Back on Track?

It would be easy to ignore the first 65 minutes of Detroit’s shootout win in Colorado on Tuesday… So I’ll do just that for a moment.

Dominik Hasek made the stops he needed to. Keeping Wolski’s shot out was huge, getting the Wings off to a good start, while the stop on Hejduk gave Detroit a chance to get the first goal.

Pavel Datsyuk took that opportunity and made Peter Budaj look foolish. I can’t imagine what’s going through a goalie’s head when a guy like Datsyuk is breaking in alone on him, especially after getting schooled by him once earlier in the game. I imagine it’s something like, “Oh man, I’m gonna be on SportsCenter tomorrow.”

Pavs proved that, with no defenders around, he can still be Datsyukian, which meant that Henrik Zetterberg had the chance to win it after Joe Sakic beat Hasek badly.

Zetterberg showed that he’s got guts, trying the “Forsberg/Jokinen Move” (first made famous in the ’94 Olympics by Peter Forsberg, then used many times last season by Dallas’ Jussi Jokinen) and giving Detroit the win.

As I posted in the forums at the time, I didn’t think that would happen. I thought for sure that the Wings would lose the shootout after an impressive overtime where they controlled the play for all except for about 30 seconds.

Somewhat surprisingly, it was the Detroit power play that even got them to that overtime. The Red Wings have been sub-par with the extra attacker all season and were without point-man Mathieu Schneider but still managed to score two of their three goals on the man-advantage.

It was a good game to end a losing streak on. They didn’t win by luck, it was an even, hard-fought match. Hopefully it’s the start of a streak of a different type.