It’s the Leafs who are supposed to be falling at this time of year, not the Red Wings. Yet one game into the NHL season for both clubs, the opposite is proving to be true.
Both the Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings have played their home openers. Each team faced off against the Montreal Canadiens.
The Leafs won 5-2, while the Red Wings lost 5-1. And that about sums up where both teams are at as they get ready to meet on Saturday at Little Caesars Arena.
Are the Maple Leafs still as dangerous a team minus departed big-time scorer Mitch Marner?
“I guess we’re gonna find out tomorrow,” Red Wings forward Andrew Copp said.
Todd McLellan after the Red Wings lost 5-1:
“The players will say… they probably have already said to you… ‘We can fix this.’ When? It’s time. Some of them have been doing it for years. It’s time.”
— Brad Galli (@BradGalli) October 10, 2025
Are the Red Wings going to be able to bounce back from their dismal opening-night performance?
Guess we’re going to find that out tomorrow as well.
Detroit coach Todd McLellan is the judge and jury regarding his team’s Game 1 execution. And the case against his team is a strong one.
“Too much evidence,” McLellan said on the team’s website. “They’re all guilty.”
A Lot For The Red Wings To Fix
Captain Dylan Larkin assessed all of the team’s ailments as fixable, but here’s the problem with that analysis.
There shouldn’t be this much wrong after just one game.
Copp described McLellan’s message to the team before practice on Friday as “very stern.”
And entirely deserved.
“The mistakes that we made were unacceptable,” Copp said. “And I think everyone in here knows it. And each individual mistake, everyone knows it.”
Watching the video of the game, McLellan felt like he was viewing a horror flick.
“I was actually shocked when I looked after the game and saw that they had 17 shots on goal and only 12 even strength, because they’ve had at least 12 outnumbered rushes,” McLellan said. “So they didn’t convert on a number of them. But that didn’t diminish the fact that we erred in a lot of those areas.
“It’s so much easier to fix if it’s one player or maybe one line. This was team-wide.”
NHL GameScore Impact Card for Detroit Red Wings on 2025-10-09: pic.twitter.com/C4uc3uvye9
— HockeyStatCards (@hockeystatcards) October 10, 2025
McLellan described the poor quality of his team’s game management. The fact of the matter is that this team has been lacking in the area of game management skills long before McLellan became coach.
That it never seems to improve is an alarming indictment of the player.
“It’s not going to ruin our year because we lost the first game,” Copp said.
It will if they continue to play like they did in that first game.