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DETROIT -- It was a good news, bad news kind of night for the Red Wings.
The good news was they carried most of the play in front of a vociferous crowd of Wings and Toronto Maple Leafs fans, they out-shot the Leafs 42-19, their penalty kill was perfect and they ended the night in first place in the Eastern Conference.
The bad news is Leafs goaltender James Reimer stood on his head and helped his team win in a shootout, 2-1.
"I thought we played good," Wings coach Mike Babcock said. "I didn't think we executed in the scoring area. The goalie was good but we had breakaways, we had opportunities and we just didn't finish. Give him credit. That's what you're supposed to do as a goalie on a back to back night, you're supposed to find a way to steal a game for your team and I thought he did that."
The Leafs were playing in the second of back-to-back games, having beaten the Calgary Flames 4-1 Tuesday night.
"I thought we played a great game," Wings goaltender Jimmy Howard said. "You gotta give Reimer props, he played really well for the Leafs (Wednesday night). It happens once in a while."
Although Pavel Datsyuk scored in the shootout, Howard gave up goals to Tyler Bozak and Mike Santorelli.
Howard has allowed seven goals in 10 shootout chances this season, falling to 0-4 this season.
"Especially when you work on it, it's tough," Howard said. "You guys can come and watch practice, you see that we do work on it. It's frustrating, it really, really is."
The Wings are 1-4 in shootouts this season, giving up 14 goals while scoring three.
Last season the Wings were 5-9 in shootouts, giving up 14 goals while scoring 11. In the 2012-13 season, the Wings were 2-5, giving up eight goals while scoring five.
The last time the Wings had a winning record in shootouts was the 2011-12 season, when they were 9-3, scoring 15 goals to opponents' eight.
"We got to be better at it," Babcock said. "We got to score for Howie and Howie's got to make saves for us. That's the reality of the situation. We try to treat it like a specialty teams, try to go through it and be as prepared as we can. No one did anything that surprised us. Bottom line is you got to find ways to score goals in those situations and you got to find ways to stop them."
For the second time in three games, the Wings had to kill off a lengthy 5-on-3 situation when both Riley Sheahan and Danny DeKeyser were in the box together for 1:10 in the second period.
"You don't want to be down two guys, but been doing pretty good job on it," captain Henrik Zetterberg said. "But if you look at today guys get hit by the puck so eventually guys will eventually go down. Hopefully we can stay out of the box."
The Wings did earn one point, giving them 40 in 29 games, best in the Eastern Conference.
"Getting points is good when you can get them," Zetterberg said. "Obviously we wanted two here at home, but one point is better than no points. If you look how the game ended with a 3-on-4 there for almost a minute I think we're going to be OK with this (Thursday) and move on."
The rest of the Eastern Conference teams were idle.
Only the Anaheim Ducks have more points, with 41 in 29 games.
The Wings will have their chance at revenge Saturday in Toronto.
"That will be huge for us," Riley Sheahan said. "The rivalry is going, and the game obviously was physical tonight and it will probably carry over to Saturday."
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