The Detroit Red Wings had a better performance but not good enough

The Detroit Red Wings remain winless on the season as they endured a 3-1 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning last night.

The Detroit Red Wings haven’t had much luck playing the Lightning in most recent memory. They have lost 12 straight games to the team Steve Yzerman built. In addition to that, TB has beaten the Wings 12 consecutive times playing in Amalie Arena. It is undoubtedly a destination the Wings do not look forward traveling to.

The losses are starting to mount, the winless streak is becoming taxing, and the first overall pick is becoming more and more realistic if this streak continues. A lot of times teams get tumbling downward early on in the season similar to this and are unable to rally themselves back with any type of winning streak to make up for it. This team does not look like a team that can string 8-10 wins off in a row.

It wasn’t all bad last night. You may wonder well it is a loss how can anything good come from this and this ugly winless streak. We didn’t get blown out in a potential blow out game. The Lightning have a tonne of firepower and was only able to notch 3 goals, one of which was an empty netter.

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Over the previous two games, the Detroit Red Wings allowed 15 goals. That is a crooked number if I’ve ever seen one. Boston buried the puck eight times, and an underwhelming Montreal club put up a seven spot.

Brayden Point has turned into one of our greatest nemesis; he opened the scoring for Tampa at the 7:33 mark of the first period. The feeling was; here we go, the Tampa floodgates are about to open drowning the Wings in goals.

The Detroit Red Wings bounced back carrying the play and taking it to TB. In the midst of an awful losing streak, surrendering the first goal of the game could have easily allowed the Wings to put their tail between their legs and start to sulk.

They came out and hung right in there with the best club in the State of Florida. The issue was trying to beat a perennial Vezina Trophy candidate in goal. Andrei Vasilevskiy was sensational in goal and definitely deserved the first star of the game. Luke Glendening was able to beat him in the second period, but that is all the netminder would allow. He made 29 saves guiding his club to the victory.

Jimmy Howard matched the play of Vasi all night long. It was a nice “bounce back” game for Howard after getting the hook in Montreal. Howard gave his team every opportunity to win often making substantial acrobatic saves versus the high powered TB offense. Steven Stamkos would beat him, recording TB’s second and inevitably game-winning goal. Howard made 28 saves on 30 shots.

Andreas Athanasiou was flying around again for the Wings, he had his fair share of scoring opportunities but was unable to bury any of them. He was trying to use his world-class speed to his advantage. He started the night on the wing of Frans Nielsen but later in the game when Christoffer Ehn found himself sitting on crazy glue at the end of the bench; AA played a heavy dose of the center position once again.

Luke Witkowski found himself in the lineup playing on the back end. He played just over 10 minutes and did not look out of place. Since the Detroit Red Wings decided to send Libor Sulak back to Grand Rapids, Luke got an opportunity. He primarily played as a penalty killing defender. The Wings were 4 for 4 on the PK against that lethal TB PP, that was impressive.

A couple of disappointing coaching decisions came at the expense of Anthony Mantha, who played only 13:13 TOI on the night. Mantha, who we’ve all wanted to see a much more consistent performance out of played his best game of the season. He looked dangerous and had his feet moving all night long, and Jeff Blashill allocated 13 minutes of play to Mantha. Stop it! Mantha needs to be playing 17 minutes a night, end of story.

Young Michael Rasmussen returned to the lineup only to play a couple of ticks under 10 minutes on the evening. Listen play the kid or send him back to junior. Jeff Blashill is risking stunting the kids’ growth by playing him so few minutes night after night when he can be in junior playing 22 minutes a night working on his game.

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It is hard to get into the flow of the game primarily as a scorer playing so few minutes. Jeff Blashill needs to start rolling his top three lines and mixing in his fourth line rather than rolling all four nearly the same minutes each and every night. As the losses continue to mount so does the pressure on the front office to make a coaching change.

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