In the NHL's 17-year salary-cap era, no team had scored more than 10 goals in a game until Sunday in Pittsburgh: Penguins 11, Red Wings 2.
But the blowout was far from a one-off this season for Detroit. The Wings have now allowed nine-plus goals three times in the last month, and seven-plus goals nine times this season -- five more than any other team. They've allowed five or more goals in more than a third of their games, 25 to be exact. They've lost all of them. They've taken 25 games, 25 potential wins, and set them on fire.
"Do we want to keep going down this road?" Dylan Larkin asked Sunday. "I sure don't, the whole team doesn't."
Which raises the inevitable question: do Steve Yzerman and the Red Wings fire Jeff Blashill at the end of the season?
"I will say they keep (him)," NHL insider Frank Seravalli told said Monday on the Daily Faceoff, "just because it isn’t that long ago that he signed his last extension."
Yzerman gave Blashill an extension reportedly two years in length after last season, his sixth behind the Red Wings' bench. He's the second-longest tenured head coach in the NHL behind Jon Cooper of the Lightning, who boasts two Stanley Cups over his eight full seasons in Tampa. Detroit has the second most losses in the league over Blashill's seven-year tenure, but that's due in large part to the team's ongoing rebuild.
The Red Wings actually made strides last season under Blashill, forging a defensive identity that made them a hard team to play against. They were aiming to build on that this season. Instead they've collapsed. Thanks to flimsy structure, shoddy D-zone coverage, uneven goaltending and at times a flat-out lack of effort, Detroit has allowed the most goals in the NHL (for the second time in the past three seasons).
"There's no room for error in this league, and if you don't play the right way, you're going to pay," Blashill said after Sunday's loss.
"It's not acceptable," said captain Dylan Larkin. "It's not enough. We can't play like that. We can't show up like that for the rest of the season or it's going to get worse. We're going to get embarrassed every night. ... We just can't show up like that and not be prepared and not have the will to compete and fight back."
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Larkin has spent the duration of his career under Blashill. So has just about every young player on Detroit's roster, every potential building block besides forwards Jakub Vrana and Pius Suter and goalie Alex Nedeljkovic, who's been in and out of the net like a yo-yo in the past month and has a save percentage of .878 over his past 21 games (compared to .918 in his first 28). Larkin, along with Tyler Bertuzzi, has taken a big step forward offensively this season, but the team has taken a step back. The growth across the roster has stalled.
"I think there’s been some considerable friction there, at least from what I’ve heard, between the coach and some of the younger players," Seravalli said Monday. "When you’re a team that’s building toward something -- and he’s been there a long time -- it’s not necessarily the friction you want to have."
If that's true, especially in regard to Larkin and Bertuzzi, "the leaders of the team," per Steve Yzerman, then Yzerman's decision this offseason feels pretty simple: Blashill has to go. The Wings have too much invested in their young players to entrust their development to a coach whose relationship with those players is strained. Larkin, to be fair, has always spoken highly of Blashill and the impact he's had on his career, and it was just a couple weeks ago that Bertuzzi said he wants to stay in Detroit long-term.
Asked Sunday if he senses a disconnect between the players and the coaching staff, Larkin said, "No, we're all in this together. Coaches, training staff, players, we're all in this together. We've got a lot of young players that haven't been in this position before and we don't want those players to be in that position again. The focus has been, what are we going do to get better so that it doesn't happen? Something's gotta give. It starts with the players, that's my message."
Still, blowouts are increasingly rare in the NHL. (Just ask Blashill: he'll tell you about the razor-thin differences between winning and losing.) That they're becoming common in Detroit suggests the coach's words and tactics are falling on deaf ears, that the players, wittingly or not, have tuned him out. If losses like Sunday's are 'unacceptable,' how else do you explain that they keep happening? If the Wings insist there's still something to play for, why do they so often look like they're playing for nothing?
"At the end of the day, none of us were good enough tonight, (coaches, players), nobody," said Blashill, asked if he's worried about his message getting through to the locker room. "To me, you battle through this stuff together. We have to find a way together to get out of this. I know that (the staff) is going to keep grinding like crazy to make us a better hockey team."
It was a strange weekend for the Wings, in a season full of strange twists. They played one of their better games of the year in a 2-1 overtime loss to the Lightning Saturday afternoon, then turned around and got skated up and down the ice by the Penguins. Their roster was raided a bit at the trade deadline, but they still have enough talent to compete with the NHL's best. They proved that one day, and tried to disprove it the next.
This isn't entirely on Blashill, and Yzerman knows it. But there are lesser teams in the NHL than the Red Wings, who are now in the fifth year of their rebuild, none of whom are losing in the same consistently embarrassing fashion. If a coach can't instill in his players, in Larkin's words, 'the will to compete and fight back,' if his systems look broken beyond repair, if his voice is fading into the abyss, 'mwa-mwa-mwa' like the teacher in Charlie Brown, it's probably time for a change.