Staff and wire reports
| Detroit Free Press
Simon Edvinsson’s birthday is near, but he was the one giving out presents on Saturday night in Calgary, Alberta.
A few days before the Detroit Red Wings defenseman turns 22, he scored his eighth goal of the season at the Scotiabank Saddledome as the Wings won their fifth straight game.
After a pair of games spent rallying from early two-goal deficits, the Red Wings flipped the trend vs. the Calgary Flames, riding early goals from Dylan Larkin and Edvinsson to a 3-1 win. Andrew Copp capped the victory with an empty-netter with 54 seconds remaining.
“I feel like we have four strong lines now that play together and keep doing that and we’re gonna go out there with two points,” Edvinsson, who turns 22 on Wednesday, said on the FanDuel Sports Network Detroit broadcast.
His first-period goal made Edvinsson just the sixth defenseman in franchise history with at least eight goals in a 21-or-younger season, and the first since Nicklas Lidstrom had 11 in 1991-92.
Red Wings creep closer in wild-card race
The Wings improved to 13-4-1 under head coach Todd McLellan since his hiring on Dec. 26. The win kept the Wings (26-21-5) apace in the crowded East wild-card race, staying one point (57 in 52 games) behind the Tampa Bay Lightning (58 in 51) in the final playoff spot. (The Boston Bruins also have 58, but in 54 games.)
Red-hot fire fighters
Larkin opened the scoring with a quick wrister off passes from Christian Fischer and Dominik Shine, putting it past Calgary goalie Dustin Wolf’s left side 8:27 into the first. The assist for Shine, a 31-year-old Michigan native playing in his third NHL game since a Monday call-up, was his first in the league. For Larkin, however, it was his team-high 23rd goal of the season.
The Wings made it 2-0 with just 46 seconds left in the first period, as Edvinsson gathered in a loose puck near the left circle and fired it past Wolf on his right.
“Great forecheck by, well, our line there, Elmer (Soderblom), Ras (Michael Rasmussen) and, uh, Fishy (Fischer),” Edvinsson said. “Yeah, it bounced out to me and I saw, I saw the opening and I shot it.”
Cam-do attitude
For Wings goalie Cam Talbot, Saturday was just his second game in Calgary since he made 26 appearances for the Flames in the 2019-20 season, and his first in almost a year. This one went better than that one (a 4-2 loss on Feb. 27, 2024, in which he stopped 33 of 36 shots faced for the LA Kings).
Talbot stopped 12 shots in the first period, 13 shots in the second and four in the first 8½ minutes of the third period before Nazem Kadri got the Flames on the board with a power play score following a hooking call on Marco Kasper. That was all for the Flames, however, as Talbot finished with 33 saves.
Next up for the Wings
There’s one more game on the Western Canada portion of the road trip, as the Red Wings face the Vancouver Canucks at 8 p.m. Sunday. After that, it’s back to the U.S. with a Tuesday stop in Seattle before a return home to face the Tampa Bay Lightning on Saturday in the final game before the Four Nations Face-Off pauses the NHL season for a couple weeks.