Archive for Hockey
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The Detroit Red Wings do a lot of things well—win hockey games, take care of their players, represent the Original Six with aplomb. They show up to the playoffs every year and it’s never as an afterthought, like someone slipping into an elevator just before the doors close.
Four Stanley Cups since 1997, plus some close calls that could have brought that number to five or six.
Now the Red Wings are becoming a feeder program for team and league executives.
Brendan Shanahan, an NHL Vice President.
Steve Yzerman, GM of the Tampa Bay Lightning.
And now Chris Chelios, the newest Red Wings front office man.
It’s not likely to end there.
What might defenseman Nick Lidstrom be asked to do, when he hangs up his skates—assuming he returns to Sweden? The NHL could use Lidstrom in their hierarchy, perhaps as an ambassador or liaison to hockey in Sweden or elsewhere.
You think Kris Draper will just fade away? I can see him as a coach or in the front office in Grand Rapids, a few years hence.
I can just picture Chris Osgood traipsing to Traverse City every September to work with the team’s young goalies.
The Red Wings aren’t just a hockey team, they are a hockey institution, literally. It’s where you go to be educated about the game and contribute to hockey society after your playing days are done.
Joe Louis Arena may as well add some ivy onto its old brick walls and a build a campus bookstore and student lounge inside. Players shouldn’t get a playbook, they should get a syllabus.
Look at GM Ken Holland.
Holland was a struggling minor league goalie when the Red Wings secured him from the Hartford Whalers organ-EYE-zay-shun (this is hockey; gotta pronounce it correctly). In 1985, Holland finished his brief NHL career with the Red Wings, who saw something in his intuition for the game and groomed him as a scout, starting in his home turf of Western Canada.
One thing led to another, and before long Holland was back in Detroit, learning how to be a hockey manager (hockey people don’t say GM) under Scotty Bowman, no less.
After Bowman had held the dual roles of coach and manager from 1994-97, it was decided that Holland was ready to take over the managing.
The transition was seamless; the Red Wings won another Cup in 1998, Holland’s first year as manager.
Look at assistant GM Jim Nill.
Nill was acquired as a player late in his career, and when he retired, the Wings again saw something and made Nill an offer to stay in the organ-EYE-zay-shun.
Before long, after also going the scouting route, Nill ended up as Holland’s right hand man and as the Red Wings’ draft specialist.
Look at advanced scouting director Mark Howe.
Howe joined the Red Wings in 1992 as a 37-year-old geezer looking for another kick at the can, after two failed Finals appearances with the Flyers.
The Red Wings made the Finals in Howe’s last year as a player (1995) but were swept by the Devils.
No matter. Howe wasn’t allowed to fade away, either. The Red Wings made him a scout, too (see a pattern here?), and true to form, Howe was eventually promoted to advanced scouting director, which means he’s in charge of scouting upcoming Red Wings opponents in the regular season and playoffs.
Howe, thanks to the initial post-playing job offer, wears four championship rings, albeit all gained in Armani instead of on skates.
Look at advanced scout Pat Verbeek.
Howe was Verbeek’s boss, essentially. Patty Verbeek, known as The Little Ball of Hate as a player, was in the Red Wings’ scouting department ever since retiring from the NHL several years ago, until Yzerman hired him away to work for the Lightning.
The highest-profile examples of this Red Wings-as-an-institution of higher hockey learning thing of course are Shanahan, who’s doing marvelous work for the NHL, and Yzerman, who’s gaining his footing as the Lightning’s new man in charge.
Tuesday, Chelios officially retired as a player and joined the Red Wings front office. His role is still being defined, as Yzerman’s was when he retired in 2006. But Holland said Chelios will advise Holland, will advise coach Mike Babcock, and will work with the team’s defenseman prospects. For now.
Holland is still a relatively young guy—not in his 60s yet. He won’t budge from Detroit anytime soon, but the Red Wings are starting to send former players from the ice to the executive washrooms of their own team, other teams and even the NHL itself.
It’s yet another affirmation of the Red Wings’ place as a beacon of hockey smarts and its status as the best organ-EYE-zay-shun in the NHL, by far.
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Joe Louis Arena is the only sports venue I know of that became obsolete the moment it opened for business.
One of the best things to come from yesterday’s announcement by Mike Ilitch that he and his family are seriously pursuing a purchase of the Detroit Pistons, is that it probably will accelerate the construction of a new arena to replace JLA—one that will likely house both the Pistons and the Red Wings.
Such an arena can’t come a moment too soon.
Ilitch has been associated with the Red Wings for so long, I’m sure there are folks who think he had a hand in the creation of Joe Louis Arena. He didn’t. JLA opened in 1979, and Ilitch bought the Red Wings in 1982.
Where The Palace of Auburn Hills was built ahead of the curve in 1988, JLA was erected with no vision, no sense of convenience, no adroitness.
Parking is a nightmare. A fellow could have a heart attack climbing the steps leading up to the joint. The concourses are too narrow. There aren’t enough restrooms.
JLA’s exterior looks like a warehouse. It has the aesthetics of war-torn Europe, the warmth of a scorned woman.
They didn’t build an arena, they created a giant mausoleum. Today, it’s old and dilapidated. On Opening Night, it was just dilapidated.
It’s not like they shouldn’t have known better; JLA was built in the late-1970s, not during World War II. You walk in and you want to ask where they used to make the tanks.
The air inside has the freshness of milk left on the counter overnight. It’s more stuffy than an aristocrat whose name ends with “the Third.”
It’s the only sports arena that should have been fitted with drop-down oxygen masks. All the air is borrowed from whatever the patrons brought in with them. The foot traffic is fanny-to-fanny; it’s always rush hour. You could walk a mile and never see the walls.
The seating was arranged as if to punish those who couldn’t afford the lower bowl tickets. The only arena promoting class warfare. The top row in the upper bowl is somewhere in Bad Axe. The game below is only being played on the word of well-placed sources.
If you don’t have the cash, you’re sitting closer to Terry Sawchuk’s retired number than the ice. Between periods you can while the time away by counting the girders.
There are suites, of course, but they’re even further away than the so-called nose bleed seats. Every suite should have come equipped with telescopes.
Joe Louis Arena was never state-of-the-art, unless the state of your art is circa 1950. It’s the only arena I know of that was a demotion from its predecessor, Olympia Stadium, which even at age 60 was ten times the hockey palace than JLA was on Opening Night in 1979.
JLA is a 20,000-seat cave. You keep wanting to look out for the bats.
The arena was old and outdated the night they swung the doors open for the first time. If it was a Broadway show it might have opened and closed in one night.
In the early days, the hockey team was worse than the arena, if you can imagine such a thing. Then the team got better and the arena just kept getting older. They’d try re-painting it from time-to-time, like Tammy Faye Bakker’s face, but it only postponed the inevitable.
The funny thing is, when JLA opened on December 27, 1979, it was deemed to be some sort of marvel—a real nifty place. It wasn’t until you got further from its grand opening, and you saw the types of buildings built shortly after it, that you realized we were sold a bill of goods.
Then along came The Palace of Auburn Hills, and that only underlined the foibles of JLA.
The Palace opened in the summer of 1988—less than 10 years after The Joe but light years ahead of it in every way imaginable.
So brilliant was the planning and architecture of The Palace that even today, some 22 years after its opening, the arena is presented as a model for what a sports and indoor concert venue should be.
If Ilitch succeeds in buying the Pistons, no doubt a new, dual-sports arena will be in the offing, likely downtown.
The Red Wings’ original 30-year lease with JLA has expired, and the team then negotiated a temporary extension to that lease, until another arena is built—or until the Red Wings move elsewhere (The Palace) as a stopgap measure.
Regardless, it appears as if the days of the Red Wings playing in Joe Louis Arena are (finally) numbered.
I call dibs on the plunger at its implosion.
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greg
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Mike Modano and 40-years-old make an awful couple.
It’s Julia Roberts and Lyle Lovett. Chocolate ice cream and anchovies. Paisley and polka dots.
Modano sat at the rostrum at Joe Louis Arena Friday afternoon having just signed on as the newest Detroit Red Wing.
And that’s exactly what he looked like: the newest Detroit Red Wing.
Modano has played in the NHL for 21 years, his social security records say he’s 40, but I can’t accept his age.
Modano was at ease in his new No. 90 Red Wings jersey, answering reporter’s questions with his perfect tan, blemish-free face, full head of hair, and big white teeth.
A 40-year-old hockey player with 21 NHL years behind him ought to have a face that looks like un-ironed corduroy. His voice should be raspy and his tongue should be pocked with marks from hitting the gaps caused by his missing teeth.
His face shouldn’t be tanned, it should be yellowed. You should be half looking for bolts coming out of his neck.
But there Modano sat, chatting as if he was an author on a book tour, not a 40-year-old giving the NHL another go, having wondered mere weeks ago if he had it in him to play another season.
Have it in him? He looks like he could do 10 laps around Belle Isle without breaking a sweat.
Just when you think someone’s trying to pull the wool over your eyes about Modano, here he comes talking about playing with Reed Larson during his first moments as a Minnesota North Star.
Reed Larson?
Larson was a rookie 34 years ago, and Modano was his teammate?
OK, so maybe Mike Modano is 40-years-old, but the only thing that seems 40 about him is his birth certificate.
Modano now wears the Winged Wheel because the Red Wings are the NHL’s Mafia: they often make offers you can’t refuse.
“If the Red Wings hadn’t come calling, I’d probably be retired now,” Modano told the media Friday.
But they did come calling, and it was a real shakedown.
Modano flew out to Detroit last month, having dinner with GM Ken Holland and coach Mike Babcock.
The two spoke of how Modano would only need to be the third-line center and quarterback the second-team power play instead of carrying the load. They told him how great it was to play in Detroit, and no doubt they had testimonials from former veterans to back that up. They said if another Stanley Cup was on his mind (Modano won the Cup in 1999 with Dallas), then Detroit was good one-stop shopping.
Babcock later said he impressed upon Modano how playing at home (Modano was born in Livonia and grew up in Westland) would rejuvenate his body and invigorate his heart.
This signing was a big wagging of the tongue to those who say the Red Wings have only been able to sign high-profile players because of all the money they have at their disposal.
Holland had precious little money to wave at Modano. He might have even gone Dutch with him at dinner.
Modano doesn’t play just anywhere for the $1.5 million the Red Wings were able to scrape up. He’s in Detroit because Holland knows how to sell the team and its philosophy. He knows what veterans like to hear, and he drums that into their heads until it becomes folly to say no.
Listening to Modano at the press conference Friday, you wonder if he’s giving owner Mike Ilitch $1.5 million to play here, rather than vice-versa.
“To have fun, win, not have to waste energy—that’s what I like about the Red Wings,” he said. “This team makes the game look so easy, the way they handle the puck and with all the world class players they have.”
And never discount the allure of getting another “kick at the can,” as the hockey folks call chasing the Stanley Cup.
“To tell you the truth, if (the Red Wings) weren’t close to winning, I’d probably not have come here,” Modano confessed.
The Red Wings have made a high living off the backs of the league’s geriatric players.
Their roster over the past 15 years or so has been dotted with big name players closer to age 40 than 30.
When you come to the Red Wings as an aging player, you somehow transition from “has been” to “still has.”
Very few veterans have joined the Wings and fallen.
Instead, once-fading stars like Igor Larionov, Slava Fetisov, Brent Gilchrist, Larry Murphy, and Chris Chelios—to literally name a few—have slipped on the Red Wings sweater, and before you know it, extended their careers by four, five years, with Stanley Cups in tow.
Owner Mike Ilitch even got caught up in the hype before Modano took the stage.
“I’m feeling it,” Ilitch said, his head bobbing. “Cuppy, cuppy, cuppy!”
All this pomp and circumstance for a player who’ll be essentially playing for peanuts this season. That Modano is a Red Wing at such a paltry salary is a testament to both him and the team with which he signed.
“I’ve followed him ever since he left Little Caesars,” Ilitch said, referencing Modano’s teenage years spent playing for Ilitch’s youth team. “It’s like he never left. His name always had a strong presence around here.”
It sure is like Modano never left. It’s also like he never aged. He’s the only 40-year-old NHL player who could play in the league and star in “The Bachelor.”
Although Modano’s wife, singer/actress Willa Ford, might have something to say about that.
So will he play beyond this season?
“I’ve been saying ‘one more year’ for five or six years now,” Modano said, grinning. “With me, it’s kind of year-by-year. Depends on how much fun I have and if I feel rejuvenated.”
If the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup next June, it’ll be easy to spot Modano.
Just look for the big teeth and hair.
I demand to look at that birth certificate.
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Ken Holland comes from a world where the TV announcers say, “He’d probably like to have that one back.”
He comes from a world where, when you make a mistake, they turn a red light on and 15,000 zealots with leather lungs might try to boo you out of the building.
It’s a world where you’re assailed with dozens of vulcanized rubber discs every night as the last line of defense. And when Holland played goalie for the Red Wings, he was often the only line of defense.
It was 25 years ago this summer, when the goaltender Holland became the scout Holland. The Red Wings assigned him to Western Canada, mainly because that’s where he was born and reared.
Then it was 12 more years of working his way up in the organization, this time wearing a suit instead of the tools of ignorance.
Holland bided his time, learning how to put a hockey team together, as the apprentice of Scotty Bowman, no less.
The Red Wings won the Stanley Cup in 1997 and it was determined that Bowman would no longer hold the dual titles of coach and general manager. Holland was promoted.
Almost immediately, the naysayers were out.
Keith Gave, mostly right than wrong as Red Wings beat writer in those days, pegged it badly.
No way, Gave wrote, could the Red Wings stay on top with a rookie GM.
Gave fretted over the return of Bowman to strictly coaching duties.
Holland then went out and made some astute trades—several at the March deadline—and the Red Wings repeated as Cup champs, despite the loss of Vladimir Konstantinov to a tragic car accident.
It was following that Cup when Holland returned to his goaltender days and made a move that I believe he wished he could have back.
He didn’t name it specifically, but I hit Holland with the question late in the 2005-06 season.
Go back into goaltender mode, I said into the phone, and tell me what trade or signing you’d like to have back, looking back on your almost-nine years as Red Wings GM.
He acknowledged there was one, for sure, that made him wince.
He wouldn’t tell me what it was, for fear of embarrassing the individual involved.
I submit that the soft goal he let in was the signing of defenseman Uwe Krupp in the summer of 1998.
Krupp was a hulking man who, on skates, could almost have looked over the glass without even stretching. He wasn’t a hockey player, he was a building on blades.
The German-born Krupp was signed from the hated Colorado Avalanche, where he had scored the Cup-winning goal for them in overtime in 1996. He wasn’t known for being extraordinarily physical, given his size, but how physical does have a building have to be? You’re still going to bounce off it.
Krupp came to the Red Wings, his wallet stuffed and before long, his back got creaky.
Krupp dressed for only 22 games during the 1998-99 season. He wasn’t heard from the next season, or the season after that, his back too painful.
Then it was discovered that Krupp, while he was supposedly too hurt to play hockey, was participating in dog sledding.
That made the Red Wings mad.
It got ugly and into the courts. In 2001, Krupp said he was healthy and wanted to come back to the Red Wings. The Red Wings told him to stick it in his five hole.
Showing more fight in the courtroom than he had shown on and off the ice for the Red Wings before and after his injury, Krupp finally won the right to play for the Red Wings, after all.
He suited up for eight games in the 2001-02 season, Bowman not thrilled with him at all.
Bowman gave Krupp a shot in the playoffs, putting him into the lineup for Games 1 and 2 of the first round against Vancouver, in Detroit. The Red Wings lost both, and Krupp was minus five.
Bowman yanked Krupp and declared privately that the tall German building would never play another game for the Red Wings. And Krupp didn’t.
Holland threw a ton of money at Uwe Krupp, when the Red Wings really didn’t need another defenseman, despite Konstantinov’s loss the year prior. The ‘98 Red Wings won the Stanley Cup, but Holland, in the pre-salary cap world of the time, couldn’t keep from tweaking.
I believe it was the signing of Krupp to which Holland referred as being his “mulligan”—Holland’s word to me in 2006.
Holland hasn’t had too many mulligans in his 13 years of managing the hockey club in Detroit.
There are those who fear he might be on the verge of another one, if he’s able to entice 40-year-old Mike Modano to play this season, and do so as a Red Wing.
The signing of Modano doesn’t look as olly-olly-oxen free as it did a couple weeks ago. Where the Red Wings looked to be Modano’s only suitors then, other teams have been mentioned lately as sniffing around the Westland native; the Minnesota Wild and San Jose Sharks are the two late entries.
There might not be enough money, when all is said and done, at Holland’s avail to sign Modano, when put up against what the Wild and/or Sharks could possibly offer.
If that’s the case, then the hand-wringers who worry about adding a 40-year-old center to the Red Wings roster need not fret.
The worry warts would have more credibility, to me, if Holland’s track record with aging veterans was pocked with cautionary tales.
Instead, it’s the polar opposite.
“We feel Mike Modano can help us,” Holland told the papers. “We feel like he has some hockey left in him.”
Those might have been the exact words Holland spoke in the late summer of 2001, when the Red Wings brought Brett Hull in when the interest in the veteran sniper was less than overwhelming.
Hull wasn’t exactly fending off teams with a hockey stick when the Red Wings called. He was 37, and even though he had just scored 39 goals for the Dallas Stars, teams were put off by Hull’s run-ins with coaches and his loud mouth.
Holland took a swing with Hull, and that swing didn’t result in the need of a mulligan.
Hull scored 30 goals and the Red Wings won another Stanley Cup.
The worry warts think the Red Wings need to get younger, and the last thing they need now is a 40-year-old Mike Modano clogging the pipeline for players like Darren Helm and Val Filppula.
I’ve written it before: they do something funny with the water that flows from the Detroit River and into Joe Louis Arena. Somewhere in the bowels of JLA lies a fountain of youth.
Dominik Hasek. Luc Robitaille. Chris Chelios. Dallas Drake. Joey Kocur.
Shall I go on? I can, you know—for quite some time.
The Red Wings are more successful than other NHL teams with aging players because those players are brought in to play specific roles; they’re not asked to do what they did when they were 10 years younger.
Compare that to the Detroit Lions, who all but embarrassed DBs Todd Lyght and Eric Davis during the Matt Millen administration, because the Lions wanted Lyght and Davis to be the players of their mid-to-late 20s, not their early-to-mid 30s.
There were times when I actually felt sorry for Lyght, especially, who was asked to cover, with his 33-year-old legs, receivers nearly ten years his junior. The results weren’t pretty.
That kind of nonsense doesn’t go on with the Red Wings. With the exception of Hasek, who was brought in at age 36 to be the starting goalie, the Red Wings make sure the aging guys are signed only if there are enough other pieces surrounding them to camouflage their deficiencies.
Mike Modano might not be a Red Wing, after all. The longer he takes to decide might mean the decision doesn’t bode well for the Red Wings.
Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have worked.
Kenny Holland feels Modano can help the Red Wings.
That’s good enough for me, and ought to be good enough for everyone else.
Holland is a man of few mulligans, after all.
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They threw a party at Joe Louis Arena on January 2, 2007. The guest list was A+.
Alex Delvecchio. Gordie Howe. Ted Lindsay. They brought Sid Abel’s ghost in, too.
It didn’t stop there.
Dino Ciccarelli. Brett Hull. Luc Robitaille. Scotty Bowman. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman.
And on and on. Dozens of Red Wings players, coaches, and management types—past and present.
All the former players wore Red Wings jerseys with their name and number sewn on the back.
The occasion was the retirement of Steve Yzerman’s No. 19, which was raised to the rafters that evening, prior to a match against the Anaheim Ducks.
As each of the stars was intoduced, and as they made their way from the Zamboni entrance to the dais, the ovation was of the deafening variety. These were the Who’s Who of Red Wings history. They should have served a feast.
One player was late. The festivities were beginning, the introduced principals seated as the first speaker opened his mouth.
Bob Probert rushed by me, past my position near the Zamboni, where I was stationed helping out the Fox Sports Detroit crew that night. My job was to snag players for between-play interviews.
“You’re late Probie!” someone yelled.
Probert’s face was sheepish. He didn’t want to go out there, initially. Someone nudged him, literally.
So Probert hastily pulls on his No. 24 sweater, jogs onto the ice, and you’d have thought Terry Sawchuk had been reincarnated and would be playing goal for the Red Wings that evening.
The ovation was as long and as loud—at least—as those for the Hall of Famers whose numbers Yzerman’s would soon be joining near the catwalks.
Even Probert didn’t know what to make of his reception. He blushed, acknowledged the crowd, and took his seat.
NOW the program could begin!
Bob Probert, the former Red Wings and Blackhawks player who died Monday at age 45, wasn’t a great player. Hundreds of men suited up for the Red Wings who had more talent in their left pinky than Probert possessed in his mammoth body.
But none of them owned Detroit like Probie owned it.
Probert wasn’t a hockey player, he was a spectacle.
Time was, you had a few pops in Greektown or the watering hole of your choosing, hopped on the People Mover to the Joe, and took in Probert first, the Red Wings game second.
“Who’s in town?” was the question, but it wasn’t what team was in Detroit—it was which goon from the other side was here.
The NHL of Probert’s heyday—the late-1980s, early 1990s—was also an unashamed circuit of fisticuffs. They barnstormed through the league: Tie Domi. Craig Coxe. Troy Crowder. Mick Vukota. The championship belt was mythical, but no less tangible.
Probert took them all on—and won most of the time. He was an ambidextrous pugilist, which made him so dangerous. You wrapped up Probie’s right, but then got pummeled with his left for your trouble.
Probert skated with a wide berth. Some nights, he looked like he was playing by himself. The nearest opponent was skating in Flin Flon.
Which is what made him such a great teammate.
Probert mixes it up with Tie Domi of the Rangers in a celebrated bout
Anyone who chose to take liberties with the Yzermans or Fedorovs of the Red Wings should have had his head examined. Or maybe the guy was just a hopeless masochist.
Bob Probert had one good offensive season. One.
It was in 1987-88, when as a 22-year-old on a line with Yzerman and Gerard Gallant, Probert scored 29 goals and made the All-Star team. He was so much a presence at the front of the net, I’ll bet his 29 goals traveled a grand total of 90 feet.
He continued his scoring prowess in the ‘88 playoffs, tallying 21 points as the Red Wings made the Final Four.
That was pretty much it for the offense. Probert became the NHL’s Heavyweight Champion, so goal scoring got knocked down the totem pole of importance.
He popped an occasional puck into the net, but he popped out eyeballs more often.
Bob Probert owned Detroit. Pure and simple. He was every bit as popular as Yzerman for a time.
When he got caught with cocaine and when his drinking came to light, it didn’t hurt his popularity one bit. Typical of Detroit sports fans, for good or for bad.
But there was an empathy for Probert, underlying, among the fans in Detroit. They genuinely wanted to see Probie kick the bottle, dump the drugs.
He never could quite do it.
The Red Wings cut him, and the Blackhawks signed him. He thrilled the Second City folks for a few years.
Then Probert retired and he was married and was having kids and was trying to stay clean. He was growing up, finally.
He traveled overseas a few years ago, as a hockey ambassador of sorts, interacting with our military troops in Afghanistan. He began to write for a local sports magazine.
Probert was a Windsor kid, admiring the Red Wings from across the Detroit River. It was a dream come true for him to play for them.
He could have been much more, said Red Wings Executive VP Jimmy Devellano in the wake of the news of Probie’s sad passing from an apparent heart attack.
Jimmy’s probably right. But Probert was still a pretty damn big deal in Detroit, as it was.
God better look out for that left.
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I don’t know what kind of a guy Frank J. Selke was, but he must have been some kind of awful.
The National Hockey League has a thing about naming awards and trophies after people, not accomplishments.
Baseball, basketball and football all have Most Valuable Player Awards. The NHL has the Hart Trophy, to show you.
There’s not a piece of hardware that the NHL gives out that isn’t named after a person, which means you need a cheat sheet to keep track of who means what.
Pavel Datsyuk of the Red Wings is the world’s best thief on skates. He wears a visor on his helmet, but he ought to wear a mask. If he did on the streets what he does in NHL rinks, he’d have a rap sheet that would make Kwame Kilpatrick blush.
The NHL names its award for the best defensive forward after Frank J. Selke, which means it’s honoring Selke, the longtime Toronto Maple Leafs and Montreal Canadiens executive of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, by rewarding on-ice crime.
What’s next? The Al Capone Award for most creative tax evasion?
Datsyuk, this week in Las Vegas, just captured his third straight Selke Trophy.
This means that Datsyuk, for three years running, has been recognized by the league as being the best in pilfering the puck from the other guys. His face shouldn’t be in a program, it should be on post office walls across North America.
This description of the superstar Datsyuk may seem to be an oversimplification, but the NHL tracks takeaways, a politically correct word that means the same as stealing. Try being mugged and filing a police report that says the perpetrator committed a “takeaway.”
In the category of puck stealing, Datsyuk is consistently near the top, if not leading the thieves. He was at it again this season, finishing second in the whole NHL among forwards. That, combined with his other criminal activity, earned him Selke No. 3.
Datsyuk does all this while also being among the very best offensive forces in the league. He giveth AND he taketh away.
“This trophy is special for me,” Datsyuk said in a phone interview. “I’m happy to represent the Red Wings. I hope it’s not my last one.”
Talk about brazen; he hopes to strike again!
There’s an art to the grab, of course. Datsyuk doesn’t just smash a window and make off with the puck. He’s too refined for that.
First, you have to accept that Datsyuk with a hockey stick against his brethren isn’t a fair fight.
It’s like Michelangelo squaring off against Tom Sawyer in a battle of paint brushes.
Datsyuk uses his stick like the surgeons at Beaumont use their fingers.
It starts with what he does offensively. Datsyuk could stickhandle the puck on a bed of nails. He doesn’t ever lose the puck, he just gets tired of playing with it.
All he needs is a slab of ice the size of a welcome mat and you could spend the entire afternoon trying to touch the puck and all you’d get is an ice cold stick.
Datsyuk could stickhandle in a phone booth and never touch glass.
He uses that same aplomb when it comes to his petty crimes when he doesn’t possess the puck.
Datsyuk takes the puck away in stealth fashion. He doesn’t mug the other guy. He doesn’t drape himself all over his opponent and strong arm away the vulcanized disc of rubber.
It’s a “now you have it, now you don’t” kind of a thing.
He usually comes from behind you. Most of the good crimes start that way, I know. But even if you know he’s behind you, it doesn’t do you any good. In fact, Datsyuk could give you a call and set up an appointment and tell you that he’s going to relieve you of the puck and it wouldn’t mean jack squat.
A common method is for Datsyuk to glide up behind you and neatly use his stick to lift yours off the ice surface, mid-stickhandle. In a flash, he has the puck and is skating away with it. He does it so fast you’d swear he was playing with giant chopsticks, not a hockey stick.
Another modus operandi involves Datsyuk pretending like he doesn’t know you have the puck, allowing you to skate by him, presumably unnoticed. But then a flick of his stick later, he’s poke checked you, you’re sans the puck and he’s with it and you can’t wait to see what the security cameras show.
And he does it all with a wide-eyed, innocent expression on his face that suggests a lovable scamp.
Datsyuk never changes his expression; he always looks like a puppy who got caught piddling on the living room carpet.
But hey, do you want irony? You wanna hear the kicker?
Get this—Datsyuk just missed winning his fifth straight Lady Byng Trophy.
Translated: that’s the award the NHL gives out for sportsmanship and—I can barely stifle a grin as I type this—for gentlemanly conduct.
Only in the NHL can they honor a guy for stealing and being a nice guy, all at the same time.
But it’s true; Datsyuk really IS a perfect gentleman when he absconds with the puck.
Pavel, the Friendly Bandit.
Datsyuk, when reached for comment after his latest Selke Trophy, started singing like a canary. He was quick to implicate accomplices of the past.
“(Steve) Yzerman, (Sergei) Fedorov, (Igor) Larionov, I learned every day in practice from those guys,” Datsyuk said. “I’m happy to disappoint a guy and make him not score on us. I want to score a lot, but I’m happy if they don’t score on us.”
Pavel Datsyuk’s been “disappointing” guys in the NHL for eight years now. So that’s what he calls it, huh?
Again, try that at the local police precinct.
“Some guy, he committed a takeaway of my wallet! He REALLY disappointed me!”
Why are we parsing words? Datsyuk’s getting away!
Never mind—he’s already gone.
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greg
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He’d never do it, but Jimmy Devellano should have burst into the NHL’s offices in New York City and cried out, “What does a guy have to do to get into the Hall of Fame around here?!”
And he should have done it 10 years ago. At least.
They finally granted Jimmy D. Hall of Fame status yesterday. Thank goodness they’re not doing it posthumously. I was beginning to wonder.
Red Wings Executive Vice President Devellano, 67, will be enshrined next year. Seems the last ones to know he’s a Hall of Famer were the only ones who mattered, sadly. Isn’t it always the way?
Devellano took the path less traveled to get here.
He didn’t play the game. He didn’t coach it. He just happened to know all about it. He was the Howard Cosell of hockey.
Jimmy D. started showing up at the hockey rink in St. Louis back in the days of the NHL’s first expansion, in 1967. The Blues’ first coach was Hall of Fame player Lynn Patrick, and after 16 games, Patrick had enough.
Patrick quit and his young assistant was thrust into the head coaching role. The assistant was Scotty Bowman.
So Jimmy D. becomes a hockey groupie around the Blues and Bowman, probably at his wit’s end, gives Devellano a scouting job. He didn’t even pay Jimmy, at first.
That’s how it all started for Devellano. It’s like Bill Shakespeare starting out as a copy boy.
You know the rest—Jimmy gets hired by another expansion team, the New York Islanders, in 1972. He canvasses Canada, looking for hockey players, in such glamorous burgs as Moose Jaw and Flin Flon and Cranbrooke.
Jimmy never played, never coached, but he had an uncanny way of knowing if a kid was either going to be a pro hockey stud or a pretender. He was a savant.
Devellano’s scouring for hockey talent in North America under Islanders GM Bill Torrey gave Torrey the core for the teams that would win four straight Stanley Cups (1980-83).
If you went to Las Vegas and played the blackjack table with the same knack and cunning that Jimmy Devellano had for identifying NHL talent in small town North America, they’d call security and have you banned from the tables for life. They’d be phoning Atlantic City to give them a heads up as you were being led out.
Jimmy seemed to have a fetish for starting with a franchise at the very bottom.
He did it with the Blues. He did it with the Islanders.
He most certainly did it with the Red Wings.
The Blues and the Isles had excuses for their ineptitude—they were expansion teams.
The Red Wings had been in the league for 55 years when owner Mike Ilitch made Jimmy D. his first hockey hire. And they were a total, complete mess.
Devellano had never been given the kind of opportunity that Ilitch gave him in the summer of 1982. If Jimmy wanted to be a GM in the worst way, then his wish was granted.
The Red Wings were slapstick, but they weren’t comedy. You need tragedy plus time to make comedy, they say, and the Red Wings just had the tragedy part down when Devellano arrived.
Joe Louis Arena in those days was a great place to study for a science test or to catch up on your reading. Mike Ilitch had himself a 20,000 seat library. The arena was so sparsely populated and so quiet, the only things missing were a microfiche reader and a copying machine.
Ilitch gave away cars. He tried other promotions, all designed to divert your attention from the players wearing the Winged Wheel.
Devellano arrived in town and no one in Detroit knew who he was. But he came from the Islanders, and they were winning the Cup every year, so what the hell?
At the presser introducing him as the Red Wings’ new GM, Jimmy said in his squeaky Canadian voice, “As long as Jimmy Devellano is the general manager of the Detroit Red Wings, we will NOT trade a draft choice.”
Rome would be built brick by brick, with no quick fixes.
His first draft pick as Red Wings GM was Steve Yzerman. So there.
Jimmy made good on his word. He horded draft picks and traded for more of them. He signed cheap, veteran free agents—Band-Aids. Most had seen their better days in the NHL. Some had never seen good days, period.
In 1985, Jimmy tried the quick fix, after all. Ilitch gave the blessing to spend money.
So Devellano signed one college free agent after the other, and went after some NHL mercenaries.
The plan backfired, to say the least. The Bay of Pigs was more successful.
The Red Wings won 17 games, allowed over 400 goals, and went through two overwhelmed coaches—Harry Neale and Brad Park. Both were so traumatized that neither went back into coaching.
But then Jimmy hired Jacques Demers as coach—some would say Jimmy shanghaied Jacques; his aggressiveness in going after St. Louis’ coach bordered on illegal.
The climb to respectability and eventually Stanley Cup contender had begun with the hiring of Demers in the summer of 1986.
Jimmy hasn’t been the Red Wings’ GM since 1990, when the team hired Bryan Murray to coach and to manage. But he’s been no less a part of building the mini-dynasty that has captured four Cups since 1997.
Jimmy never had much hair, and what little he had always looked dirty and was matted over his scalp as if he used a comb with the middle teeth missing. His clothes fit him like a kid playing dress-up with his dad’s wardrobe. He didn’t walk, he waddled.
But he knew his hockey players. Even after his GM days, Devellano was the Great and Powerful Oz behind the curtain at JLA. Then he got older and he turned Yoda for GM Kenny Holland.
You’d like to say that Jimmy Devellano has forgotten more hockey than all of us know, except that I don’t think Jimmy has forgotten a lick.
The NHL shouldn’t enshrine him, they should clone him.
They’re finally putting Jimmy D. into the Hall of Fame. It’s almost a redundant move. Nothing’s been this overdue since an apology from Ann Coulter.
Cheers, Jimmy!
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How many dreams come true in Pittsburgh?
On Friday, April 6, 1979, a 27-year-old man from Waltham, Massachusetts crouched behind Pirates catcher Ed Ott and prepared to call balls and strikes in Three Rivers Stadium in his first game as a big league umpire.
Whether the first pitch from Bert Blyleven was a ball or a strike has long been forgotten.
What is irrefutable from that day is this: Dave Pallone pulled his mask over his face, and he left it there for the next 10 seasons.
Pallone was a big league umpire but he wasn’t, in the eyes of some. He was an opportunist or he was a scab. He was part of the fraternity yet he wasn’t.
You think that’s some confliction? You have no idea.
Pallone, for 10 big league seasons, was two people.
There was the tough, talented umpire Pallone, who toiled in the minor leagues for eight years before getting his chance in the wake of the infamous big league umpires strike of 1979. There was the guy who wouldn’t be shoved out, despite atrocious and reprehensible treatment by his so-called brethren who looked at him and saw scab.
Then there was the “other” Dave Pallone—the one who told bold-faced lies regularly. The one who didn’t want anyone to know what he was really up to. The one who lived in daily fear of being found out.
That Dave Pallone was gay.
Actually, both Pallones were gay. But only one of them let anyone know it. The other lived as a straight man, pretending to have girlfriends and telling illogical falsehoods at even the most innocuous questions.
“Hey, what did you do over the weekend?”
Pallone might have lied—might have given you a whopper of a fish story, to keep himself cloistered in the closet. He might have rattled off a laundry list of things he had done—some involving members of the opposite sex. And all would have been a bunch of horsepucky.
Pallone led that double life for 10 big league seasons (1979-88).
Dave Pallone today
“You lived in daily fear that you’d be found out,” Pallone was telling me over the phone, his easy accent still tinged with New England.
Pallone is 58 today. He’s a diversity trainer and motivational speaker. He preaches a message: always respect yourself, and others.
Ironic, because for years, Dave Pallone tried to run away from who he was. And he didn’t always respect himself.
“I knew I was different,” he says. “But it wasn’t until my first sexual encounter with another man, in Puerto Rico when I was 25, that I knew for sure.”
It was a bittersweet discovery. Pallone had finally solved his mystery, but he didn’t dare tell anyone.
Besides, there was a career dream to pursue.
Pallone told me that he was watching Curt Gowdy announce the MLB “Game of the Week” one Saturday afternoon, circa 1969. Sometime during the broadcast, Gowdy read a promo, soliciting young men to consider becoming umpires.
“It was like he was talking to me,” Pallone said. “From then, I wanted to be an umpire.”
His sexual orientation providing a constant, confusing backdrop, Pallone set out to be a baseball arbiter. He did the bush leagues and rode the buses, just like the players in the low minors. He ate the bad food and slept in the dirty motels. He was just like the guys with the gloves and bats—he was waiting to be discovered.
For his umpiring.
After the Puerto Rico encounter, Pallone would have been mortified to have been discovered as anything else.
The double life was on.
Pallone kept getting promoted for his umpiring. By 1978, he was entrenched in the International League—a Triple-A circuit just one step below the bigs.
Then the big league umpires went on strike.
It began in spring training, 1979, and there was no agreement by the time the regular season dawned.
Pallone was one of the umpires plucked from the minors to fill in.
It was his chance to fulfill his dream of rendering judgment on a big league diamond. He knew there’d be fallout—especially when the strike was settled and Pallone was one of the handful of umps who stayed.
“Scab” is an awful, sneer-inducing word. But in organized labor parlance, it fit Pallone like a glove. By accepting a full-time assignment to stay in the majors, Pallone in essence became a union buster. Of all the lines a man can cross, a picket line is among the most perilous.
When the “real” umpires returned after their labor dispute was settled, Pallone hunkered down. He knew it would likely be Hell for him.
He was wrong.
It was worse.
“There was absolutely no camaraderie,” Pallone said. “If I asked for help, like on a checked swing, they’d turn their back to me. They wouldn’t even walk out onto the field with me.”
This childish, overtly disrespectful treatment continued, Pallone estimates, for at least his first three seasons in the majors. It got better after that, but for his entire 10 years in the big leagues, he was never truly accepted—although Pallone’s three years spent on a crew with Bob Engel and Paul Runge (1983-85) were the least stressful.
And oh yeah, there was that double life thing happening, too.
It was so ironic—Pallone was ostracized, but not for what he feared would be the reason: the revelation that he was gay. If his fellow umpires only knew!
Dave Pallone kept wearing his mask, kept looking over his shoulder. At any moment he’d be found out. How long could a man keep such a secret?
Pallone made an analogy for the straight man. He likened it to being at a perpetual party, drinking underage, and living in constant fear that someone would find out that the ID you had was fake.
Yet Pallone pulled it off, year after year. Not once did he think of quitting—not when the other umpires treated him like excrement. Not when paranoia threatened to engulf him.
“This was my dream,” Pallone explained. “I worked hard to be a big league umpire. I wasn’t going to be driven out.”
Until the day that he was.
It wasn’t true, Pallone said then and says now of a story that was reported in 1988. It wasn’t true that he was part of some prostitution ring involving young men and boys. The facts agreed with him. The law absolved him.
But the damage was done. He had finally been “outed” as a gay man.
Major League Baseball paid him to leave. Never before had one of their men in blue been a confirmed homosexual. After some soul-searching, Pallone took the money and ran.
Ten years and out.
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t taken the money, and I had fought (baseball) in the courts,” Pallone told me. “But that would have been very costly and taken a very long time.”
He came out with a book, “Behind the Mask: My Double Life in Baseball,” in 1990. Shortly after leaving the game, he started on the speaking circuit.
Today, Pallone estimates that his speaking engagements are “60/40—60 percent college campuses, 40 percent corporate stuff.”
He talks of diversity and the respect thing and will lighten things up with some funny anecdotes about baseball.
Pallone and his partner, Keith, live in Colorado.
He doesn’t have to lie about that anymore.
(Dave’s website is www.davepallone.com)
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greg
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The last time the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup, they were the Black Hawks. Bobby Hull was still fuzzy-faced, and hadn’t even started wearing out No. 9 yet. He wore no. 16.
John F. Kennedy was president. Barack Obama hadn’t been born. Mary Tyler Moore was on television—as Dick Van Dyke’s wife.
We hadn’t figured out how to get to the moon. Hell, we were just getting the hang of floating a guy in space on a tether.
The Green Bay Packers hadn’t won a single NFL championship under Vince Lombardi. The Lions were good.
Norm Cash was using his illegal, cork-filled bat to hit .361. It was the same year Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris both threatened Babe Ruth’s single-season HR record.
There were still Edsels on the road. Ty Cobb was still alive.
The Pistons had just finished their first season in shiny new Cobo Arena. Dave DeBusschere was still playing for the University of Detroit.
“Gay” meant happy. Everyone smoked.
Hull was a 22-year-old kid in just his fourth season with the Black Hawks. He had most of his teeth and all of his hair.
We thought we had it bad in Detroit with the Red Wings, who went from 1955-1997 without a Cup. That was a mere 42 years.
The Blackhawks are going to win the 2010 Stanley Cup. It could be this week, or it might take them until early next.
They have a 2-0 series lead over the Philadelphia Flyers, who used up their city’s century’s worth of equity when they rallied from 0-3 down against the Boston Bruins. You come back from 0-3, you’ve used up your share of comebacks for the season—and beyond.
The Blackhawks are going to win this thing, and gone will be the 49-year drought. If you’re a Chicagoan, that’s two down, one to go. The White Sox, in 2005, ended their dry run that started in the early 20th century and overflowed into the early 21st.
All that’s left is the Cubs.
Don’t laugh.
The Black Hawks should have nipped this drought in the bud in 1971, when it was only 10 years old. They had a 3-2 series lead in the finals over the Montreal Canadiens, and a 2-0 lead in Game Seven—at home—but couldn’t seal the deal.
Jacques Lemaire got the Canadiens on the board in the Cup-deciding game with a shot he took from near Elgin that somehow eluded Tony Esposito. Momentum shifted like the winds at Candlestick Park in April.
But the Black Hawks blew it back in ‘71, which was a pattern with them. Since their ‘61 Cup, the Black Hawks went to five Finals and lost them all. Saturday night’s Game One victory was their first in the Finals since 1973.
It’s all ice under the bridge now. It’s Ollie, Ollie, Oxen Free. You can take all that ghoulish history and shove it in your five hole. The Blackhawks will be Stanley Cup Champions in a matter of days.
Every dog really does have his day. Blind squirrels find nuts after all. A broken franchise is still right twice a half-century.
The Blackhawks will be Cup champions for the first time since 1961. Someone get the Good Book and see if we’re one step closer to the Apocalypse.
This is for guys named Eric Nesterenko and Chico Maki and Pit Martin and Cliff Koroll and Mike Veisor. And for guys named Bill White and Dale Tallon and Phil Russell and Murray Bannerman.
Hell, it’s for Dennis Hull.
Some team was going to end a streak when these Finals were over. The Flyers haven’t won the Cup since 1975. And counting. But that makes more sense; they play in Philadelphia, where the Phillies are just now starting to win the World Series again after about 236 years of going without, where the Eagles are allergic to the Super Bowl and where the 76ers have just hired Doug Collins, for goodness sakes.
Get used to it, folks: Chicago Blackhawks, Stanley Cup Champions.
I don’t know—it’s still like cheese sauce on chocolate ice cream to me.
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greg
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The home of Michael Ilitch has become an historic landmark for high-profile departures.
It was almost 20 years ago—June, 1990—when Ilitch, the Red Wings owner, placed a phone call he dreaded making.
On the other end of the line, Jacques Demers was summoned to the Ilitch pad.
Shortly after Demers arrived, two grown men had a good cry.
Ilitch had bad news for Demers, who had then just completed his fourth season as Red Wings coach.
They call it the “ziggy” in Detroit. Our word for canning a coach. You can thank the old Lions coach, Joe Schmidt, for its creation.
Schmidt rendered a self-ziggy in January, 1973—the loser of a power struggle in the Lions’ front office with GM Russ Thomas.
Inside Ilitch’s home on that June day in 1990, the ziggy wasn’t self-inflicted at all.
Ilitch, ever the gentleman and consummate professional, could have told Demers over the phone that he was being released. He could have delivered the news via his agent. He could have mailed a certified letter—no e-mail or text messaging in those days.
Ilitch would have none of that. He had made a very difficult decision about a man who he adored, and so he was going to break that news in person, mano-a-mano.
Jacques Demers said he’d never forget the courtesy Ilitch gave him, the day the owner fired him as Red Wings coach.
Ilitch had a relationship with Demers that never was replicated with any other Red Wings coach, before or since. Just four years prior to the 1990 meeting at his house, Ilitch and his lieutenants had bent the rules in order to poach Demers from the St. Louis Blues. They’re still crying about it in St. Louie.
But in 1990, two years removed from Final Four status and after having missed the playoffs completely in 1989-90 (still the last time the Red Wings missed the post-season), Ilitch had come to the hardest decision—to that point—he ever made as Red Wings owner.
So he told Demers, in person, that the Red Wings were letting him go. Bryan Murray was pretty much already hired as Jacques’ replacement.
Demers’s respect for Ilitch, already off the charts, grew even greater in the wake of how Demers’s cashiering was handled.
Twenty years after that teary meeting, another took place in the Ilitch home.
Steve Yzerman—Stevie Y, forever a Red Wing—was telling the owner, practically a father figure, that he was accepting the Tampa Bay Lightning’s offer to be their new GM.
It’s a safe bet that the eyes of Mike and Marian Ilitch and Yzerman were far from dry.
But Yzerman, who has learned so much from so many within the Red Wings organization, proved that he learned something from the old man owner.
Yzerman could have taken the less uncomfortable path to deliver his news, just as Ilitch could have, when he fired Jacques Demers.
Nothing doing.
Yzerman had made a big decision in his own right, and so it would have to be delivered in person—even more impressive considering all the ways people can be gotten ahold of in this digital age.
No e-mails. No texts. No hurried-through calls from a cell phone.
In person. Face-to-face. Man-to-man.
That’s the only way Steve Yzerman would have it. Reports say that Ilitch wasn’t the only one Yzerman met in person, saying goodbye.
Yzerman wasn’t raised by Mike Ilitch or the Detroit Red Wings.
But this is where he became a man.
Even better.
