Red Wings Desperately Need Raymond’s Goals

All last season and into this season, the braintrust of the Detroit Red Wings fretted over how to get forward Lucas Raymond to shoot more pucks.

This season, they find themselves fretting over how to get Raymond to shoot more pucks into the other team’s net.

Today, Raymond finds himself with perhaps the most interesting stat line in the NHL.

Goals scored: zero. Game-winning goals: one.

Raymond netted the shootout winner as Detroit beat the San Jose Sharks 4-3 on Saturday. In open play this season, through eight games, the four-time 20-goal sniper has yet to light a red lamp.

“We took a chance,” Red Wings coach Todd McLellan said of calling on Raymond in the shootout. “Obviously, he doesn’t have a hot stick. We took a chance in [the shootout]. He made good on it.

“Maybe that’ll make him feel good, and it’ll start coming back to him. He’s too important of a player for us not to get him going.”

Red Wings Are Starving For Goals

Raymond is among 11 players on Detroit’s active roster who are still seeking their first goal of the season.

That absolutely has to change. He knows it. His team knows it.

“I go out there every night, and I want to score,” Raymond said. “I want to contribute to the team in that way. And obviously when things aren’t going your way, you’ve got to look at things. But I think it’s easier now to kind of see it as a big picture.

“Right now I feel like I’m getting a lot of looks and creating a lot of chances. So as long as I can keep doing that, I know it’ll go in.”

McLellan knows that it has to start going in for Raymond, or the Red Wings’ season will soon be going south. With five-time 30-goal scorer Dylan Larkin’s future with the team tenuous at best, the only real proven goal scorers that will be left when Larkin’s trade request is ultimately met will be Raymond and Alex DeBrincat.

DeBrincat is delivering the goods. He potted his fifth of the season on Saturday to send the game to the extra frame.

“I said at the beginning of the year there’s going to be a lot of pressure put on DeBrincat and Raymond in particular, to finish and produce,” McLellan said.

He doesn’t want to pile the pressure on Raymond any further, but knows the team can’t wait much longer for him to start scoring.

“Sometimes with players in Lucas’s situation, they get so focused on the goal – I got to get a goal, I got to, I got to – that some of the other things don’t go real well for him,” McLellan said. “And it’s hard to go to a— I would consider him a goal scorer, an offensive player – and say, you know what, just forget about that and do these things well and it’ll happen.”

As they embark on a four-game road trip, the coach waits for the player they call Razor to sharpen his goal-scoring touch.

“Hopefully Razor, on this trip, we get away from here, and he just starts to play a little more free, and it flows, and he feels better,’ McLellan said. “Because we need him.”

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