I'm an outside fan and I'm curious, can I get a TL DW on why your team is good since the coaching change ? I saw people saying it was just Kaner going hot. I'm skeptical. Haven't watched a wings game in a while.
Lol, anyone saying our streak is because of Kane going nuclear is bonkers. If they watched the Wings under Lalonde, they’d know that Kane isn’t just “getting hot.” They’d know that Kane didn’t even look capable of going on a hot streak under Lalonde. He looked like it was the end of his career. There were debates about him even being wanted by other teams at the TDL because his play in every facet looked spent. Kane under McLellan is putting up points because he’s fully engaged and because the new team structure facilitates so much more movement through the neutral zone than it did before.
Arguably the real reason Detroit is booming right now is because of the defense. Under Lalonde, basically the only guys performing well were the “star” players on the team - guys with enough talent and IQ not to be held back by Lalonde’s shit system. So on the back end, that list starts and ends with Seider and Edvinsson. They looked good under Lalonde and were paired together. But the rest of the defense looked wholly incapable of NHL play. That’s not even an exaggeration.
The first thing McLellan did was split up Mo and Ed to spread the wealth on the defense. But it wasn’t just the redistribution of talent on the back end that made things better, it was also the change in system. Lalonde had the defense sitting back, letting the play come to them, which resulted in our defense always playing catch up to the puck and playing on their heels. McLellan put the kibosh on that and has the defense sitting higher in the d zone and also lets them go on the attack and join the rush, as opposed to just rimming it up the boards.
A testament to this system change is the Chiarot-Seider pairing. We tried that pairing a lot under Lalonde, and it rarely had success and never sustained success. They’d look good together like once or twice every dozen games. But under McLellan? The Chiarot-Seider pairing has suddenly strung together a series of good-to-awesome outings. Seider has always looked good, but now he isn't carrying Chiarot and Chiarot finally looks like the guy he was signed to be: a capable fill-in on the top pairing of a rebuilding team. But it doesn’t end there. McLellan put rookie Johansson with Edvinsson on the 2nd pairing, whereas Lalonde had him in and out of the lineup, never higher than the bottom pairing. Well it turns out Johansson is the type to thrive when paired with a talented defenseman and McLellan’s system suits his game much better as well. Gustavsson is the other piece. Gus makes like $2M and there were buyout discussions about him because even in his small role, he was terrible. Didn’t look like an NHL defenseman. Under McLellan he is so much more engaged. He didn’t look anything like the supplementary offensive defenseman he was supposed to be under Lalonde. But under McLellan, it’s like he’s manifested offensive skill out of thin air. Under Lalonde, he had 5 points in 26 games. Under McLellan, he has 8 points in 10 games.
So McLellan basically imported 3 more NHL defenseman into our roster without any acquisitions needed.
