Seems as though Red Wings coach Mike Babcock has been picking the brain of hockey's Yoda, Scotty Bowman. Not a bad choice, considering all the Stanley Cups won and the players broken down -- both analyzed and demoralized. Besides, Bowman is still employed by the Red Wings as a consultant, so why not have him earn his money from time-to-time?
Helene St. James, in today's Freep, related some tidbits of conversation between the coaches of present and past.
"I told him, '[Steve] Yzerman is the ultimate team player,' " Bowman said of one of his discussions with Babcock. Additionally, St. James wrote, Bowman remembered telling Babcock to be "upfront with Yzerman about where he would fit in."
Bowman ought to know.
For it was after Bowman's first season in Detroit, with the coach a clear-cut winner in an internal power struggle, that Steve Yzerman was whispered to be the target of Scotty's wrath the summer after a horrific first-round playoff loss to the San Jose Sharks. The captain, we were being told, was being dangled in front of the then-awful Ottawa Senators as trade bait. It was more than just rumor, as it turned out.
Yzerman was, in 1994, a 29 year-old who was still an elite scorer in the league and not necessarily known for being a two-way player -- although he was by then widely regarded as a premier faceoff man. Although he was coming off a down year offensively -- 24 goals and 58 assists in just 58 games -- he was only one season removed from a banner '92-93 campaign (58 goals, 79 assists). He could score, everyone recognized, but some questioned Yzerman's ability to be a two-way forward who could consistently help the team on the backcheck and in the neutral zone -- defensively.
One of those questioners was Scotty Bowman.
So as training camp approached in 1994, rumors swirled of Yzerman's impending dispatching to Ottawa, the province where is father had been a prominent politician. Who the Red Wings were to receive in such a trade was unclear, leading to speculation that it was mostly talk, encouraged by Bowman, forever the master of the reverse psychology method of motivating.
In Bowman's first season, the team operated under the odd and ultimately disastrous hierarchy of Vice President Jimmy Devellano, General Manager Bryan Murray (the deposed coach who was kicked upstairs upon Bowman's hiring), and Coach Bowman. It wasn't long before the old coach/new GM and the new coach/wannabe GM clashed, and the players could see it readily. Eventually, there were players who went to Murray with their concerns about Bowman, and those who remained in the coach's corner. It made for an unharmonious dressing room all season.
Murray and Bowman went weeks without speaking. A late-season trade that exchanged goaltenders -- Tim Cheveldae to Winnipeg for Bob Essensa -- was reportedly made by Murray with little or no consultation with Bowman.
The first-round upset at the hands of the Sharks may have been the last straw for Murray's tenure in Detroit. The fact that Essensa -- the man Murray brought in to "solve" the team's apparent goaltending weakness while also ridding the JLA denizens of whipping boy Cheveldae -- played so poorly down the stretch and earlier in the series that rookie Chris Osgood started Game 7, didn't help the GM's situation.
The power struggle won, Bowman assumed dual roles of GM and coach -- a consolidation of power he relished and had before, in Montreal and Pittsburgh. It was with this newly-acquired autonomy that he stoked the fires of a possible Yzerman trade. The Red Wings hadn't won anything, really, with Steve Yzerman as their captain, Bowman reasoned, so what harm would there be if he was moved?
Meanwhile, Bowman used the trade rumors to encourage Yzerman to buy into the notion of the center being less of a scorer and more of a defender. If Yzerman did that, the theory went, then the rest of the team would follow suit and overall team defense would improve.
There was a labor dispute that wiped out the first half of the '94-95 season, but once play resumed, the Red Wings -- with their new emphasis on defense and a new goalie (Mike Vernon) -- reached the Stanley Cup Finals. The following season, the team set an NHL record with 62 wins.
From then on, Yzerman switched roles gradually, until he became a Selke Trophy winner as the league's best defensive forward in 2000. And the Red Wings won three Stanley Cups between 1997 and 2002.
Now, whether Bowman's Ottawa threat was an example of being "upfront", as he encouraged Babcock to be with Yzerman, is very much up to conjecture. But there's no quibbling with the results.
Yoda always did know best.
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