Detroit Red Wings general manager Steve Yzerman recognized that his team needed a change.
So did the team captain, Dylan Larkin.
Because of this, both Yzerman and Larkin spoke to the media on Friday, the day after Yzerman fired head coach Derek Lalonde and replaced him with Todd McLellan.
“Our team isn’t performing up to what my expectations are,” Yzerman said. “Whether anybody agrees or not, I have expectations for the team, and they aren’t meeting them because our players aren’t playing to each of their own individual expectations.”
The Red Wings almost made the playoffs last spring, but they missed out due to a tiebreaker in the final minutes of the regular season. Now, they have taken a big step backward. With a record of 13-17-4, they sit seventh in the Atlantic Division and 28th in the league.
“It’s been a frustrating start to the season — we’re missing something,” Larkin said. “This is something you never want to happen — I really like Derek as a guy — but something needed to happen.”
The timing of McLellan’s hiring couldn’t be worse, though, as he and his top assistant, Trent Yawney, will coach the Red Wings against the Maple Leafs on Friday without having a single practice with the team.
“Trent Yawney and Todd McLellan aren’t coming in here and waving a wand to change the forecheck, the neutral zone system, the D-zone coverage and the power play,” McLellan said after Friday’s morning skate. “There just isn’t time. What we’ve asked the players is to play harder, play faster and play a little bit smarter.”
McLellan has a connection to the Red Wings, having won a Stanley Cup with them as an assistant coach in 2007-08, but that was a different team in a different arena — Joe Louis Arena. Besides Cam Talbot, whom McLellan coached in Edmonton and Los Angeles, McLellan’s only experience with a key player is having Larkin on his Team North America roster during the 2016 World Cup.
“Cam sent me a text after the announcement saying, in a nice way, ‘Again?’” McLellan said. “Team North America was a great experience, coaching so many great talents at 20, 21 or 22 years old. Dylan was a very responsible part of that team.”
McLellan does have one advantage with the schedule: he expects to have Detroit’s No. 2 and No. 3 defensemen, Simon Edvinsson and Ben Chiarot, available to play against the Maple Leafs. The Red Wings had struggled before the break with both of them sidelined due to upper-body injuries.
McLellan will use Lalonde’s line combinations and defense pairings for the game against Toronto, but Yzerman made it clear on Friday that one of McLellan’s tasks will be giving more ice time to the team’s younger forwards.
“We had young guys like Michael Rasmussen and Joe Veleno who took on a bigger role last season, and for whatever reason, those roles were reduced a little bit in the first part of this season,” Yzerman said. “We need those players to play a bigger role again. Jonatan Berggren can play a bigger role.”
In the end, McLellan’s job is clear, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy.
“It’s a very obvious answer,” Yzerman said. “We need to score more and we need to be better defensively. We need to keep the puck out of our net, whether that’s through better defending or better goaltending.
“We just need to get better.”
