On Cam Talbot and how goaltending has at least given the Red Wings a chance to figure it out

Is it sustainable? Probably not. But it's what Detroit needs now.

I don’t have a ton to write on the Detroit Red Wings 2-1 win against the Buffalo Sabres.

It was chaotic and sloppy hockey. Sure it was fun, but neither team probably felt particularly proud of how they played this game.

For Detroit, it’s a needed win after having lost three straight. The Red Wings are teetering on the edge of potential coaching change discussions.

It’s not there yet, but anyone can look at the situation and realize that Derek Lalonde is in the final year of his contract, and fair or not, the lame duck coach is often the guy to take a fall for a team under performing when internally “playoffs” were an expectation.

Lalonde is an old goalie himself, he played the position up until the NCAA Division III level, so it’s fitting that goaltending has effectively kept the Red Wings in the tightly-packed playoff hunt.

On Saturday, Cam Talbot was the hero, making 31 saves, including two point-blank stops in the first minute of the game. That’s the save Detroit needed, especially when you consider how much early goals against unraveled Detroit in a loss to the Winnipeg Jets on Wednesday.

I’m not sure Talbot’s statistical performance is sustainable, he’s got a .923 save percentage thus far this season, but his demeanor fits with what Detroit needs right now. Talbot is 37, he’s playing for his eighth NHL team and fourth in four seasons, and he’s painfully self-aware of his place in the NHL.

During the 2021-22 season, when Talbot reached his first NHL All-Star Game, he told me that he was trying to relish that moment because it was likely the only one he’d ever reach (he was also an All-Star last season with the Los Angeles Kings). He went through the disappointment of the Kings picking Darcy Kuemper over him, signed the two-year deal in Detroit over offers from other teams (including Dallas, which offered him more money on a one-year deal), and has embraced the fact he’s likely going to finish his career as a Red Wing.

When you’re at peace with that, and having a rare sense of stability for the family, the chaos of an NHL game starts to feel less chaotic.

Through both design and necessity, the Red Wings defense is young. Moritz Seider and Simon Edvinsson are the top pair and will be for years. Albert Johansson is now a regular. Many of the veteran defense Steve Yzerman signed to calm things have done the exact opposite.

With that combination in front of them, Red Wings goalies have to be mentally rock solid. Talbot’s found it through NHL consistency, Alex Lyon has reached this point through happy-go-lucky realization that he was never really supposed to have an NHL career as undrafted, and undersized, goalie out of Yale.

I’m not sure there’s enough for Detroit to actually be a playoff contender, the roster construction and offensive plan seem flawed to me. But there’s at least been the early calming forces in net that have given the Red Wings some time to figure it out.

The Red Wings have five wins this, in each of those games they’ve been out-shot and out-possessed. With league average goaltending, the Red Wings would be in San Jose Sharks territory and would already have potentially changed their coach.

The lesson from Saturday for Detroit isn’t that this is the way to reach the playoffs, overall it’s not a winning formula. But it is evidence that sometimes, deserved or not, you get the more chances to fix those problems later than sooner because of the guy in net.