Todd McLellan put it simply the day after the Red Wings were officially eliminated from the playoff race: "We're out. What else can I say? We're not happy. We don't want to be there."
But here they are for the ninth year in a row, peering at the playoffs through a classroom window, like serving detention during recess. It's the punishment they deserve after making a mess of the most important month of the regular season for the third straight year.
"It’s been a disappointing stretch of games," said captain Dylan Larkin. "Again, March, and allowing teams back into the mix and then getting passed and not beating teams that you’re fighting with puts the ultimate nail in our coffin."
Larkin had little in the way of answers, having yet to fully reflect on the season with three games to go. He did point to the Wings' NHL-worst penalty kill as "maybe our Achilles heel all year," a unit on which Larkin played a prominent role. Toward the end of a frustratingly familiar series of questions, Larkin said that "we’d like to be talking about going into a playoff series and finding a way to match up well against a team for seven games."
Instead, "we’re talking like it’s end-of-the-season locker room clean out day, and we’re playing tomorrow night."
"It’s very disappointing," said Larkin, "seeing where we were and now where we’re at."
The Red Wings were in the first wild card spot in the East on the final day of February, fueled by two seven-game winning streaks under McLellan. But they lost six straight from Feb. 27 to March 10 and never recovered. A seven-game skid around the same time doomed them last year, a six-game skid the year before that. The takeaway, said McLellan, is that "we’ve got a lot more work to do."
"The coaches have to get more out of the players that are here, the players have to give more when they’re here, and we have to value every moment that we’re in it. I don’t think we did that all the time. Sometimes we’d just take a game for granted, even a period for granted, and it comes back to bite you," McLellan said.
You can point to any number of poor performances throughout the season. As the Red Wings know well by now, an extra goal here or an extra save there can make all the difference. McLellan, for his part, pointed to the Wings' final game before a two-week break for the 4 Nations Face-off, a 6-3 loss on home ice to Tampa that snapped their second seven-game surge. Some of Detroit's players looked they were already on vacation.
"We were in a good position going into the 4 Nations until we played Tampa that game before. We talked about the importance of that game, and it wasn’t that important to us that night. We were down 2-0 right off the bat and (4-1) in the first period. When you look back at it, was that the turning point? I don’t know. We go into the break and come back out and have some big games against Columbus. We did not perform well here and lost (the first one) and we go into the outdoor game and perform pretty well and still lose. That stung a little bit and took a little while to recover," said McLellan.
McLellan also admitted that while he tried to push it out of the players' minds by not talking about, the Red Wings faced a brutal schedule down the stretch. By McLellan's count, about two-thirds of their games since he took over for Derek Lalonde the day after Christmas "have been against playoff teams, or teams that are going to make the playoffs."
"So you gotta make hay when the schedule allows you to, and we failed to do that as well," he said. "But it’s good for us to evaluate the players and the team against the best down the stretch. That’ll be a good tool for us."
The Red Wings' best players weren't good enough in the biggest games of the season. Larkin and Lucas Raymond, in particular, faded on the other side of the 4 Nations, after Larkin starred for the United States and Raymond played a big role for Sweden. Larkin had 24 points in his first 21 games under McLellan, Raymond 26 in his first 21. In 24 games since the break, 16 points for both.
The Wings did have "some great stories" this season, said Larkin, starting with "how we battled back from being way out of it at Christmas." That's true, but it's also reflective of the hole they dug themselves into with a terrible start. Lalonde bears some of the blame, but not all of it. The core players, most of them back from last season, were culpable, too.
As Larkin said, this year's playoff miss is "probably more frustrating" than last year's, given how close the Red Wings were at the end of last season "and the emotions of it, and this year we felt like we had expectations to make the playoffs."
Larkin cited "the development of some of our young defensemen" as another positive to the season, with Simon Edvinsson and Albert Johansson making important strides. The same could be said of forward Marco Kasper. But it wasn't enough to overcome a batch of underperforming veterans and a generally middle-of-the-road roster assembled by GM Steve Yzerman.
The 28-year-old Larkin, who's inextricably tied to the longest playoff drought in franchise history, said he hopes "that as a young group we’ve learned some tough lessons and can move forward through that."
"You look around the names on the stalls in this room, there’s a lot of guys here that are going to be here for a long time," he said.
The Red Wings host the Stars Monday night in their final home game of the season, "and our fans have been great," Larkin said. "We owe them a solid performance." Larkin would much rather repay them with a playoff berth, but that will have to wait at least another year.