Red Wings Key Play Breakdown: Winnipeg Takes the Lead on a Breakaway Goal

The Wings lost in a real kick-in-the-dick fashion as they welcomed a tired Winnipeg Jets team to the Joe, blew three different leads, and then faded late to the team that was supposed to have done that. The key play for tonight is Brandon Tanev’s second goal of the night, as shown on Fox Sports Detroit and NHL Network. Let’s take a look:

Haha isn’t that great! A professional broadcast cutting to commercial and missing the game-winning goal. Wonderful work all around.

(For the record, the last commercial break of the game, according to rule happens at the first non-icing stoppage after the 14-minute mark. This broadcast had that happen at 16:58 of the period, so somebody goofed with going to another).

At any rate, here’s the real play:

The Jets get it off a won faceoff taken back into their zone and ring it around the boards. Athanasiou takes up position down the boards behind the play to get in position to start a cycle for Helm, who looks to start with good position, but ends up getting hung up on Morrissey, allowing Dano to come in and take up away from him escaping up the boards. Sheahan pinches down, but Adam Lowry is between him and the puck, which buys Dano time to make a play for an outlet to the middle of the ice where Byfuglien is jumping up

You can already see that the play is on its way to screwed here. Marchenko has decided to gamble on holding the line in case Dano tries to dump it up the boards, but without containment to the middle for Byfulien, there’s no reason for him to be here.

As soon as Helm lost the battle to Dano, both Sheahan and Marchenko should have backed off and made this a 3-on-3 rush. Unfortunately, two of them fail to do that and we’ve already got the makings for a 3-on-2 rush beginning when that all goes to hell and we end up with a breakaway instead.

You can already see Tanev bustling up ice as the pass to Byfuglien hits the middle. Here’s the remainder of the sequence

As you can see in the break between the end of the previous gif and the beginning of this one, Ericsson has failed by the time the puck is even in transit to Tanev. He knew he should be getting back, but doesn’t realize that both Sheahan and Marchenko have trapped themselves. When Byfuglien gets the pass to the middle of the ice, Ericsson’s first instinct is to turn over his back shoulder to see about squaring to Buff.

As a result, Riggy isn’t watching as Tanev burns by his near shoulder on his way to receiving the pass from Byfuglien in stride. Tanev freezes Mrazek and that’s all she wrote.

This was a mental failure late in the third period by the more rested team. I don’t have anything nice to say.