Both the Detroit Red Wings and the host Dallas Stars will be coming off a loss when they meet Sunday night.
The Stars dropped a 6-3 decision to the Colorado Avalanche on Saturday afternoon in Denver, while the visiting Red Wings lost 5-1 to the Tampa Bay Lightning later that night.
Dallas has lost two in a row and three of its past four.
Matt Duchene scored on the power play 3:24 into the game to give Dallas a 1-0 lead but the Avalanche scored the next five goals.
“We’ve played these guys,” Stars coach Pete DeBoer said. “We beat them in the playoffs (in the Western Conference second round) last year. We’ve played them a lot over the last two years. So anytime you play them, you want to give your best game. I’m not sure we learned anything tonight. We know how dangerous they are and they burnt us.
“They just made us pay for any of the mistakes we made.”
Jason Robertson scored two goals and set up another. Duchene also had an assist and Casey DeSmith made 30 saves for Dallas.
“They’re a skilled, fast team. We know that. We’re very familiar with it,” Robertson said. “I think we could have done a better job weathering instead of taking on so much water. It’s only a matter of time, if you can’t get enough pushback, that they’re going to break through.”
Detroit trailed 4-0 on Saturday before Lucas Raymond’s power-play goal put the Red Wings on the board with 5:48 left in the second period. Starter Cam Talbot allowed all five goals on 16 shots before being pulled in favor of Alex Lyon, who made six saves. Lyon returned after missing four games with an upper-body injury.
“They owned us in and around our blue paint and I didn’t think we were real aggressive around their blue paint,” Red Wings coach Todd McLellan said. “Yeah, we had 40-some shots on goal, but (Andrei) Vasilevskiy saw most of them and I don’t think we did a lot to help our goaltenders around the blue paint.”
The loss gives the Red Wings an 8-3-0 record since McLellan took over from the fired Derek Lalonde the day after Christmas.
“Disappointed in our group because I thought we were kind of at our desk but not really working,” McLellan said. “We were in position a lot of times, but didn’t get the job done.”
Detroit was 1-for-6 on the power play after coming into the game with a 29.5 percent man-advantage conversion rate.
“First couple power plays, it would have been nice to get one to get the lead,” Patrick Kane said. “Obviously we feel pretty confident in our power play, but it kind of let us down tonight.”
Detroit is 0-8-3 in its past 11 games in Dallas.
Lyon was activated before the game by Detroit, which returned Ville Husso to Grand Rapids of the American Hockey League.
Kane, who assisted on Raymond’s goal, has 16 points (six goals,10 assists) in the past 10 games.
Dallas is missing Tyler Seguin (hip surgery) and Mason Marchment (facial surgery). Roope Hintz sat out the past two games with an upper-body injury sustained in Toronto on Tuesday.
–Field Level Media
