DETROIT — Patrick Kane looked vintage Friday night, wheeling around the offensive zone, controlling the flow of the game. He was hunting.
On a night when his old team, the Chicago Blackhawks, were in town, Kane assisted on the Red Wings’ first three goals in a 5-3 win. The narrative could have written itself.
The thing is, though, this wasn’t just a case of Kane being at his best against the Blackhawks. This has been building.
With a three-point effort Friday, Kane now has 11 points during the Red Wings’ current six-game winning streak. Wind back a little further, and it’s 15 in his last 12.
So while, yes, Kane haunted his former team, the story is really a little bigger than that for Detroit. It sure looks like the Red Wings have one of their most important offensive pieces back-firing on all cylinders.
“It’s huge,” Lucas Raymond said afterward. “He’s a big part of our team, and when Kaner’s going, he’s a really good player. Everyone knows that.”
Indeed, everyone knows that. But through the first two months of the season, it wasn’t coming easily. Kane had just 10 points through his first 24 games, three of them goals. His shooting percentage (6.4 percent through that stretch) always smacked of a player due for some friendly bounces, but even then, he hadn’t been as consistently noticeable early this season.
Back on December 18, after a two-point effort at the very start of this recent surge, Kane was asked if he was feeling more like himself. He laughed, and briefly opened up a hand, beginning his answer with “I mean … yeah, it’s nice to produce.” It wasn’t exactly emphatic.
Kane’s 36 now, and the days of him taking games over every single night may be in the past. But he still sees the ice like few ever have. And when he gets going, it’s something to behold.
Friday was a clinic in that. It started with him gliding through the neutral zone, beating his first man and then setting up Alex DeBrincat to open the game’s scoring. Then it was Kane keeping a possession alive on the power play, disrupting a Chicago breakout, coming up with the puck and turning it into a three-on-one that Raymond finished off early in the second period.
But the real work of art was on Detroit’s third goal, at a moment when the game still felt perilously up for grabs. The Red Wings had dominated the second period but went into the third up just a goal. That’s when Kane took over, hanging onto the puck as he knifed across the offensive zone. There were four Blackhawks back, and no plays to be made. So, he waited until there was.
“He has unreal poise with the puck,” Red Wings coach Todd McLellan said. “There’s traffic, there’s people going everywhere, and guys are taking runs at him, and he’s just so calm. He can hold it a little longer, and while he’s doing that, he’s seeing things.”
That certainly applied here. Kane stickhandled and created space until defenseman Erik Gustafsson was alone up at the point. Then Gustafsson walked it in — making a couple of slick moves of his own to beat a defender and drag Petr Mrazek out of position — and then found Andrew Copp out front for a key insurance goal.
“That was all Patty Kane,” McLellan said. “Just slowing things down and creating opportunities for teammates.”
This current hot streak coincides with one for the Red Wings as a whole, as Detroit has won six in a row since McLellan’s first practice on Dec. 28. They’re the hottest team in the league in that time. And their power play — on which Kane plays a key role — has been especially dominant, converting at a ridiculous 50 percent clip.
That power play rate will be hard to sustain as time goes on, but regardless, Kane’s re-awakening has huge implications for the Red Wings as a whole. All year, Detroit has struggled to find scoring outside of their top three forwards: DeBrincat, Raymond and Dylan Larkin. On plenty of nights, those three were all together on one line. And while that can work for spurts, Detroit’s lineup was crying out for more scoring depth.
Now? Kane’s been consistently reunited with DeBrincat, and their trio with Andrew Copp has been perhaps Detroit’s most dangerous under McLellan. That has left a hole on the top line, in which the new coach first tried Joe Veleno and now rookie Marco Kasper, who had a two-point outing on Friday in that spot.
The power play is probably papering over some five-on-five questions right now, but if Detroit can get both of those top lines going consistently, that may be the biggest key to ensuring this winning streak doesn’t turn out to just be a flash in the pan.
It’s easy to get swept up in the highs of a winning streak, of course. Rookie defenseman Albert Johansson got his first career NHL goal Friday to add to the infectious good vibes. It’s a totally different feeling from where things were before Christmas.
But while everyone around the Red Wings surely knows the honeymoon won’t last forever, Kane looking like this again is something that will only get more important whenever that next phase begins.
When Detroit found itself in a tight divisional game against Ottawa earlier this week, it was Kane who scored the overtime winner — and then relished it in classic fashion.
Patrick Kane overtime celly alert. #Blackhawks pic.twitter.com/lS1BWRgyzS
— Charlie Roumeliotis (@CRoumeliotis) January 8, 2025
After the game, he was asked afterward to grade Veleno’s goal celebration from earlier in the night, and Kane didn’t miss a beat before responding “I think it was the second-best Celly of the night.”
That’s the kind of swagger Detroit has come to expect — and love — from Kane over the last two seasons, after being on the other side of it for so much of his career.
And after a slow start, it certainly appears to have come roaring back to him, at just the right time.
(Photo: Brian Bradshaw Sevald / Imagn Images)
