Detroit Red Wings on what they liked in getting a point in Minnesota
Detroit Red Wings Lucas Raymond, Dylan Larkin & Todd McLellan, Jan. 22, 2026 in Saint Paul, Minn.
ST. PAUL, MN — The Detroit Red Wings headed north – even further so – feeling warmed by the mental toughness they showed in grinding out a point on a night that might have been tempting to think of as a scheduled loss.
They finish up a borderline – literally – challenging trip on Saturday, Jan. 24, in Winnipeg against the Jets, ending a stretch of crossing the U.S.-Canada border four times in five days. From Ontario to Minnesota to Manitoba, it has been a tour of frozen tundra, with highs in the minuses. In both St. Paul and Winnipeg, the highs Thursday-Saturday were in the negative single digits, and the lows hovered around minus-20 or so. With wind chill, the “feels like” temperature was below minus-30.
Coach Todd McLellan, from Saskatchewan, shrugged it off.
“We were talking about, I don’t know what the temperature exactly is, but when we were kids we’d play street hockey in this stuff,” he said. “You’d play until you got real cold and you run in the house to warm up and you go back out again.
‘That’s just the only thing we had was that. There was no phones or video games or TikToks or anything like that. It was it was hockey.”
Give his current crop of players credit, though: They gutted out a point in a 4-3 overtime loss on Thursday to the Minnesota Wild, reaching 67 points with a 31-16-5 record. That was after coming in late following an overtime victory Wednesday at the Toronto Maple Leafs, and then having to wait for the Wild game, because it was broadcast nationally on ESPN, to finally start at 8:42 p.m. locally. It ended at 11:12 p.m. – past midnight for the Wings’ body clocks.
“Leaving here with the circumstances and looking at it on the whole,” McLellan said, “we’ll take the point, get some rest try and heal up and get ready for another tough one.”
The Wings – without top-pair defenseman Simon Edvinsson, unavailable because of a lower-body injury – had the lead three times against the Wild. The performance, overall, was a demonstration of the mental toughness McLellan has preached must be a part of the psyche for the Wings to be a playoff team.
“100%,” McLellan said. “You know there there are groups of players, teams ,even individuals, that could walk in and say, this is the night I’m giving myself permission – we’re done, move. I’ve heard some of the media people – not ours, but just around the league – talk about a scheduled loss. I don’t want our guys to think like that, and I don’t think they do.
“So that’s us pushing that mental strength right from training camp and them accepting the responsibility for it and I give them credit.”
Dylan Larkin called it one of the Wings’ better games, and credited mental toughness.
“I thought we showed it tonight,” the Wings captain said. “We talked about it going into the third and they go out and score one, their big guys get one first shift to the third period. And we respond after that and got right back to it and went ahead again. In my eyes, we got skating five minutes into the third and changed that period and that’s mental toughness, responding after it, not going your way, coming out of the intermission.
“Everyone plays back-to-back – everyone has a tough schedule. I think we play like that more often than not, we’re going to get two.”
Contact Helene St. James at [email protected].
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Next up: Jets
Matchup: Red Wings (31-16-5) at Winnipeg (20-23-6).
Faceoff: 7 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 24; Canada Life Centre, Winnipeg, Manitoba.
TV/radio: FanDuel Sports Network Detroit; WXYT-FM (97.1).
