Motor City Malaise: Detroit Red Wings May Simply Be Out Of Gas

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For many teams in the NHL, a 4-4-2 record, while nothing to get excited about, would still be considered respectable after 10 games.

The Detroit Red Wings are not one of these teams.

A .500 record, 10 games into the season, is cause for panic for an organization and a fan base that expects nothing less than the Stanley Cup, year in and year out.

On paper, this team is much better than their record.

Granted, much has been made of the mass exodus that occurred over the summer as Detroit waived goodbye to superstar forward Marian Hossa (signed by Chicago), and solid secondary scorers Mikael Samuelsson (signed by Vancouver) and Jiri Hudler (signed with the KHL).

However, the core of the team that won the Stanley Cup in 2008 is still intact.  And while newly welcomed (or re-welcomed as the case may be) players like Todd Bertuzzi and Jason Williams don't provide a one-to-one substitution for Hossa or Samuelsson, they're not exactly AHL players either.

The loss of one superstar and two secondary scorers seems a hardly sufficient accounting for Detroit's floundering start.

Now, having power-forward Johan Franzen out of commission for four months with a torn ACL is certainly having an impact on Detroit's scoring ability.

But, with a roster that boasts two elite scorers in Henrik Zetterberg and Pavel Datsyuk, the loss of Franzen is something Detroit should be able to overcome.

Finally, four of Detroit's losses have come in games they have led.  These are games that perhaps last year or the year before, this team would have surely won.

The fact may be that the success this team has enjoyed for so long may actually be the reason for their subpar performance thus far.

After being eliminated in the Western Conference Finals in 2007, Detroit went on to win the Stanley Cup in 2008 and advanced again to the Stanley Cup Finals last year, pushing the series to seven games before losing to the Pittsburgh Penguins.

That's a lot of hockey games.

One could imagine that, after expending so much physical and emotional energy over such a long period of time, the team often referred to as "The Big Red Machine" may simply have nothing left in the tank to keep it going.

A team that does nothing but win doesn't do so without sacrifice.  Winning consistently requires a tremendous amount of internal motivation, emotional involvement and physical endurance.

For any team, these are finite resources.

Add to this exhaustion, emotional and physical, from the upcoming Winter Olympics in February, and the cause of Detroit's .500 record may become even more apparent.

If Johan Franzen is recovered in time, the Wings will have nine sure-fire Olympians and maybe as many as 11. Forward Dan Cleary (Canada) and defenseman Jonathan Ericsson (Sweden) may very well be Olympic participants.

That's 48 percent of Detroit's roster, not including head coach Mike Babcock who will be performing the same duties for Team Canada.

The task of expending what little emotional and physical energy they may have to sufficiently contribute to regular season wins, while reserving enough to contribute to your country's team in February, could be too difficult to manage for most of these players.

One must remember that, despite their often other-worldly play, these men are human after all.

The upside to all of this is that it is still very early in the season.

The Red Wings do have a lot of time to get back to their winning ways.

However, all the road in the world is useless if you don't have the fuel you need to travel it.

Only time will tell if Motor City's hockey machine is running on empty.

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