DeBrincat Picks a Fight With Bennett, Then the Red Wings Blow a 3-Goal Lead

Alex DeBrincat picked the wrong night to pick a fight. The Red Wings’ 5-foot-8 scorer dropped the gloves with 6-foot-1 Panthers forward Sam Bennett at 5:25 of the second period in Sunrise on Thursday, and then watched Florida score the next four goals to turn a 3-1 Detroit lead into a 5-4 loss. It was the Red Wings’ fifth straight defeat, and the fight that was supposed to spark them lit the wrong bench instead.

What happened between DeBrincat and Bennett?

They fought for about 15 seconds near centre ice, and Bennett won it on the scorecard. Bennett finished a check on Marco Kasper, the whistle went three seconds later, and DeBrincat came looking for him, Gino Hard reports. The two dropped their gloves, traded punches while holding each other’s jerseys, and Bennett drove DeBrincat toward the boards and down to the ice before the linesmen moved in. Both players got five minutes for fighting, and Bennett took an extra two for roughing, which gave Detroit a power play the Panthers killed. The clip went viral within the hour: B/R Open Ice framed it as a 5-foot-8 40-goal scorer against a 6-foot-1 Conn Smythe winner, with the caption “didn’t have this on our bingo card”, and BarDown’s reel of the same scrap drew 14,000 likes overnight.

Why did DeBrincat go after Bennett?

To answer a hit on a teammate, and the timing says it was deliberate. Kasper had just returned to the lineup and was playing on DeBrincat’s own line, and Bennett’s check on him was the kind of hit a team answers with its fists when it has no other response. The Free Press notes the fight came at 5:25 of the second with Detroit up 3-1, seven minutes before Kasper himself scored to make it 4-1, so the Red Wings were in control of the game when DeBrincat decided to make a point. Detroit’s week had already turned strange on the road, and a scorer fighting a Conn Smythe winner fit the mood of a team searching for a spark.

How did the fight change the game?

It did not change it the way Detroit wanted. Florida’s comeback started with Gustav Forsling’s goal with 17.8 seconds left in the second period, cutting the lead to 4-2, the Free Press reports. Anton Lundell made it 4-3 early in the third, Lars Eller tied it at 16:29 by batting a puck out of the air at the back door, and Lundell scored again 51 seconds later for the 5-4 final. Coach Todd McLellan put it plainly afterwards: “We lost our momentum that we worked really hard to earn in the first 40 minutes of the game,” NHL.com reports. J.T. Compher was blunter still: “We frustrated them when we were up 4-1. They continued to ramp up the pressure, and it seemed like we sat into it a lot. We kind of accepted it.”

Why is this fight so unusual for DeBrincat?

Because he almost never does it. Ferda Hockey’s fight log for DeBrincat lists only Roman Josi in December 2023, Ian Cole in 2024 and Trevor Kuntar in the preseason before Bennett, and he signed a seven-year extension with Detroit in October, ESPN reports, which makes a fight a notable departure from his usual job. The size gap is the other half of it: DeBrincat gives up five inches and about 16 pounds to Bennett, a former Conn Smythe winner who makes a living being miserable to play against, Gino Hard reports. The league’s toughest players usually pick their spots more carefully, and DeBrincat picked the least careful spot available: the other team’s most abrasive forward, while his own team was winning.

Has a Red Wings scorer fought before this week?

Yes, and that is the pattern that makes this more than one scrap. The Free Press notes it is the second time in three games a Wings scorer has fought: defenceman Moritz Seider took on Avalanche captain Gabriel Landeskog on November 7 in Denver, and DeBrincat followed five days later in Sunrise. Landeskog’s Avalanche have their own injury crisis at the moment, but the Detroit pattern stands on its own: two of the Red Wings’ skill players dropping the gloves in the same week, on a team that has now lost five straight and sits 7-10-3. A team that is winning does not usually need its scorers to fight. A team that is losing five in a row reaches for anything that might change the room.

What happens next for Detroit?

Tampa Bay on Saturday, then home. The Red Wings wrap up their four-game road trip against the Lightning on Saturday at 7 p.m., the Free Press reports, and then return to Little Caesars Arena for six of their next seven games, starting with the Boston Bruins on national television on Wednesday. The fight will not follow them there, but the question it raised will: whether a team that keeps answering hits with its fists can stop answering losses the same way. The answer has to come on the ice, not in the penalty box, where the next borderline hit will be judged by the officials, not by the players.