Updates

Since Detroit played last night, it looks like there’s no morning skate today. We’re guessing the lineup will be the same as yesterday’s game, although we don’t know for sure.

Lineups

DETROIT

Tyler Bertuzzi – Dylan Larkin – Luke Glendening
Andreas Athanasiou – Valtteri Filppula – Robby Fabbri
Darren Helm – Frans Nielsen – Filip Zadina
Adam Erne – Christoffer Ehn – Brendan Perlini

Dennis Cholowski – Mike Green
Madison Bowey – Filip Hronek
Alex Biega – Dylan McIlrath

Jonathan Bernier
Calvin Pickard

WASHINGTON

Alex Ovechkin – Evgeny Kuznetsov – Tom Wilson
Jakub Vrana – Lars Eller – T.J. Oshie
Richard Panik – Chandler Stevenson – Travis Boyd
Brendan Leipsic – Nic Dowd – Garnet Hathaway

Michal Kempny – John Carlson
Dmitri Orlov – Nick Jensen
Jonas Siegenthaler – Radko Gudas

Braden Holtby
Ilya Samsanov

Keys to the Game

Play 60

The Red Wings hung with a good Philadelphia Flyers team for 39 minutes yesterday. At one point early on they were outshooting them 13-2 and putting a lot of pressure on the Flyers. But they lost their focus late in the second and early in the third giving up three goals in a minute and nine seconds between the end of the second and beginning of the third and the game was essentially over. This is not a team that can afford lapses in effort or focus, they simply do not have the talent to recover. If they have any lapses tonight Washington is very likely to punish them for it.

Special Teams

Everyone knows that the Capitals are dangerous on the power play. Alex Ovechkin has made a HoF career out of standing in the left faceoff circle with his stick cocked waiting to blast one timers. Everyone knows he is there and the team is looking to feed him and he stills scores consistently. None of that is news and it will be important to either A) Stay out of the box or B) Kill off the penalties if the Wings want to come away with a win tonight. Additionally though Washington has a top 10 Penalty Kill as well this season so even with the man advantage for Detroit they are going to have a rough time finding the net. If by some chance they win the special teams fight tonight they will have a decent chance at winning the game.

Puck Luck

There is not really much the Red Wings can do directly about this one but man to they need to find some puck luck. Every time there is a strange bounce it seems to go against Detroit. Be it a lucky bounce off a skate into the net or just over the stick of a forward looking at a wide open 6×4, every bounce seems to be against the boys in Red. There is no way to control puck luck but there is a way to even out its chances. Driving hard to the net, getting pucks through traffic, digging and battling behind the net, clearing out the front of their own goal and limiting the shots by the opposing team will put a team in position to potentially benefit from some puck luck. They are going to need to do that tonight.