Summer Starts Early for Red Wings
Team will get high draft picks, but won’t give up on reaching postseason in 2018.
The last time the Detroit Red Wings missed the National Hockey League playoffs was 1990. Coleman Young was the city’s mayor. Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard was running for re-election (he would lose to Republican State Sen. John Engler that November). And the Detroit Pistons were getting ready to defend their NBA championship.
When the 2017 Stanley Cup playoffs start, the Wings won’t be there. They finished in seventh place in their division, and posted the NHL’s sixth-worst record.
Helene St. James, who covers the Wings for the Detroit Free Press, says injuries contributed largely to this season’s decline. “They lost [goalie] Jimmy Howard in mid-December, and he was playing very, very well,” St. James says.
She also noted that several players underachieved, including goalie Petr Mrazek, who allowed 30 more goals than he did in 2015-16. And the team ranked 27th out of 30 teams in scoring power-play goals.
“If you don’t have good special teams, if you don’t have goaltending in today’s NHL, you’re not going anywhere,” St. James says.
The Wings won 33 of 82 games in their second season under Head Coach Jeff Blashill. St. James says she expects he’ll return and that the team’s off-season moves will be focused on returning to the playoffs in 2018.
Click on the audio player to hear the conversation with WDET’s Pat Batcheller.
