Red Wings booed off ice as playoff drought reaches 10 years: 'That's what we earned'

From the longest active playoff streak in the NHL, to the longest active playoff drought.

How the mighty have fallen: the Red Wings were booed off the ice after their final home game of the season Saturday night, a 5-3 loss to the Devils that sealed Detroit's 10th straight year missing the playoffs, punctuated by its fourth straight late-season collapse. The longest drought in franchise history comes directly on the heels of a 25-year run of making the playoffs, a stretch that produced four Stanley Cups and six appearances in the Stanley Cup Final.

That was the fuel of the frustration that rained down on the Red Wings as the final seconds ticked off the clock and as they skated to the locker room after gathering at center ice on fan appreciation night at Little Caesars Arena. If anyone gets it, it's their head coach, who served as an assistant for three seasons under Mike Babcock, including when the Wings won their most recent Stanley Cup.

“This is Detroit. This is Hockeytown," said Todd McLellan. “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. And 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."

"This 'outside noise' stuff or whatever, that's inside noise. Those are our fans in our building. They pay to watch us play, and we get paid well to perform well for them. They're fully entitled to their opinion, and we deserve their opinion. There's no other way to sugarcoat it. That's what we earned," said McLellan.

Captain Dylan Larkin debuted on the last Red Wings team to make the playoffs, in the penultimate season of Joe Louis Arena. He cheered for the team growing up, when they ruled the NHL. He knows the standard. That makes it all the more difficult for Larkin to be one of the faces of this famine.

In their centennial season, this was supposed to be the year that the Red Wings finally returned to the playoffs. They had a near 90 percent chance of making it on Jan. 25 when they were tied for the most points in the East, with 69 through 53 games. Instead, they became the second team in NHL history to reach that position and then miss out.

Their early success owed largely to the stellar play of goaltender John Gibson. When he stumbled down the stretch, the Red Wings again fell on their face. Hearing the boos on Saturday night, said Larkin, was "extremely difficult."

"Our fans are great. They're passionate, they care. They care about winning. There's been some great years here and they want us back to that. That's what they expect here. And to hear that, very difficult. We're down. I'm as down as I could be right now," said Larkin.

The frustration among the fans was exacerbated by an all-too-familiar ending to the season. As Lucas Raymond said, "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."

"We have to figure it out, and we have to figure it out fast and take that next step. We have to look ourselves in the mirror, everyone in here in this building, and we have to be better than this," Raymond said.

The Red Wings fittingly held three leads on Saturday night, and let each one slip away. New Jersey's game-winning goal late in the third came after an ill-advised pinch by Larkin in the offensive zone led to a two-on-one rush the other way, a mistake for which Larkin took complete responsibility. The Red Wings made a similar mistake on the Devils' first goal.

McLellan said the game was "a microcosm of the year, really, and where we are as an organization."

"We have to get better top to bottom, and execute better. We do. ... It's the heaviness, it's the hardness.The puck doesn't care who gets there first or who has it. It has no feelings, no thoughts. And we can do a better job of that. And then the mental part of sticking to it and getting through it."

The Red Wings have two games remaining, and can still set a new high in points for the Steve Yzerman era. Of course, that's a low bar for a franchise of Detroit's stature, and not the one they were trying to clear this year. Despite putting themselves in a great spot in the first half of the season, "we just didn't do what we set out do and make the playoffs and continue to build this thing," said Larkin.

If the pressure from the outside is getting to the Red Wings at this time of year, well, "we keep earning that," said McLellan. "We earned that pressure."

"You can accept the pressure as a challenge or you can succumb to it, and we seem to choose the second one," he said. "That's the way it is. And the only way you get out of it is, you work your way out of it."