road map. And it was at that practice when McLellan uttered the words that would become the mantra behind the winning that followed: “Play f---ing hockey! You’ve done it your whole lives!”

Since McLellan’s takeover, the Red Wings’ practices provide a clearer distinction between coaching eras than the underlying numbers. Sessions at the BELFOR Training Center in Little Caesars Arena offer an obvious manifestation of McLellan’s other mantra: “harder, faster, smarter.” McLellan has lengthened practices while also raising the tempo to each skate and all the while introducing new drills to provide a combination of competition and levity.

“I think there’s just a really good purpose to every practice,” defenseman Moritz Seider told The Hockey News before the Red Wings set out for their road trip. “We just either try to emphasize a new system or we’re really focusing on the next game that’s upcoming. I think today you could really see from the outside that we’re a skating team, we try to go with pace and speed out there, and that’s exactly what he told us we’re gonna need.”

Of course, all that skating in practice wouldn’t count for much if it hadn’t correlated to results. McLellan’s “road map” has proved so effective, because he demonstrated from the moment of his arrival that the changes he chose to implement would bear fruit in a hurry. As Andrew Copp put it before the trip, “He’s got a clear, concise message. He’s in command. Everything on video makes total sense. He’s the one doing the video every time, so he’s got the presence.”

“It can start with practice,” Copp added. “It can start with the effort, the pace and intensity that we have, but ultimately, the results are gonna dictate whether you have momentum or not. You can play good and not win and still feel good about yourselves, but that can only last for so long really. And if you are playing the right way, you’re going to get wins. I would say it probably started in practice and bled over to the games, but the games are the ultimate confidence builder.”

After that loss to the Leafs, Detroit rattled off seven wins in a row. Clearly, the road map charted a course worth pursuing, and the work in practice had paid dividends. 

However, following that initial win streak, the Red Wings past threatened to creep back in. Detroit lost in a sloppy home performance against San Jose, then dropped three of four on the road. Was the initial surge no more than the dead cat bounce of a coaching change?

On the contrary, McLellan had warned that this sort of backslide, this disruption to momentum, was inevitable. When it came, there was not panic, just more methodical work in practice. Seven games and seven wins later, McLellan’s Red Wings have offered a decisive ‘no’ in response to the question posed above. Once again, the coach’s emphasis on daily incremental improvement bore immediate fruit.

“You can practice as hard as you want, but if you can’t translate it onto the ice, I think it’s very stressful and painful situation for all of us,” Seider said. “Obviously, getting the results gives us a little more confidence, a little more happiness in practice. Even if it might be a little longer…we still have a smile on our face and work through it—put our work boots on and grind. And then obviously if it translates on the ice, it’s all worth it.”

It would be hard for the Red Wings’ now complete road trip to contrast more starkly from the season’s prior trip west of the Rockies: a winless tour of California in November, the season’s unquestioned nadir.  However, the beauty of what the Red Wings have accomplished lies in the way they have played that stultified, hapless version of themselves into irrelevance. 

By now, Detroit can forget that past easily because there is no need to remember it any longer. Sure, the first 34 games still count in the standings, but after the Red Wings’ post-Christmas surge, they're no longer holding them back from the season-opening aspiration of returning to the playoffs. And make no mistake, with the past forgotten thanks to a road map and a few pairs of work boots, the focus can shift to a future illuminated by a postseason hunt back on in earnest in Hockeytown.

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