Detroit — This is why you let them play.
Because this is also how they grow, in confidence and experience. Maybe in stature, too, though Tuesday night’s loss to Tampa Bay — a rough-and-tumbling 4-3 defeat at Joe Louis Arena — actually dropped the Red Wings back to .500 on the season.
And prompted their captain, Henrik Zetterberg, to sound another alarm.
“We can’t keep losing games,” he said afterward, “if we want to be a team battling for the playoffs.”
They may yet be one if they play more games the way they played the final 40 minutes against the injury-depleted Lightning, clawing their way back from a 3-1 deficit in the third period only to lose that point late on Nikita Kucherov’s fluky rebound goal with 1:10 remaining in regulation.