The centennial season for the Detroit Red Wings is now only weeks away from officially beginning now that they've concluded Training Camp in Traverse City
Preparations are now underway for the annual Red & White Game, which has been moved to Grand Rapids this year for the first time. Following the game on Sunday, the club will return home to Detroit and begin the pre-season schedule on Tuesday at Little Caesars Arena against the Chicago Blackhawks.
This year's edition of Training Camp was marked by a noticeably more intense pace to the action on the ice led by head coach Todd McLellan, who is entering his first full season behind the Red Wings bench after he was hired in late December.
Red Wings players who are still on the roster from last season when the coaching change was made well remember McLellan's first official full-length practice during which he exclaimed, "Play f------ hockey, you’ve done it your whole lives!"
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Given the intensity of the last three days in Traverse City, has the team adopted that candid demand?
"I'd like to think they have, but we're going to need to see them play against someone wearing a different color to really determine that," McLellan said. "They can't just skate around and think their way through games. They're really good instinctual players; I think we have a really good skating team, and if we're riding the brake, that's for our veterans. If we're riding the brake, we're not going to give ourselves a chance."
The Red Wings began turning things around almost immediately after McLellan was hired on December 26, aside from a 5-2 loss to the Toronto Maple Leafs the following day, when he hadn’t yet had time to run a full practice.
Their intensity increased, their focus seemed renewed, and suddenly they resembled the team that held a nine-point lead at the playoff cutoff in February 2024, rather than the club that stumbled to a 13-17-4 start in the 2024-25 season.
While the Red Wings ultimately fell short of securing a playoff berth last season, McLellan's overall record since taking over the head coaching duties (26-18-4) would translate into a 96 point total over the course of 82 games, which would have been sufficient to claim the second overall Wild Card spot in the Eastern Conference.
In order to avoid a similar lull in the month of March like what they've experienced in the last two seasons, the Red Wings will need to, as McLellan put it, "play with our foot on the gas".
"We've got to push the gas pedal and get after teams," he said. "Obviously, there's areas for improvement - penalty kill, defensively, we can't give up that many goals, but we've got to play with our foot on the gas."
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