Red Wings Now Just Another Hockey Team

It was the summer of 1990, and Mike Ilitch made a phone call. Then he got into a car and made the executioner’s sojourn.

It was the same type of visit that Bill Davidson had once made to Dick Vitale’s house, some 10+ years earlier. Inside the Vitale residence, the Pistons owner rendered the ziggy to his coach, pulling the plug on Dickie before the coach and de facto GM could do any further damage to the Pistons brand.

In 1990, Ilitch phoned Jacques Demers and before long the Red Wings owner was at his coach’s house, to render an emotional ziggy.

Four summers prior, Ilitch, with GM Jimmy Devellano as his muscle, shanghaied Demers from the St. Louis Blues. The Blues were becoming a force, and no small credit was given to Demers, the coach, for the upswing. The Red Wings were coming off a dreadful 17-57-6 season, and had burned through two coaches (Harry Neale and Brad Park); the latter’s relationship with Devellano being described as “like oil and water”—by Devellano himself.

So Ilitch went after Demers, hard, and the Red Wings might have bent some tampering rules in their zeal. The Blues cried foul, but the Red Wings ended up with Demers in the summer of 1986.

Under Jacques Demers, the Red Wings went from laughing stock to the NHL’s version of the Final Four in each of Jacques’ first two seasons. Both times they were dumped out by the mighty Edmonton Oilers.

There was a step backward in 1989 (first round playoff exit), but Ilitch stuck with Demers—even though a disturbing incident involving Red Wings players acting out at an Edmonton bar called Goose Loonies in the 1988 playoffs still rubbed some nerves raw in the team’s hierarchy.

But there had been no playoffs for the Red Wings in the 1989-90 season. This was no step backward—this was a flat out fail. It was whispered that Demers was no longer connecting with his players. The dreaded tuning out.

So Ilitch made the phone call. And the journey, to Demers’ house. Inside, in what was described by both men as a wet-eyed meeting, Ilitch relieved Demers of his coaching job.

That was almost 23 years ago. The Red Wings haven’t missed the playoffs since.

Not only have they not missed the playoffs, the Red Wings have been strong Stanley Cup contenders for most of the past 21 seasons. Rarely did a spring go by where the hockey folks didn’t include the Red Wings on their short list of teams who could win it all.

In baseball, even the iconic New York Yankees haven’t gone the past 21 years as solid World Series contenders. No team in the NBA has been championship caliber every year since 1992. The San Francisco 49ers just snapped a 17-year Super Bowl appearance famine, and no NFL team has been “all that” for the past 21 years.

Yet here are the Red Wings, constantly finishing in the Top 10 of the league standings. Sometimes they’d win a Cup along the way—four times since 1997, in fact.

Not anymore.

We knew it wouldn’t be easy, with Nicklas Lidstrom taking his magic stick and his perfection and retiring to Sweden. We knew there’d be some struggling, with fellow defenseman Brad Stuart no longer around to add a steady physical presence.

We knew the front of the net would never be the same again, with the retirement of Tomas Holmstrom. We figured age might catch up with the players still around.

Sometimes it’s no fun to be right.

The Red Wings, after losing another at home on Friday to the Anaheim Ducks, are 7-5-2, but that’s just the NHL’s roundabout way of saying that the Wings are 7-7—seven wins, five regulation losses and two more losses in extra time (overtime and/or shootout).  

Too often scoring goals is like pulling teeth—which is ironic, because in hockey, teeth aren’t pulled so much as they are knocked out.

The power play is often that in name only. Time was that you’d give the Red Wings an extra skater and it was like giving the Grim Reaper an extra sickle. Now, you take a penalty against the Red Wings with barely any impunity.

Players have been dropping like flies, which hasn’t helped.

Even line changes have become an adventure. Coach Mike Babcock has been yelling at his assistants almost as much as his players.

Turnovers are becoming commonplace. No more are the pinpoint, lasered breakout passes from behind the blue line to a forward past mid-ice, in stride.

The Red Wings used to play a selfish brand of hockey—meaning that they never let the other team have the puck. They cycled and passed and it was like watching the Harlem Globetrotters with the basketball during “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

It’s become so hard for the Red Wings now.

No longer do teams step onto the Joe Louis Arena ice shaking in their skating boots. Gone is the intimidation factor at The Joe. The crowds are still sellouts but it’s a polite crowd nowadays—19,000+ who are sitting on their hands too often.

We knew it wasn’t going to be the same this season, but for a long time it was all conjecture, thanks to the labor lockout. The hockey season was always somewhere over there, past the horizon.

Then the labor strife was over and the NHL started playing games again, and all of Hockeytown’s fears are being realized.

The Red Wings are an ordinary team, no longer one of the league’s bullies. They win on some nights, lose on others. They are 7-7 and it befits them.

We knew it wasn’t going to be a cakewalk to the playoffs and that a long post-season run was anything but a given.

We knew all this, but it doesn’t make it any easier to see the Red Wings, certainly one of the best franchises in all of pro sports, morph into a pedestrian unit.

The 21-year playoff streak is in more jeopardy than a nerd’s lunch money on his walk to school.

The Red Wings win, the Red Wings lose. Comme ci, comme ça.

There hasn’t been so-so hockey played in Detroit since 1990.

How are you adapting?

Red Wings’ Annual Cup Contention Began With Four-Eyed Frenchman

The last time the Red Wings failed to qualify for the playoffs, we were in the midst of President Bush I and the “Bad Boy” Pistons had only won one championship and Dennis Rodman wasn’t weird yet.

We hadn’t quite shaken off the after effects of the 1980s. Miley Cyrus’s dad wasn’t even popular yet. No one had heard of Bill Clinton, outside his home state of Arkansas.

It may seem like ancient history to some, but there was actually a time where we didn’t expect the Red Wings to be in the thick of things when it came to the Stanley Cup playoffs. A time where a first round exit or even a conference final failure wasn’t cause for heightened security around the Ambassador Bridge or a spike in the sale of razor blades.

Or before Detroit goalies did things like cry in front of their locker (Chris Osgood, 1994) or publicly declare suicidal feelings (Manny Legace, 2006).

I’ll end your suspense: it was 1990.

It sometimes gets boring, writing about the Red Wings and their nearly twenty-year reign as the most successful franchise in hockey. We keyboard mashers and the quote-unquote experts wearing headsets and jabbering into microphones think it much more interesting when the teams we cover, founder.

So it was 1990 when the Red Wings couldn’t manage even a fourth place finish in their division, thus finding themselves on the outside looking in when the playoff party began.

A couple months later, the bespectacled French-Canadian coach spoke in tears to the media.
“Mr. Ilitch and I both had a good cry,” Jacques Demers said. “But he was a man about it. I respect that about him.”

Demers was speaking of his getting the ziggy, and the manner in which he received it.

A phone call came from Red Wings owner Michael Ilitch, asking for a face-to-face meeting. It was mid-June. Ilitch told his coach not to bother leaving; he’d be over to his place.

Inside Demers’s home, Ilitch, in an emotional moment according to both men, told Jacques that he would no longer be coaching the Red Wings.

“I love Jacques Demers,” Ilitch told the media. “And I always will love Jacques Demers.”

Ilitch called the firing one of the most difficult things he ever had to do in his life.

But both men agreed that it had to be done.

Ilitch was probably emotional because if it wasn’t for Demers, Lord knows where the owner’s hockey franchise would be. And I mean today, let alone 1990.

Four years prior, in 1986, Ilitch was heading into his fifth year of ownership and things were arguably worse than when he bought the team. And things were so bad when Bruce Norris sold to Ilitch that we didn’t think it could be any worse.

We were wrong.

The ’85-’86 Wings went 17-57-6. They gave up 415 goals. Yeah.

Ilitch, along with GM Jimmy Devellano, tried patching the roster with cheap, veteran free agents shortly after Ilitch bought the team. That didn’t work so well. So with the farm system still not developing quality players, the strategy changed to hiring higher profile free agents and those fresh out of college.

That worked even less.

So in the summer of 1986, Ilitch, at his wit’s end, looked within his own division and saw how the rival St. Louis Blues responded to their coach who resembled Inspector Clouseau. The spunky Frenchman Jacques Demers.

Ilitch shanghaied Demers from St. Louis, causing some rancor and ill will. But Ilitch didn’t much care about whether he ruffled the Blues’ feathers. He had himself a disaster in Detroit, and needed relief NOW.

Demers bounced into town, made 21-year-old Steve Yzerman his captain (that worked out pretty well) and preached work ethic, defense, and team.


Demers made the 21-year-old Yzerman his captain shortly after becoming coach in Detroit

The Red Wings made it to the conference finals in Demers’ first year, doubling their win total to 34. Demers won the Jack Adams Award for coach of the year.

The next year, the Wings won 41 games and again made it to the Final Four. And Demers won the Adams award again. He won it because he guided the Red Wings into the third round despite losing Yzerman to a knee injury in March.

In Year Three, the Wings won the division, albeit with a pedestrian .500 record. They lost in the first round of the playoffs.

In Year Four, no playoffs. Then came the ziggy, as Ilitch, with Demers’ agreement, felt that another coach would be needed to shove the team up another notch.

Later it was reported that Demers was on thin ice—no pun intended—ever since an unfortunate incident during the 1988 playoffs, in Edmonton. The now infamous Goose Loonies bar debacle, where several players were seen partying into the wee hours, the night before a game that the team lost, dumping them out of the playoffs.

That fall, Bob Probert got busted at the Detroit-Windsor border with drugs. Maybe not Demers’ fault, but combined with the Goose Loonies thing, it gave the impression that Jacques wasn’t the disciplinarian the Red Wings needed.

So Ilitch had his tearful goodbye with Demers in June 1990. In Washington, the Capitals had just canned longtime coach Bryan Murray. Ilitch decided on a swap: Demers for Murray.

Bryan Murray was hired, despite concern that his teams in Washington couldn’t win in the playoffs. Concern that would be validated in Detroit. Concern that would, three years later, lead to Murray’s own cashiering. But without tears.

The Red Wings though, were on their way. They hired Scotty Bowman, and he took the franchise the rest of the way home, to Stanley Cup land. To “Hockeytown.”

But if Mike Ilitch doesn’t hire Jacques Demers in 1986, who in turn made Yzerman his captain at an aggressively young age, the fortunes of the Red Wings may not have been as rich as they currently remain.

We’re spoiled in, ahem, Hockeytown. We demand Stanley Cups, and are offended when the Red Wings don’t contend for them seriously. We’ve become Montreal, the way Montreal used to be.
Oh, and speaking of the Canadiens—the last time they won the Stanley Cup was in 1993. Their coach? Jacques Demers.

Ironic, eh, that we should have become like the French-Canadians with their hockey, since it all started with the four-eyed Frenchy named Jacques Clouseau—I mean, Demers?