James Reimer, Dylan Larkin, and Derek Lalonde debrief the Red Wings' 4-2 Sunday night win in Toronto
Last night in Toronto, the Detroit Red Wings snatched an improbable victory from the Maple Leafs—arriving barely an hour before puck drop after travel difficulties and coming from behind to secure a 4-2 victory.
Here's what James Reimer, Dylan Larkin, and Derek Lalonde had to say about the victory:
James Reimer
On how good this victory feels: "Oh man, I'll tell ya, it truly is a blessing that we get to play a sport for a living. Every once in a while, there's a special night, and tonight is one of those nights. A ton of adversity, backs against the wall, schedule's all messed up flying in late. And those are games where you can cave, or you can dig in. As a group, to a man, we dug in. And then we went down a forward early in the game too. Just so much adversity where if we don't have the character we have in here, you'd give up and lick our wounds and try again next time."
On killing three penalties in the first: "That's not ideal. That's not the game plan to give those guys with that many weapons opportunities, but it just spoke to the intensity and the integrity that we played with as far as how we killed. We stuck to our structure."
Dylan Larkin
On what this win means: "It was a huge win, a gutsy win, all of the above. When everything was stacked up against us, we just battled, and you could tell the buy-in there. Going into the third period, we were down 2-1, and we were excited about that, because everything was stacked up against us...so why not come back...It feels amazing."
On Reimer's performance: "He was unbelievable. You look at our recent success, it's been goaltending, and his name was called upon tonight, and he gave us 60 minutes and made big save after big save. I know it means a lot in this building, and it's hard when you're not playing a lot, but he came in and did his job really well. We're all really happy for him."
On how much disruptions to travel schedule impacted the game: "It was kinda like a preseason game. You fly in and get here a little bit late, but our staff from top to bottom, all of 'em, went above and beyond to have everything we needed to play tonight, and we had every reason to not show up, and we showed up."
Derek Lalonde
On overall performance: "Really good win obviously. Really unique 24 hours. I haven't experienced a 24 hours like that. I don't think anyone in the league has. Weather, mechanical issues—it was crazy. To show up for a 7 o'clock hockey game in the National Hockey League at 6:15, it's very unique and unusual. But I thought our guys handled it pretty well. There's things we couldn't from the last 24 hours, but the one thing we could control was our effort and execution, and for the most part, a pretty good job from our guys."
On how big the impact was of the travel challenges: "I talked to the guys. We've battled too hard of late, we've done too many good things of late to get our game in order to make excuses now. We just did a good job of hanging in there throughout. Obviously got a good performance from James. We've had some experience with 11 and seven. Not ideal when Patty [Kane] went down...it's hard to win in this league on the road. It's hard to win in this league trailing going through the third. So just a huge credit for our guys.
On Kane's status: "No update, lower body...I don't think it's related to his hip, but I don't have all of the information on it yet."
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