Detroit Red Wings Goalied by Division Foe

The Detroit Red Wings’ 2024-25 season continues to echo their 2023-24 season. The Red Wings were once again largely sellers at the NHL’s recent trade deadline. Left-winger Joe Veleno was traded to the Chicago Blackhawks in exchange for former Red Wings goaltender Petr Mrazek and veteran center Craig Smith. Smith played his first game for the Red Wings against the Ottawa Senators. The Senators would defeat the Red Wings by a score of 2-1. The Red Wings’ 2022-23 season effectively ended when the team lost back-to-back games to the Senators.

The Red Wings have fallen to five points behind the Senators, who are in the first wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference. This comes as the team has lost six straight games after the Four Nations Faceoff break. That is not to say that the Red Wings have not been playing good hockey during this streak. The latest game in this streak involved the Senators and goaltender Linus Ullmark. The Red Wings put up 49 shots against the Lugnvik, Sweden native who saved 48 of them. The reality of hockey is that sometimes a team gets “goalied.”

10 of the 49 Red Wings shots were taken by Alex DeBrincat, who has been one of the hottest Red Wings even through this losing streak. This was not the case during the Red Wings’ playoff chase that came up short last season when he scored only four goals in his last 11 games of the season. The former Senator, who is a Farmington Hills, Michigan native, signed with the Red Wings in free agency to alleviate the scoring load put on Dylan Larkin. DeBrincat finished last season with 27 goals scored in 82 games played.

The Red Wings have been a team of streaks, whether positive or negative, under new head coach Todd McLellan. McLellan thought the team had played their best game of the losing streak at the time against the Columbus Blue Jackets at Ohio Stadium. The Red Wings would lose the game by a score of 5-3. Had it not been for a high hit on right-winger Elmer Söderblom that was not called, the Red Wings may have been able to tie the game.

“They put a lot into that game,” head coach Todd McLellan said about the Red Wings, according to NHL.com. “There’s no complaints about effort or, really, execution. We ran into a goalie who had a career night, and unfortunately for us, we couldn’t find a way to beat him. We didn’t give up much. We played a good, hard, gritty game. When you’re in [a losing streak], it’d be nice to get a game like this and come out of it. But if we play like this and continue to play like this, we’ll find ways to get wins.”

Prior to the trade deadline, the Red Wings sent goaltender Ville Husso to the Anaheim Ducks for future considerations. Husso signed a three-year contract with an AAV of $4.75 million in July of 2022. Despite being the starting goaltender for the Red Wings for their first game of the 2024-25 season, a game which the Red Wings would lose to the Pittsburgh Penguins by a score of 6-3, the number of injuries that Husso has endured made him expendable.

The Red Wings have 18 games remaining in the 2024-25 season. If they catch the Ottawa Senators for a wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference, the team will need scoring from DeBrincat and Larkin. According to McLellan, the team is playing well during the current losing streak, and it has proven it is capable of this.