The Wings were above .500 in points percentage as late as Feb. 17, but as the games intensified, they faltered. Learning how to win this time of year matters.

"I was happy with our growth up till that point," coach Jeff Blashill said. "I think we had surprised people and played better than what other people had thought. Obviously, since then we haven’t been very good. We haven’t done a good enough job for a multitude of reasons.

"I like the fact for the last three games we’ve had good fight. None of us want to be in this spot, we all want to be a team that’s fighting for a playoff spot right now. We’ve put a lot of people in positions to potentially grow and at times they have, and at times it’s gotten stagnant. Ultimately you hope as some of those young people in lots of different positions go through these experiences, they become better players on the other side of it. But in the end, we’re out of the playoffs again."...

"If you look at last year and a couple years before that, this year we went into arenas, we went into games, expecting to win," Larkin said. "Yeah, it’s disappointing when you don’t, but when you go into a building and you don’t expect to win, it’s a hopeless feeling. This year we’ve had enough guys, we’ve had enough good players to go into buildings and expect to win. We came up short, but it’s definitely trending in the right direction."

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