Familiar Result but New Road Map as Red Wings Fall in McLellan's Debut

DETROIT—Moments before two national anthems were sung and the puck dropped, the Little Caesars Arena crowd cheered as a public address announcement introduced Todd McLellan as Red Wings head coach for the first time.   McLellan himself showed no reaction to the warm reception, steel-faced to the applause.  That reticence to embrace excitement would prove the appropriate emotional tenor for a night when his new team trailed 5—0 after two periods on the way to a 5—2 defeat to the visiting Toronto Maple Leafs.

When asked how it felt to coach an NHL game for the first time since being fired by the Los Angeles Kings in February, McLellan replied, "I think the result always dictates the way you feel at the end of the night.  It's really not about how I feel.  It's probably more important how the players feel."  Of course it wasn't a good feeling, a far cry from the new coach bump a change behind the bench is supposed to inspire.  Instead, the opening 40 minutes felt painfully familiar to the losing streak that inspired the coaching change in the first place.

In the first period, a Detroit defensive zone turnover set the Maple Leafs up to score on their first shot of the game.  Six minutes later, the Red Wings fell back into the sort of scrambling in the defensive zone that doomed McLellan's predecessor.  In the final minute of the period, Mitch Marner buried a power play goal, exploiting a vulnerable Detroit penalty kill and lifting his team to a 3—0 advantage by just the first intermission.  By the end of the night, Marner would tally a hat trick, the Leafs would score another last minute goal in the second, but the Red Wings did push back with a pair of third period goals to restore some modicum of confidence.

"It's a lot for one day, a complete change of voice behind the bench. It's a lot for a game day," acknowledged defenseman Ben Chiarot of the challenge of acclimating to a new head coach over the course of a single day.  Even if the result was nothing new, winger Lucas Raymond suggested that the tone was, saying, "It's never fun losing 5–2, but it was a different feeling and something to build off of."

That different feeling despite the final scoreline came from McLellan, whose post-game debrief cut a simultaneously vulnerable and commanding presence.  And, to Raymond's point, that debrief also brought an explicit path forward, "a road map" McLellan called it.

"When you're not on the bench, you forget how fast it really is...so the game for me was moving fast, and that's because I'm as rusty as rusty can be," McLellan admitted.  He wasn't interested in the phony optimism of the cliché of winning the final period in a game already lost. "Let's face it: They were playing back-to-back games, and in the third period, we were playing against lines two, three, and four most of the time," he pointed out.  "Marner and that group weren't out on the ice very much [in the third]."

What the evening brought into focus for McLellan was the work that needs to be done.  "We know where we'll go to begin with tomorrow in practice," he said.  "It's evident. You don't have to be a hockey expert to see that some of our entry coverage, some of the D zone parts of the play have to get fixed. I think penalty kill's been obvious for a little while, but that's what happens when a team's not playing real well: Half the group is saying we gotta be better offensively, and we hear it from you and deservedly so, but then there's the defensive side. And so we've got to pick one and try to get after it. For me, that's on the defensive side after what we saw tonight."

McLellan said that he Red Wings needed to rid their defensive play of its "mechanical" qualities.  "You can't play that way," he cautioned.  "Your systems and your structure allow you to get to places, but then you have to play hockey.  You have to rely on instincts...I see us being mechanical, I see us being tentative, I see us leaving our feet a lot...We have work to do.  We have a road map now.  Nobody's happy about losing, but we'll get after it tomorrow in practice."

Like the evening's performance, Detroit's place in the standings is neither pretty nor enviable.  With the loss and a simultaneous 6—2 Sabres win over the Blackhawks a few hours East in Buffalo, the Red Wings dropped to 13–18–4 and now sit beside that Sabres team at the floor of the Eastern Conference with 30 points.  "It's not gonna happen over night," McLellan added of the road out of the present abyss, but with his arrival, there is at least a map.

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