Simon Edvinsson made mistakes in the Detroit Red Wings’ 6-3 Thursday night loss to Pittsburgh. In fact, he made many.
The towering 6-foot-6 defenseman lost 50/50 battles at the net front, leading to the Penguins’ second goal. He took a bad penalty early in the third period, sticking up for a teammate against Cody Glass. The Penguins scored a goal on the ensuing advantage to go up three and put the game on ice. And in a general sense, Edvinsson got hit up and down the ice.
The game, and an injury to Edvinsson’s defense partner Jeff Petry, left Red Wings coach Derek Lalonde contemplating some changes to the defense corps. By all means, Edvinsson played poorly enough to be yanked from the lineup for Saturday’s game against Nashville. Instead, it’s Erik Gustafsson taking a seat as Albert Johansson and Justin Holl take the ice.
Yes, there’s a little bit of preference at play for Edvinsson to get another chance. Yes, the decision probably accounts for Edvinsson being a first round pick with high expectations as a top four defenseman. But this second chance reveals just as much about how the Red Wings and Lalonde handle the acclimation of young prospects. With so many players expected to mature to the NHL lineup soon, this process is also one that will be often utilized.
Coaching, in its purest essence, seeks to extract the best possible performances from players. With that in mind, coaches have to consider the impact of allowing a player to work through a mistake versus making them prove they have fixed it before playing again. Mistakes are a lived example of what not to do on the ice, and players can learn a lot from these instances. But before players can actually learn from mistakes, they have to make them in the first place.
Mandatory Credit: James Guillory-Imagn Images
“There’s a development aspect to it,” Lalonde said. “It’s still so raw. We’re getting first round draft picks at 18, 19 years old. It’s amazing the mistakes you can show them on video and how they grow. And you guys are talking about growing pains with our young guys, just getting even that feedback at a young age, I think there’s something to that.”
Lalonde draws a line between these two concepts when mistakes really hurt the team. It’s a constant balance between allowing a player of any age to learn from their miscues versus limiting their opportunity to make more. This process also goes on in real time, with iPads and coaching staff sharing information with players. As they respond to live feedback on the bench, some players are better at figuring out where they need to improve than others.
“There’s a lot of times a player makes a mistake, a coach is there with an iPad, instant feedback — and you don’t even have to tell them,” Lalonde said Saturday. “Other guys, it’s amazing they make a glaring mistake, and you’re trying to communicate. They have no idea what you’re talking about and then when you show them, you can see the light bulb goes off. I just think it’s player to player. Again, I just think it’s an instant-feedback player today, they want that feedback. There’s a level of accountability too.”
Edvinsson has to learn from this process, too, and so will the rest of Detroit’s top prospects when they come into the NHL. Even Patrick Kane and Dylan Larkin learn from every shift. But for prospects, this mistake-driven process is a little more intense. Anyone getting to a level of anything has to learn on the fly, and mistakes are a given. But it’s what these players do with these mistakes — what they learn — that means more. Mistakes are a good thing, so long as Edvinsson learns from them. That’s how he can become a better defenseman.
At the NHL level, though, mistakes come with a big cost. Every point matters, as last year’s just-shy playoff push makes Detroit painfully aware.
That cost is why Marco Kasper, Carter Mazur and Nate Danielson — who all are seen as near NHL readiness — are starting the year off in Grand Rapids. That’s why Edvinsson was in those shoes last season. As much as those three prospects will be useful to the team in the future as they showed in a strong AHL opener Friday night, the Red Wings can’t just throw them into the NHL fire without costing team success. And as much as Edvinsson will in all likelihood factor into the franchise’s future, right now he’s also making mistakes that cost them in the present. That’s why the Red Wings like maturing their players in the minor leagues, where some of the same mistakes come at a much lower cost, and where players can learn under easier stakes.
“I personally like where we’re at with some more young guys, and that we’re forwarding them the opportunity to play in Grand Rapids,” Lalonde assessed. “I mean, you guys saw Marco (Kasper) and (Carter) Mazur. I mean, there’s three or four of those kids that can play with us tonight, but what does that look like?”
It would look like mistakes — turnovers, penalties, missed assignments. And that’s OK so long as players learn from them. In the NHL, however, it is exceedingly hard to throw a bunch of young players into the lineup and let them fail their way into success. And if you doubt that, go ask Anaheim, Columbus and Montreal how that’s been going lately.
But Detroit can’t do that with all its players. Look no further than Johansson and forward Jonatan Berggren, who are all but thrust into the NHL this season due to their waiver eligibility. If the Red Wings want to keep them, they have to play them in the NHL. Even if they think those players might benefit from a slower development path and more AHL time, they have no option. Just like Edvinsson, they have to learn how to play in the NHL as they are doing it.
“They are here now, and they’ve earned it, but you still got to develop on the fly,” Lalonde said of Berggren and Johansson. “You got to live with some of those mistakes. You got to keep developing them. So it is a balance you’re battling all the time. I think the new NHL is you have to develop real time in the league.”
That’s what’s happening with Berggren and Johansson, but the same can be said of Edvinsson in a top four role. The same could have been said three years ago about Lucas Raymond and Moritz Seider when they broke into the NHL.
Mistakes are a fact of life in the NHL, whether they’re bad penalties, lost battles or anything else. What matters is that players learn from them — and that coaches put them in position to learn from them. That’s why Edvinsson gets a second chance Saturday after such a poor performance Thursday. And the chances are, a player of his caliber, he’ll learn from his mistakes.
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