Todd McLellan Practice Media | Nov. 12, 2025

Todd McLellan Practice Media | Nov. 12, 2025

a pretty animated practice today and I think you told them take care of the puck and get out of the way at one point. Um, how beneficial are practices like this? I go back to my answer yesterday. When you have time, you can have them. Um, you can’t practice that way every day. It just doesn’t it doesn’t happen. Um and the last couple practices were they were intense but there was some direction some teaching going on. Um coach has team has players have you know three different types of practices. There’s there’s the intense hard heavy one. There’s the teaching and managing one and then there’s what we call cleanout. And and the cleanout’s not a lot of thinking. It’s simple passing. It’s getting them prepared to play and really practicing, but trying to get them some conserving some of their energy a little bit, making them feel good for the game. Those are the three types of practices you have. Um, the first two we’ve had over the last two days because of time. And just how beneficial is it? I noticed Cam was giving some insight on one of the power. Yeah. Um, from his Exactly. It’s it’s I don’t know who it was. It was Joe Pavvelski. um in San Jose and uh Nabalakov was the goalender and he was having trouble on wraps and jams and you know getting a lot of them but not not scoring and and he went to Nabi and Abby just told him like you you aren’t getting to if you get to this spot it changes everything. So the the player the skater went to the goalender and asked him what causes problems. We were in a situation there where let’s ask Talbs what causes problems for for goalenders and it it isn’t always the coaching staff that can teach or bring up situations. Sometimes we ask the players that are actually playing and Tuls was very helpful. Um but they’re the guys that wear the pads. They’re the ones that have to fight through screens and and reads and that type of stuff. Why wouldn’t we ask them what causes problems? Yeah, Todd, along along those lines, a lot of work on the power play today. Uh, was one of the focuses just getting more of a net presence? It looked like you had uh Ras Mue and and Finny on on at at the net on the power plays. I I think there we we had power play time, but we also worked on penalty kill. So, there’s kind of the the visual is you think you we’re spending all the time on the on the power play. We focused on power play today, but we spent a good portion of practice trying to sort a couple things out on the penalty kill as well. Net front, uh, on the power play, we’ve tried a lot of different individuals there, but um, you know, again, analogy, if why run to the end zone if the quarterback never throws the ball there? It makes no sense. So, the quarterback and the receivers have to be on the same page, and we need people to get the puck there if we’re going to go there. If it’s not going to go there, why stand there? Um, so the pieces all go together and it’s a big challenge for uh for all five guys on the power play right now. Everything from faceoffs to entries and and possession to establishing um an attack mentality and then running your plays off of it or whatever we want to do, but um it can’t start the other way from the other end. It has to go through all those steps. Has there been a decline here those last five or so games of of just getting pucks on net uh on the power play? Well, we you know, we looked at uh the power play the other night. The the attempts and the actual shots on goal were quite high. There’s there’s a good volume of them against Chicago, but it’s what we did with the shots. Some of them were just fluff shots, and those fluff shots are dangerous if somebody’s in the eyes and somebody’s prepared to deflect or screen or play off a rebound. uh but we didn’t have them. So volume is one thing. Um what comes off the volume is what’s important and we lacked in that area. I think you talked the other day about how you know the rush offense was in an okay place but I guess against two teams that seem like they want to play that kind of game and up and down game. Is there a little incentive to try to really emphasize some of the sustained time and the ozone heavy off? Oh, there is. Yeah, there is. you know, um, usually ozone time dictates five on five especially, uh, ozone time dictates the winner. Um, although the the Chicago game was upside down that night, even the chances and stuff like that, but if you lose the special teams game three nothing, it doesn’t matter how much time you spend in the ozone. when you are tweaking or looking at experimenting different lines and pairs, where’s the balance of this line’s doing well versus the chemistry that could change? How do you navigate that process? Yeah, one uh one decision, one movement creates um you know, you fix one thing and you might open up a hole somewhere else. Um but we’re willing to to take that chance right now because we haven’t scored a lot and um we haven’t overly experimented with lines this year. Uh they’ve been pretty consistent. So uh we’ve moved a few people around. Uh sometimes things click, sometimes you get somebody’s attention real fast and and you get more out of them and sometimes maybe somebody pouts and takes themselves out of it. Um, there’s really no other. Those are the three ways you get to react as a player. And, um, I like the first two a lot better than the third one. I’m sorry. Okay.

Todd McLellan speaks with the media following Detroit’s practice on Wednesday November 12, 2025 at the BELFOR Training Center.