Detroit Red Wings

Nielsen: Some nights we didn't pay the price
April 11, 2017, 8:10 PM ET [6 Comments]
Bob Duff
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His first season as a Detroit Red Wing ended without a playoff appearance and with consternation among the faithful, distraught that both general manager Ken Holland and coach Jeff Blashill will be retained by the club but as far as center Frans Nielsen is concerned, they aren’t the ones to blame for the debacle that was Detroit’s 2016-17 NHL season.

He’ll point the finger of blame directly at the players in the dressing room, and Nielsen pulled no punches in his critique of their performance.

“We got outworked in a bunch of games,” Nielsen said. “Stuff like that, it’s not X’s and O’s. It’s us in here that have to step it up and do a better job.”

Blashill admitted that when the team arrived in training camp in the fall, he set out to implement a different playing style for the Wings. The old days of dominating with high-end skill had long ago set sail and it was time to change the way the Wings went about thinking the game.

Eventually, the players bought in but it was a hard sell, and by the time the purchase was completed, the Wings were too far behind to make a playoff push.

“There was a certain style in which this team has won over a period of time, and it complimented the players who played here,” Blashill explained. “We made some minor changes to how we’re going to play to be successful. I think as a group you look at your group and you say how can you best maximize, what playing style will best maximize this group? We made some tweaks going into the year and I think that takes time to take hold.”

Nielsen witnessed the stubbornness on the part of the players first hand and thinks that eventually, the message did get through that the old ways weren’t going to work.

“We just seemed to – we couldn’t get away from that skill game and when it was off, everything was just going wrong,” Nielsen said. “So we’ve got to learn to win when we don’t have a good night and learn how to just find a way, grind it out and do it the hard way.

“I know they always had a tradition of playing a lot of nice hockey here with skill guys but I think we gotta learn how to play the other side of it, too, when we don’t have that, when our game is not on. Teams are so good defensively today if you turn pucks over, that’s what teams are looking for. It’s a tough league and you have to pay the price every night.

“You can’t skill your way through this league today. It’s too hard. It isn’t going to be pretty every night. Sometimes you have to stand in front a shot and it’s going to hurt to win. I didn’t think we . . . some nights we just didn’t pay the price.”

Blashill believes that the way the Wings were able to finish out the season indicated that they were finally seeing that the chip and chase game was their best chance at success.

“I thought by the end of the season a lot of those things we’d gotten better at,” Blashill said. “I think that gives me lots of confidence moving forward that those lessons that I learned, that we all learned during the season on how can we maximize this group – not the group that played 10 years ago, not the group that played two years ago but this group. How can we maximize that? I think we learned as we went through the season, different things that potentially we can do to help our group be better.

“I think the goal is always for the sum to be greater than the parts, for any team. We learned and we took steps in that direction.”

A direction that has Nielsen believing Detroit’s playoff absence will be a one-off and the Wings will be in the hunt again in 2017-18.

|I think talent-wise we are right there,” Nielsen said. “We just gotta bring a little more mean attitude and play harder and do it a little more simple sometimes.

“That’s my take from the year.”