BOX SCORE
Detroit -- The Red Wings have officially reached the level of a skid.
Counting the overtime loss to the Los Angeles Kings Saturday and Wednesday's 3-2 loss to the pesky Nashville Predators, the Wings have dropped three straight games.
They're still leading the division but not by a mile as it seemed a week ago.
In Monday's game against the San Jose Sharks, a 5-2 loss, it looked like the typical first game after a West coast trip where they started out hot and lost energy as the game went along.
Wednesday was almost a reverse of that story line.
The Predators carried the play in the first period and were eventually rewarded with a late goal by Colin Wilson, who drove to the net. Defenseman Jonathan Ericsson followed the puck instead of Wilson and Wilson was able to re-direct it past goalie Jimmy Howard.
The Predators scored in the first minute of the second period to take a 2-0 lead.
"I thought they were better than us at the start tonight, for sure," coach Mike Babcock said. "We weren't skating, they were on top of us, we spotted them a two-goal lead. We had some excellent penalty killing to even keep it that way. Then in the second and third we started to play and we came with a real push but we say it lots, catch-up hockey is losing hockey. You don't get prepared, you don't start on time, you don't skate, you're not going to be very good."
Pavel Datsyuk helped jump-start the Wings when he and Henrik Zetterberg had a 2-on-2 shorthanded chance and he scored his ninth goal of the season.
The Wings were buzzing but couldn't solve young goaltender Anders Lindback, a huge 6-6 Swede.
"He played real well," Nick Lidstrom said. "They were making it hard on us, kind of forcing us on the outside but he made some good saves. He's a big guy in net, he covers a lot of net. It wasn't easy to get some pucks by him tonight."
Lidstrom should know. He very nearly scored the Wings' first goal in the second but defenseman Kevin Klein swooped in and prevented the puck from trickling into the net.
"That's what we do for each other," Lindback said. "We work hard for each other. That's a huge save by Kleiner."
Late in the third, Zetterberg committed a turnover that led to a 2-on-1 chance with J.P. Dumont and Klein against Ruslan Salei. Dumont put the puck in the top right corner of the net, giving the Predators a 3-1 lead at 14:37.
"Kind of got the puck in my own end, skated all the way around, tried to force a play instead of maybe holding onto it and the puck hit on their stick and odd-man rush and they really capitalized," Zetterberg said.
The Wings don't have much time to worry about it as they welcome the Montreal Canadiens Friday night. The Canadiens already have 18 wins and lead the Northeast Division.
If they can cut out their own errors, the Wings should be able to right themselves quickly.
If not, it'll be a four-game skid.
"We've got to find our way out of this, the way we're playing right now," Lidstrom said. "The other night we had a good start and then fell off. Tonight we just did the opposite. The first half of the game we didn't skate with them at all and then we started picking it up. We were two goals down when that happened so we want to have a better start and we want to keep that up, too, for the whole game and not have the letdowns we did in the last couple games."
Dec. 8, 2010
