The Detroit Red Wings made so many mistakes in their last game that head coach Todd McLellan knows he can’t fix all of them in just one day.
Detroit gave up five third-period goals to the team with the league’s worst record — Nashville — in a 6-3 loss on Wednesday. The Red Wings will host the streaking Tampa Bay Lightning in a Friday matinee.
“We were talking in the back — a lot of times when you play, you get a feel for where you need to take practice the next day or your meeting or what you’re going to look for because there’s some patterns that appear. Where do we as a staff take this?” McLellan said. “It’s all over the map. Leaving New Jersey (a 4-3 loss on Monday) we were a little bit concerned about net play — the deflections, the tips, those types of things. We saw one of those (Wednesday) but there’s other areas we have to take care of. We can’t get everything done in one day.
“Every time we get something and we grab onto it, we give something else back,” he added. “That is not the sign of a good team. Good teams hold their lessons and you build off of them.”
The Red Wings built a 2-1 lead during the first two periods but McLellan didn’t feel comfortable about his team’s performance throughout the contest.
“I didn’t like our game most of the night. I thought we were quite casual early in the game,” he said. “Our passing was horrendous. There was nothing crisp about our game and somehow our power play, even that was ugly, but it kept us in the game. Third period starts, we gave up four (goals) in every different fashion you can think of.”
Alex DeBrincat scored his 12th goal and tied captain Dylan Larkin for the team’s points lead with 24.
In contrast, the Lightning have looked sharp recently and carry a five-game winning streak into Detroit. They have given up just five goals during that span with Andrei Vasilevskiy protecting the net in four of them.
Tampa Bay collected a 5-1 win over Calgary on Wednesday, two nights after Vasilevskiy recorded his first shutout of the season against Philadelphia.
“Phenomenal,” said defenseman Declan Carlile, who scored his second career goal against the Flames. “I mean, best goalie in the world. Obviously, I’m not here all the time, but I watch a lot of games and I’ve been watching for a long time, and, yeah, he’s one of a kind.”
Nikita Kucherov leads the Lightning with 16 assists and 27 points. He carries a seven-game point streak (four goals, nine assists) into the rematch.
The matchup on Friday begins a three-game trip. Tampa Bay will play seven of its next nine games on the road.
“The boys defended, and if we made a mistake, Vas was there for us,” head coach Jon Cooper said. “You look at summing the whole thing up, it’s another solid victory for us at home. And now we’ve got to go see if we can do this on the road.”
Vasilevskiy made 29 saves at Detroit on Oct. 17 but the Red Wings pulled out a 2-1 overtime victory. Larkin scored the game-winner.
