Friday\u2019s 6-3 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning.<\/a><\/p>\nAnd coach Todd McLellan is asking questions.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst, you got to look and say, \u2018Are we good enough? Do we have enough talent?\u2019 Yeah, we do,\u201d McLellan said. \u201cWe don\u2019t get 13 wins 25 games in without having a team that can play well enough. Are we playing well enough? No, we\u2019re not. Why aren\u2019t we? There\u2019s a little bit of disconnect between forwards and D right now. And then in a team game, you sometimes get punished as a team, score-wise, momentum-wise, win-loss wise, for individual mistakes. And that happens. Team breakdowns are much more repairable than just an individual faux pas.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo, let\u2019s take care of what we can take care of. If you\u2019re an individual and you\u2019re playing, clean it up. And if you can\u2019t, then we got to start asking ourselves, \u2018Do you belong?\u2019 This is about all of us. If you can\u2019t clean it up, we got to figure things out.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Red Wings (13-11-1) have lost three in a row and four out of five. A team that allowed only nine goals during a five-game winning streak in October now ranks 26th in goals-against per game (3.44).<\/p>\n
That stat must improve significantly for this team to compete for a playoff spot because this group isn\u2019t good enough to outscore its mistakes.<\/p>\n
Many of their miscues during this Black Friday matinee came around their crease, where the Lightning created a lot of chaos in front of goaltender John Gibson and won a lot of battles.<\/p>\n
\u201cTodd talked a lot about net play in the last few days, and they get a couple in front of our net,\u201d Dylan Larkin said. \u201cIt\u2019s frustrating when we talk about it a lot and it just keeps happening.\u201d<\/p>\n
Players are listening, Larkin said. They\u2019re just not executing.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re almost trying too hard and we\u2019re not playing the game,\u201d Larkin said. \u201cWhen things aren\u2019t going well, we just kind of sag and it seems like the things that we talk about just keep happening.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re just a little fragile and mistakes seem to be compounding.\u201d<\/p>\n
Said J.T. Compher: \u201cThere\u2019s definitely some frustration throughout the room.\u201d<\/p>\n
McLellan echoed Larkin\u2019s sentiment that effort is not the issue.<\/p>\n
\u201cLet me make that really clear. They care,\u201d McLellan said. \u201cWe had a really good practice (Thursday). They do care, but that only gets you so far. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re trying to give them some guidance, but when it doesn\u2019t go well, we got to stay with it. And the unfortunate thing tonight is that we could have said, \u2018Here\u2019s two (goals), and now we\u2019ll start playing. We gifted them the second (goal) and the four-on-four (fifth) one. And we\u2019re not good enough to be giving stuff away for free. <\/p>\n
\u201cSo, until we take care of it, we\u2019ll keep having these issues.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DETROIT \u2013 They\u2019re not defending well around the crease. They\u2019re getting caught out of position. They\u2019re not controlling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-319696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-nhl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}