Happy anniversary, Hockeytown, raise a glass to the '97 Stanley Cup champs
Eighteen years ago tonight, NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman handed the Stanley Cup to Red Wings captain Steve Yzerman, who waltzed it around the ice as bedlam erupted in and around Joe Louis Arena.
A powerful thirst 42 years in the making had finally been quenched.
After heartbreaking near-misses in the two previous seasons, Detroit finally reached hockey's summit with a resounding sweep of the Philadelphia Flyers. Darren McCarty, who started the Wings' Stanley Cup run that spring of 1997 by pummeling Colorado's Claude Lemieux in a March 26 brawl at The Joe that Wings fans still love talking about, finished it with a gorgeous breakaway, game-winning goal.
After a glorious lap around the rink with his silver dance partner, Yzerman eventually handed the trophy over to Slava Fetisov, signaling to all who might have doubted how important the five Soviet-born players were to this franchise. Fetisov and Igor Larionov paraded it around together, and then all their teammates took a turn -- among them Nick Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Brendan Shanahan and Mike Vernon.
Finally, the Cup made its way to the Detroit bench, where coach Scotty Bowman again hoisted the trophy that bears his name so many times.
High above the ice, however, the man most responsible for rejuvenating a long-moribund franchise at least for a moment could stop wringing his hands. His team had finally delivered on a long-overdue promise.
"Thinking back to that Cup, I remember distinctly what it meant to me: It was relief," said Jim Devellano, hired in 1982 as general manager and now the team's senior vice president.
When Devellano came to Detroit from the dynastic New York Islanders (he was assistant GM there for the first three of four straight Cup titles in the early 1980s) he sat down with new owners Mike and Marian Ilitch, who got right to the point.
"How long do you think it will take to win the Stanley Cup," they asked.
Devellano didn't sugarcoat it.
"What you really bought here was an expansion franchise," he told them. "It has to be totally rebuilt through the draft. It's going to take eight years, at least. That's how long it took us with the Islanders."
It would take his Wings longer than that, though to be fair in eight years they had built a franchise that would begin a playoff streak that continues today.
"We persevered," said Devellano, 72 and in his 33rd season with the club. "Eventually we were able to win it, and then win a few more."
That summer was marked by two noteworthy events, one largely overshadowed by the other. Hockeytown's celebration lasted less than a week. Six nights later, after a golf outing, a limo carrying a contingent of Russian team members crashed, ending the promising career of one of the Wings' most popular players, Vladimir Konstantinov.
Amid the mind-numbing sorrow that gripped the city's hockey fans, Ken Holland was elevated to general manager, a position he holds today along with the title of executive vice president.
The resurgence was complete, but Devellano can't help but appreciate all the effort that went into rebuilding the franchise and rekindling the city's love affair with hockey. For that, he credits four people:
Steve Yzerman, the first player he drafted for the Wings in 1983; Jacques Demers, the fourth coach he hired in the summer of 1986 and immediately took a team that had accumulated just 40 points the previous season to the Stanley Cup semifinals in his first two seasons; and, interestingly, Bob Probert and Joe Kocur, also widely known as The Bruise Brothers.
"Probert and Kocur for sort of a different reason," Devellano said. "They were just so, so tough. They turned the people on.
"They drew a lot of publicity to our team -- some of it in a perverse kind of way -- but the people loved it. We were a big topic all over the league. That sold a lot of tickets."
Probert was gone by 1997, a career remarkable in so many different ways ending with the Chicago Blackhawks. Kocur was back in his second stint in Detroit. Yzerman, of course, never left until he took the GM's job in Tampa Bay, where his team is three wins away from a Stanley Cup title.
But on this day 18 years ago, while players were in their locker room swilling cheap champagne and beer out of the Stanley Cup, the Ilitch family and friends were in the owners' suite drinking champagne circa 1982. The year they bought the club, they also bought several cases of bubbly, just for this occasion.
