from Helene St. James of the Detroit Free Press,

The Wings haven’t converted a power play in five games. It has been a season-long weakness — they have converted just 20 times on 131 opportunities, a 15.3% success rate. They are currently without one of their best players in Anthony Mantha, who is sidelined at least through January because of a ribcage injury. But Larkin’s unit still features Tyler Bertuzzi, Robby Fabbri, Zadina and Hronek. Bertuzzi leads the team with nine power-play points and Fabbri leads with five power-play goals.

“We’ve had different guys with injuries where guys are funneling in and out of units and we’ve been playing a lot of games so there hasn’t been a lot of practice time,” Larkin said. “But we have five guys out there, they have four. We’re all good players here so we need to go out and execute and make plays and tape-to-tape passes, get the puck down there around the net. Bert is great with his stick tipping pucks and getting rebounds, so we need to create more chaos in front of the net and we just need to execute more.”

With both Mantha and Andreas Athanasiou in sickbay, the second unit has been patched to feature Valtteri Filppula with Frans Nielsen, Justin Abdelkader, Mike Green and Givani Smith. They have a combined five power-play points. (Though Smith hasn’t been a power play regular until the past two games.) It’s not a unit that will strike fear into any penalty killing unit, but Larkin’s unit, which was on for both shorthanded goals, does feature talented players.

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