On Thursday, December 26, 2024, Detroit Red Wings General Manager Steve Yzerman announced that the team was firing head coach and Gru lookalike Derek Lalonde and replacing him with Todd McClellan, late of the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks and a former Red Wings assistant under Mike Babcock, effective immediately. And the effect was almost immediate.

At the time of the coaching change, the Wings were 13-17-4, having lost three games in a row and nine of the preceding twelve. McLellan’s first game behind the bench came the very next night, and it was a 5-2 home loss to Toronto.

The team has not lost since then, though. The active winning streak now stands at seven games, a stretch never matched during Lalonde’s tenure. In fact, it’s been thirteen years since Detroit last won seven consecutive times. They did it exactly that many times in January of 2012. (They actually had two winning streaks of exactly seven games that season, the earlier one spanning November and December of 2011.)

I caught a Red Wings game that season, a loss at Chicago, in which my chief complaint outside of the result appears to have been that the home fans didn’t do enough different cheers. I still haven’t been back to the United Center. I also attended the team’s preseason intrasquad scrimmage in Grand Rapids, where it seems I encountered Ken Holland in the concession line. I’ve been back to Grand Rapids since then, but I don’t have any other Ken Holland meetings to report. Detroit’s 2011-12 season ended with a first-round exit from the playoffs at the nasty hands of the Nashville Predators.

The last time Detroit won more than seven in a row, they won the Stanley Cup. They’ll have a chance to match that eight-game streak from January and February of 2008 when they lace them up against the Sharks tomorrow night.