Postgame: Flyers @ Red Wings – 2/12

Obviously the big thing about the Red Wings’ win tonight over the Flyers is that they’ve now tied the NHL record for longest home winning streak at twenty games. It’s a remarkable run but we’re going to see a lot of debate about how legit it is, given that they had three shootout wins and an additional overtime win in the run.

When the 1929-30 Boston Bruins set the record, they didn’t have the benefit of a shootout and played ten-minute overtime periods without sudden death. The 1979 Philadelphia team that tied that mark played only sixty-minute games with no overtime. As such, games that would have been ties for either of those teams were wins for the Red Wings, keeping their streak alive.

I agree with that argument. We’re comparing apples and oranges here. I also think it doesn’t matter.

Any time you compare records from different eras, you end up with cases where what the two teams had to do don’t always match up. Should only the Flyers’ share of the record count because they had no overtime wins? Should only the Bruins’ because they had harder travel, having to take trains during a grueling season rather than being able to fly straight to their destination? Should Detroit’s count more because they put together the team that did it under a salary cap?

They’re all twenty games, that’s all that matters ’cause we can find any number of reasons for every record to have an asterisk if we try hard enough.

Things I Liked
Scoring by Henrik Zetterberg, Pavel Datsyuk and Johan Franzen? More of that, please. Great to see so many of the Wings’ elite forwards getting on the board at once.

Detroit’s puck possession was stellar all night.

Jonathan Ericsson made some big defensive plays, including one on Wayne Simmonds on a breakaway in the third period. Simmonds was offside by about a mile and it wasn’t called but Ericsson did a good job of getting to him.

Joey MacDonald continued to look really good… As long as he was in the crease.

Things I Didn’t Like
Joey MacDonald had two pretty bad giveaways. The first Philly goal came when he went behind the net and bobbled the puck, then hesitated on getting back in position. The second came when he attempted to poke the puck away and put it right on a Flyer’s stick. Ugly.