McLellan: Red Wings ‘earned’ boos following being eliminated from Stanley Cup playoff contention
As the Detroit Red Wings skated off the ice on Saturday night at Little Caesars Arena, they were met by a chorus of boos from their faithful supporters in the team’s final home game of the regular season.
Not only were the fans in Hockeytown disappointed by another loss, blowing a trio of leads to the New Jersey Devils, but the Red Wings were also officially eliminated from playoff contention for the 10th consecutive season.
10 years.
10 years of disappointment and futility for a franchise that had set the standard for consistency for a quarter century. Every season since the 2015-16 campaign, including the first nine years inside LCA, Detroit has come up short of reaching the postseason. Thanks to the Buffalo Sabres earning a berth already, the Red Wings have been granted the title of longest playoff drought in the NHL.
Head coach Todd McLellan – who is finishing up his first full season as the bench boss after spending a few seasons as an assistant during the franchise’s better years earlier this century – understands the fans’ frustration, and that his team’s play has warranted their decision to turn on the winged-wheel.
“This is Detroit. This is Hockeytown,” McLellan said after the loss. “I’ve been lucky enough to be on the other side of it, when they couldn’t stop cheering for this team. And they’re dying for that, they crave that. That’s what they want…That’s inside noise. Those are the fans in our building, and they pay to watch us play…they’re fully entitled to their opinion, and we’ve deserved their opinion. There’s no way to sugarcoat it, that’s what we earned.”
Todd Mcllelan on the boos during the salute "This is hockeytown, they're not even clamoring for a cup...they just want a group to give them something to cheer for. We earned that reaction..."
McLellan admitted that he doesn’t even think Wings fans even care about winning a championship, but simply playing beyond the regular season.
“I don’t even know if they want a Stanley Cup Championship anymore. They just want a team that’s going to come in and give them something to cheer about.”
While there have been some pretty lean years during the team’s extended rebuild, the fact that Detroit is going to experience another long offseason this time around is going to sting a lot more than years past, including the 2023-24 season when the Wings were eliminated on the final day of the regular season.
“It’s been too many years in a row now where we’ve been right there and just haven’t been able to get it done,” forward Lucas Raymond said. “We’ve got to figure it out, and we’ve got to figure it out fast and take that next step. We’ve got to look ourselves in the mirror, everyone in here in this building, and we’ve got to be better than this.”
Heading toward the Olympic break, the Red Wings were busy fighting with the Tampa Bay Lightning for first place in the Atlantic Division. Coming out of the league-wide pause, Detroit was still third in the division, seemingly sitting in a comfortable position to finally get to the postseason.
However, the team went on a rough slide, with the month of March proving to be the Wings’ downfall for the third year in a row. Since March 1, the Red Wings have posted a disappointing record of 9-12-3 and have been leapfrogged by Buffalo, the Boston Bruins, and the Ottawa Senators.
If there’s any glimmering sense of a silver lining, the Red Wings have a chance to post the most points since their last playoff appearance in 2016, as the team has 91 points with two games to go. However, Raymond and captain Dylan Larkin admitted it doesn’t feel like much of a moral victory.
“It does undercut it,” Larkin said. “Progress, yes. It doesn’t feel like it right now, though. That’s for sure…[We] put ourselves in a great spot and a lot of good things, but just didn’t do what we set out to do, to make the playoffs and continue to build this thing.”
“It all kind of feels the same, to be honest with you,” Raymond said. “You miss it, you miss it. You don’t really care how close you are. The only thing you care about is getting in. We had all the tools to do it.”
Larkin, who is the only player left in Motown from that 2015-16 team, says that things continue to go wrong at the worst time of the season.
“We all know it, right? Marches and late seasons,” Larkin said. “When it gets tight, we come up short. And we’ve talked about it, we’ve tried different things, and it happened again this year.”
There are certainly loads of questions that are surrounding this team heading into the offseason. What players should be considered to be brought back? Does general manager Steve Yzerman need to spend the big bucks to get an attractive free agent? Or is Yzerman even back running the team next year? What about the goaltending? Does Detroit run it back with John Gibson and Cam Talbot, or is it time to give prospect Sebastian Cossa a shot?
Those are just a few of the topics that fans and the team will be pondering for the next six months, as many around Hockeytown are left to wonder what could’ve been had this edition of the Detroit Red Wings had been able to finally make it to the playoffs.