The dust is settled on the Red Wings 2014 post season run and after a wild night of game seven finales, the first round is over now too. The first round was full of surprises but unfortunately the Red Wings besting the Bruins was not one of them. Even the return of captain Henrik Zetterberg was not enough to stop the President’s Trophy winners. Going into the series, the Red Wings may have arguably been the team with the best shot to upset the top team in the league but that wasn’t in the cards. While you can speculate what they could’ve done differently, pick every play, every line change, and every shot apart looking for what went wrong, at the end of the day, the Bruins were the better team.

Riding momentum is as important in the playoff as who is in your starting lineup and right now, the Bruins are hot. Down the stretch, the Bruins were not only sitting atop the league standing, they continued to win. The Red Wings got the wins they needed to make their 23rd consecutive playoff appearance on the backs of young players stepping up to fill the void left by injury, but to say that they were firing on all cylinders would be far-fetched. Success through all the lineup juggling certainly indicates an admirable degree of flexibility but ultimately the sort of united force that’s needed pull off an upset against a team like the Bruins just wasn’t there. The Bruins had a few standout players with big points but with ten players scoring goals and fourteen players getting points, Boston had everyone contributing and everyone pulling in the same direction.

Perhaps it was due to the lineup juggling due injury or maybe it was a sign of inexperience with all the rookies, but the Wings struggled to score at all, let alone scoring throughout the lineup. The Bruins imposed their will on the Wings. Even when the Wings pulled in Todd Bertuzzi and altered the game plan to play a little tougher and take the middle of the ice, the Bruins still came out on top.

In saying all that, in my opinion, the series was a lot closer than the results might suggest and the future is bright.

The last thing the Wings need to do is blow the team up for a major overhaul. There are certainly tweeks that can be made and if there was nothing to be done, the Wings would still be playing, but making major changes to the core of this team would be short-sighted. Sometime you need a little patience. The young players that jumped into the lineup may not all be ready to be regulars next year but should they continue to progress, and should the past development of current Wings be any indication, things look pretty good for the future of the Red Wings.

Ken Holland may have said it best when he said, “We don’t want to be a development team for other people.” The young players got a lot of attention down the stretch as they kept the Wings playoff streak alive, but moving any of those players would be awfully short sighted.

There are some obvious needs that need to be met in the off season, but it’ll be a long summer so let’s save that for next time…

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