For the first time this season, the Nashville Predators have lost consecutive games in regulation. Entering the third period on Saturday afternoon, the Predators held on to a 3-2 lead, but goals from Alexey Marchenko and Tomas Tatar gave the Red Wings their 35th win of the season.

“They got some good momentum from their power play,” said Cody Franson. I thought a lot of what the got stemmed off of the momentum that they got on their plays. They are a good offensive team. I didn’t think we gave them a ton tonight, but what we did give them, they did a good job of capitalizing on. I don’t think it was fro a lack of hard work or anything like that tonight, they just executed a little bit better.”

Prior to Saturday’s match up, Nashville was 19-13-3 when they allowed the opponent to score first. Without being able to overcome the two goals by Detroit in the third, this was just the second regulation loss all season for the Predators when leading going into the third.

“They scored four goals,” said head coach Peter Laviolette. “I thought we played good, but stopped playing in the third period. It wasn’t a lot of easy ice and we just came out on the short side.”

After a fairly dominating performance in the second period to score three straight goals, the Predators couldn’t keep the momentum going for the rest of the game.

“I think you want to have the lead going into the third and then you have to keep going,” said Shea Weber. We took penalties and went on the PK. Their power play is first in the league so they are going to make you pay.”

On the other side of special teams, Nashville was given multiple opportunities to score on the power play. Out of the five chances, they converted on one and it was a bomb from Shea Weber. It was unusual for an opposing team to give Weber so much room to shoot, but Detroit gave the Predators an opportunity to set up multiple times.

“Shea is definitely our best option on the PP,” said Roman Josi. They gave him a lot of room and he got a couple of good shots and the goalie made some good saves.”

Peter Laviolette echoed those thoughts, but wanted the team to get more second shot opportunities, and noted that Roman Josi had good chances as well.

“Roman had some too,” said Laviolette. “If you can only take one of them, they made some saves when they had to. We couldn’t get the second shots when we wanted to, but going back and looking at it, it seems like we had traffic and we pushed to the net.”

Sunday, the Predators will fly to New York to prepare for back to back games against the New York Rangers and New Jersey Devils on Monday and Tuesday, respectively. There will certainly be some adjustments made for the two games.

“Yes, again, we lost our second game and there are thing we need to do better,” said Laviolette. “I think we can and will do better, but they are playing hard. We will fix those things and be ready.”