Puck Drop for the Red Wings’ Regular Season is officially less than a week away! I thought a fun final exercise of the preseason would be to prognosticate early season results. By ‘early season’, I’m talking roughly the first quarter of the season thru American Thanksgiving. The media has really liked to harp on the importance of being in playoff position at that point in the season lately, so this feels like as good of an arbitrary point as any.
If you’re like me, you might feel like the Red Wings have started seasons off in recent years by punching well above their weight before falling off pace. Indeed, the numbers back that up. Three seasons back in our final year of The Process™, we were 11-9-3 on November 30th for a 54.4 points percentage. The Red Wings finished that season at 32-40-10 for a 45.1 points percentage.
Lalonde’s first 22 games had the Red Wings at a 61.4% clip (11-6-5) by November 30th, but finished the season 35-37-10 (48.8%). Last season, we started at the same 61.4% clip (12-7-3) and saw a markedly muted regression tied with WC2 Washington at a 55.5 points percentage.
One major thing that each of these three rosters had in common were some pretty radical personnel differences compared to the season prior. This has a couple of impacts, albeit ones tough to quantify. First, this creates a pretty steep learning curve internally for both the coaches (line combinations) and the players (anticipating each other’s actions). This team chemistry aspect is always a bit mysterious but undeniably impactful. Second, this creates a steep learning curve for our opposition; how do you gameplan against a team you’ve never seen play together?
While we’ve had another offseason of significant turnover by volume, I would argue that this is the most consistent we’ve looked to a prior year this decade. Will that allow a stronger team chemistry to forge, or will that enable opponents to more effectively gameplan against the Red Wings?
Another important, unquantifiable aspect of this team I’d like to bring up is coaching. A certain someone aside, I am still fairly on the fence with the majority of this coaching staff. Two years of a consistent staff is plenty of time to make informed judgements, and if I had to grade this staff today I would comfortably put it in the bottom third of the League, but it is still possible that talent on this roster has yet to catch up to the coaching. I am willing to give Newsy and Co. the benefit of the doubt here and really hope I’m singing their praises over some turkey and apple pie this fall.
My biggest concern about our coaching staff currently is whether they are the right men for the job at hand of developing our youth. Not just Berggren, Edvinsson, and Johansson, but I still include Raymond, Seider, and Veleno in that group as well, not to mention any callups of Kasper, Danielson, et al. That said, what I’m really hoping to see out of our coaching staff early on this year is some damned accountability. If an opponent cheap shots one of our players and the refs do nothing, take the fine and call them out in a press conference. Show your players you have their back. If a player egregiously misses an assignment or repeats mistakes that cost their teammates, send a message by giving them a nice, cozy, permanent spot on the bench for a period. If Debrincat is clearly snakebit, I don’t care how disgustingly talented he is, take him off the damn power play until you find him some antivenom.
Okay. *deep breaths* Gonna step away from the opinions a bit and come back towards the facts side of things. It’s important to note, even though this is pretty obvious, that we have improved our team record pretty significantly each of the past three seasons. We continue to move consistently in the right direction and our young stars seem poised to blossom into bona fide superstars. Health and depth remain a concern at every position, but things seem a lot less dire this year than they have the past eight years. Case in point: even though our points percentage in ’23-’24 and ’22-’23 were an identical 61.4%, those early-season success just felt different. While the wheels came off for both squads at various times throughout their respective seasons, the ’22-’23 squad racked up three embarrassing blowout losses to the Devils, Sabres, and Rangers during that early stretch of success. It wasn’t until Larkin was hurt last season that the ’23-’24 roster was one that could hit the ice and be flat out uncompetitive. At the end of the season, the record is all that matters, but for me, it’s not just wins and losses but how we win and how we lose.
Now for the bad news. Have you seen our October schedule? Yikes-o-rama. Penguins, Predators twice, Rangers twice, Sabres twice, Devils, Islanders, Oilers, and Jets. That is a brutal gauntlet to start a season. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Penguins and Islanders are the only two games on that slate where the Red Wings will be the favored team. Hell, I honestly wouldn’t be all that surprised to find the Red Wings aren’t the favored team in their tilt until they go to Chicago on November 6th. Other than a trip to California mid-November, it honestly doesn’t get any easier after that. So here’s to hoping the Wings continue the trend of over-performing early on in the season and, finally, find a way to not regress come winter.
So, Dear WIIM Community, what do you think? What might be the impacts of roster turnover and team chemistry, our coaching staff, and this brutal early schedule? Any predictions for Detroit’s record when the calendar turns to December?
