DETROIT — Playing the first of 12 matinees in their 2026-27 regular-season schedule, the Detroit Red Wings battled but couldn\u2019t quite finish off a three-goal comeback in a 3-2 loss to the Winnipeg Jets at Little Caesars Arena on Sunday afternoon.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe guys on the bench are pissed when we\u2019re down,\u201d Red Wings head coach Todd McLellan said. \u201cThey\u2019re not happy, but no one is digging graves. They\u2019re trying to dig themselves out. I didn\u2019t think the effort, or anything, sagged. In fact, we pushed a little bit. You could feel the building get some energy, and that certainly helped us. We\u2019re appreciative for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goaltender John Gibson finished with 24 saves for Detroit (0-2-0; 0 points), while goalie Stuart Skinner had 33 for Winnipeg (1-0-1; 3 points). Special teams played a significant part in Sunday\u2019s result, as the Red Wings went 1-for-5 on the power play and 1-for-4 on the penalty kill.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s where they won that battle today,\u201d Alex DeBrincat said. \u201cLike I said, power play must be better. We had a lot of opportunities to put one in the net. We obviously got one, but one isn\u2019t enough in a game like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before the Red Wings saw the Jets take a 2-0 lead in the opening frame on power-play goals from Cole Perfetti at 13:04 and Kyle Connor at 14:36, J.T. Compher was on the receiving end of a hit from Tyrel Bauer that sent him backwards into the left boards at 12:10. Keegan Kolesar immediately stepped up in defense of Compher by dropping the gloves with Bauer and absorbing a few blows before briefly leaving the game, but he returned to start the second.<\/p>\n
The early goings of the middle frame also saw Gibson make an impressive stop on Vladislav Namestnikov’s breakaway attempt \u2014 the 33-year-old forward accepted a pass and raced down the ice out of the penalty box just seconds after Detroit’s second power play of the afternoon expired.<\/p>\n
At 5:41, Josh Morrissey set up Connor for another Winnipeg power-play goal that staked the visitors to a 3-0 advantage.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe penalty kill failed us,\u201d McLellan said. \u201cAnd the penalty, unsportsmanlike conduct right after we get scored on, bang, they\u2019re up 2-0. We can\u2019t have that. Pretty simple, but the penalty kill let us down. First one was a lucky one. Second one was a penalty that we didn\u2019t need to take. Third one was off a rebound. So, we\u2019ll keep working on that, try to fix it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Red Wings got on the board before the second intermission arrived, however. With Dylan DeMelo in the box for tripping Kolesar, Viktor Arvidsson was at the back door when he redirected a cross-ice feed from Andrew Copp behind Skinner and cut their deficit to 3-1 at 16:52. Moritz Seider picked up the secondary assist on Arvidsson’s first goal of the season, which was also Detroit’s first as a team.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT — Playing the first of 12 matinees in their 2026-27 regular-season schedule, the Detroit Red Wings battled…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":921310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194296],"tags":[49,48,22073],"class_list":["post-921309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-winnipeg","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-winnipeg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=921309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/921309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/921310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=921309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=921309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=921309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}