Red Wings fall to Canadiens Sunday night at JLA
By @SKubus –
DETROIT – Red Wings head coach Mike Babcock put it simply after the game: the team that executed and put in the effort unquestionably and justly won Sunday night at Joe Louis Arena.
The Montreal Canadiens defeated Detroit by a 4-1 final, as Brendan Gallagher and PK Subban each tallied a goal and an assist. Backup netminder Dustin Tokarski made 28 saves for Detroit’s Original Six and Atlantic Division rival in the win, while Jimmy Howard stopped 15 of 19 in the loss. Riley Sheahan scored the Red Wings’ only goal.
Detroit falls to 8-4-5 on the season, while Montreal improves to a league-best 14-4-1.
“You don’t mind losing when you were as good as you could be, but I didn’t think we were at all tonight,” Babcock said. “I didn’t think we were near good enough. We didn’t have enough hands on deck.”
It took 23 minutes to get the game’s first goal, and it went to the Canadiens.
Just after a poor Detroit power play expired, Montreal’s Brandon Prust came down on a 2-on-1 and wired home his first of the season with a wrist shot from the right circle to make it 1-0 at 3:20 of the second stanza. Subban added an insurance marker at 8:36 of the period after driving a cannon off Kyle Quincey’s leg and past Howard to send his Habs off the ice with a 2-0 lead after 40 minutes.
“We needed to come out a lot harder than we did,” defenseman Danny DeKeyser said. “We didn’t have a lot of jump, we were turning pucks over and we just weren’t making the right plays out there.”
But DeKeyser was quick to give credit where credit is due.
“They’ve got a really good team over there. They skate well, they’ve got some skilled players throughout all four lines. They make it hard on us, throwing pucks in the crease and driving the net. They take advantage of their opportunities and then, on the flip side, they limit opponents to not getting good chances.”
At 1:47 of the final frame, Plekanec scored his seventh of the season on an easy rebound tap-in after Gallagher had ample room to move in for a low shot from the right circle.
After what had been an abysmal two periods with the man advantage, Sheahan notched his second goal of the season with three seconds left in a power play, tapping home a DeKeyser drive from the point at 4:06 to make it 3-1.
Gallagher then scored his fifth of the season from an impossible angle. From behind the Detroit goal line to the right of the net, the Canadiens forward somehow banked the puck off Howard’s leg and in while down on one knee. That made it a 4-1 game and virtually put Detroit away.
“I thought we didn’t have much jump, much energy for whatever reason,” Babcock said. “We scheduled a day off yesterday because we had to because we travel so much this month we couldn’t get enough days, and we knew going in we didn’t want to do that, but that’s the way it goes. But we should’ve competed and skated better than we did tonight.”
The Red Wings head out on a three-game road trip to face Columbus, Winnipeg and Toronto before returning home to host Ottawa on Nov. 24.
“It’s obviously not what we wanted, but I think the big thing for us now is just to get back to the drawing board because we have a lot of games in the next few days,” Sheahan said.