After dropping two straight to start their western road swing, Detroit dominates the Flames at the Saddledome
After dropping two straight to start their western road swing, Detroit dominates the Flames at the Saddledome
It wasn't a playoff game, but it was a game the Red Wings had to win.
Detroit had fallen apart in the third period in Edmonton Tuesday, then never seemed to find a way into the fight in Vancouver Thursday. A two-game losing skid need not inspire panic, but it couldn't persist. "There were some good spurts in both of those games. It's a little stretch we went through where we had good 40 minutes, but we need that full 60," Robby Fabbri said at yesterday's practice. And, from puck drop to the closing horn in Calgary, the Red Wings played like a team for whom there could be no alternative to victory.
When the heavy lifting was done and the game was out of reach in the third period, a bold yet furtive Detroit fan tossed an octopus onto the ice where it lay, tentacles splayed, until an unfortunate member of the Flames' ice crew shoveled up the long-time Red Wing playoff talisman to a chorus a boos.
Even if the cephalopod itself could be evicted and dispensed with, its implicit message persisted, highlighting the imperative of the afternoon's victory while casting an eye forward to the ambitions reaffirmed by the team's response to urgent circumstances.
In the first period, the Red Wings wasted no time in claiming as their own a game they had to have, leaving the frame with a 2-0 advantage that would grow to 5-0 by night's end for an emphatic road victory.
The Red Wings skated out to a sharp start in the game's opening minutes, but it took nearly three-quarters of the first period to break through to a reward for those efforts. That breakthrough came from the stick of a Patrick Kane, a power play one-timer blasted off a face-off with more precision than raw power. With the goal, Kane had recorded at least a point in each of his first four games back since returning from injury, though he wasn't done scoring for this game.
One minute and three seconds later, Detroit doubled its lead. Forechecking pressure from Alex DeBrincat and Lucas Raymond disrupted a Calgary exit attempt, leaving Raymond to charge assertively off the wall and toward the slot. Rather than forcing a shot into traffic once he got there, the Swedish winger slipped a pass over to J.T. Compher, who had a clear lane through which to send home the puck.
In the final 30 seconds of the period, Detroit had a pair of glorious, point-blank chances to push the score to 3-0—one from DeBrincat then another with hardly five seconds to play from DeBrincat for Jeff Petry. Jacob Markstrom managed to keep both pucks out of his net, and, on a different night, perhaps the Red Wings would have paid for squandering the chance to all but kill off the game in one period but not Saturday.
Instead, Detroit got the third five minutes and 12 seconds into the second period, with the benefit of a four-on-three power play, with a series of well-choreographed interchanges culminating in an inch-perfect Kane feed to Dylan Larkin—who had boxed out Chris Tanev at the top of the crease—to tap home.
A fourth, from David Perron, soon followed, before the fifth came courtesy of Raymond in the third. Though as it turned out, it was far more scoring than Detroit would need thanks to a shutout effort in net from James Reimer. Reimer started for just the third time in 2024 but managed to ward off whatever rust might otherwise have plagued him to provide a 38-save shutout.
In the third period, to complete the 60-minute effort Fabbri named pre-game as essential, it was the Red Wings' penalty kill who had the final hurdle to clear. Midway through the frame, Detroit had 1:49 of five-on-three to kill, with two essential PKers in Moritz Seider and Joe Veleno cast into the box. The Red Wings dealt with that last test with aplomb, fighting their way back to full strength without incident.
It was a game with no shortage of bright spots for Detroit—Reimer responding in a moment where the Red Wings needed relief in net, the power play putting two past a stingy Calgary PK unit, Kane continuing his prolific return from injury, shuffled lines providing a necessary injection of verve to the forward group—but the night's biggest star was also its slimiest.
The octopus—and the bold Detroit partisan who felt compelled to conceal on their person for two-and-a-half periods of action in enemy territory—reflected the simultaneous urgency and confidence emanating from the fan base. To toss an octopus onto the ice at Little Caesars Arena is one thing but to do so on the road requires an even more daring miscreant, especially on the heels of uninspired losses in in Vancouver and Edmonton.
And on Saturday, the Red Wings met that urgency and rewarded that confidence, stopping their skid in its tracks with a rout that brought LCA's first true postseason octopus two points closer to reality.
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