TERRY EGAN Dallas Morning News
In a time of monumental greed, in a game dominated more than ever by free agency and player movement, the Detroit Red Wings just might have built the last dynasty Theirs is a team laced with talent, intelligence and a willingness to sacrifice personal glory for team success.
The Red Wings won 62 games, a National Hockey League regular-season record, without a player in the top 10 in the league's scoring race. Sergei Fedorov, who perhaps could challenge Mario Lemieux in the pursuit of goals, is instead the game's best two-way player Steve Yzerman, who six times has scored more than 100 points, thinks a Stanley Cup championship is better than a scoring title. Dino Ciccarelli, a proud man who could help many teams, quietly accepted less playing time in exchange for a run at the Cup.
They also know this: last season, they made the Stanley Cup finals and were swept by the New Jersey Devils, hollow success indeed. Detroit hasn't won the Stanley Cup since 1955, the longest drought in the NHL. Fair or unfair, anything less than a title this year is marked down as a failure.
But it can't detract from what has been built in Detroit: a team that has been successful for most of the last decade, a team that should dominate for much of the next decade.
FROM RAGS TO RICHES
This story must start on June 22,1982, Jimmy Lites had just married a woman named Denise Hitch, and they were honeymooning. Jimmy Devellano was a hot-shot scout with the New York Islanders looking for a general manager's job. And Mike Hitch was a millionaire in the pizza business closing a deal to buy the Red Wings.
The Red Wings, at this point in the story, were dogs. Dogs with no bite and not much bark, either. The team had failed to make the playoffs in 11 of the previous 12 seasons, 14 of the previous 16, and 16 of the previous 18. And in those days, only five teams failed to make the playoffs.
Hitch decided to change that. He wanted the best hockey man he could find. He was told to interview three people: David Poile, who has averaged more than 37 wins a season as general manager of the Washington Capitals the last 15 years; Red Berenson, who has since built an impressive hockey program as coach of the University of Michigan; and Devellano.
Devellano, 39, had been head scout and run the farm system for the expansion Islanders since 1972. Along with Bill Torrey, Devellano was instrumental in drafting and developing the players who led the Islanders to four consecutive Stanley Cup championships from 1980-83.
“I think that Jimmy Devellano is the best evaluator of 18-year-old talent there is in the world,” said Lites, who spent 11 years working for the Red Wings and now is president of the Dallas Stars.
By the third of the four Cups won by the Islanders, Devellano was looking to strike out on his own. and he won the Red Wings' job in the summer of 1982.
He had what he calls an eight-year plan to rebuild the Red Wings, but more importantly, he had an idea of how an organization should be constructed.
“I had read a lot about the Brooklyn Dodgers and the O'Malley family and the importance of stability and a strong farm system,” Devellano said. “I tried to do that here. I deliberately tried to pattern our organization after that team.” He also surrounded himself with talent, and not just on the ice. In his tenure in Detroit, the Red Wings have employed Bryan Murray, now general manager for the Florida Panthers; Colin Campbell, now coach of the New York Rangers; Barry Melrose, who led the Los Angeles Kings to the Stanley Cup finals in his rookie year as an NHL coach: Doug MacLean, who as a rookie coach for the Panthers has that team in the playoffs for the first tune; and Ken Holland, an assistant general manager with the Red Wings who many say is one of the best young executives in the game today And there was one other.
In his final years with the Islanders, Devellano gave a job to a kid who was an Islanders' draft choice, but never made it to the NHL as a player. The kid just wanted to get into arenas. to see games, to try to carve out a career in the NHL. Devellano brought him on as an unpaid scout, then hired him in Detroit in 1982 as head of professional scouting. Soon, Neil Smith became director of the Red Wings' entire farm system.
Devellano and Smith were an unparalleled tandem when it came to spotting talent. And they had the foresight and luck that winners need.
It is true that a team so fallible afforded Devellano and Smith a lot of high draft choices, but here is what they did with those choices:
■ Drafted Steve Yzerman (first round). Bob Probert (third). Petr Klima and Joe Kocur (fifth) and Stu Grimson (10th) in the 1983 entry draft.
■ Drafted Shawn Burr in the first round in 1984.
■ Drafted Joe Murphy (first round), Adam Graves (second) and Tim Cheveldae (fourth) in 1986.
And then they decided to be bold.
SPANNING THE GLOBE
In the late 1980s, the Cold War stiff lingering, many of the better teams—the Calgary Flames, New Jersey—would spend late-round picks on the rights to Russian players. There was no way to get the players out of Russia and into the NHL. but Devellano thought drafting them was smart, anyway, especially for his team.
“We were so weak.” Devellano said. “We were such a bad team, they weren't making enough players in the United States and Canada to help us out. We had to go worldwide. And then we lucked out.”
As Branch Rickey said: “Luck is the residue of design.”
Devellano hired a full-time European scout, the first NHL team to do that. He gathered all his scouts together in 1989.
“I said, ‘Look, this year we're going to take the best 18-year-old player in Russia,' ” Devellano said. “I didn't care about what position he played or anything else. In a country of how many millions of people, common sense told me the best 18-year-old had to be a super-star, and we were going to take him.”
In the 1989 entry draft, Detroit took Mike Sillinger in the first round, Sweden's Niklas Lidstrom in the third, and Sergei Fedorov in the fourth, the highest a Russian had ever been drafted by an NHL team. They also picked Dallas Drake in the sixth round and, in the 11th, another Russian, Vladimir Konstantinov.
“I begged them to take Lidstrom in the third round,” Smith said. “You couldn't take an 18-year-old after the third round, so I begged them to take him that high. If we waited until the next year, we would have had to draft him very early. So, in one year, we got Lidstrom in the third and Fedorov in the fourth.”
What you would call a pretty good draft day “The next year,” Devellano said, “I told our scouts we were going to take the best 18-year-old Russian, and we were going to do it before the third round. Keep in mind, we still couldn't get them out of Russia. But by that time we were winning some divisions, having some success. We thought the world might change, and we could always kidnap them.”
In the first round in 1990. the Red Wings took Keith Primeau. In the third, they got Vyacheslav Kozlov. They did not take a Russian by the name of Sergei Nemchinov, whom Smith wanted the year before. Instead, Smith, the new New York Rangers' general manager, took him in the 12th round for his team.
The residue of design:
“We did a lot of research on the Russian players and the Russian government and culture,” Lites said. “There were a lot of bribes and secret meetings in the woods.
“One of the best decisions (Devellano) ever made was that Detroit was a year ahead of everyone else in Russia. And Neil knew the talent and drafted it.”
Lites, according to Devellano and Smith, was instrumental in keeping his father-in-law committed to strengthening the organization. That meant spending a lot of money to get the Russians to the United States. It meant smoothing over inevitable organizational squabbles.
“I threw myself on grenades” on several occasions, Lites said. Perhaps the biggest was convincing Hitch that a deal to send Jimmy Carson (a Hitch favorite) to L. A. for All-Star defenceman Paul Coffey could not be nixed.
Bryan Murray also was pivotal in the budding of this team. A shrewd trader, he brought Ray Sheppard to Detroit, and Sheppard, before being dealt for Igor Larionov, was a 50-goal scorer for the Red Wings. Murray traded Kocur to the Rangers for Kevin Miller, and Miller became Dino Ciccarelli in a later trade with Washington.
Murray made the Carson-for-Coffey deal. He worked with Lites to get Konstantinov out of Russia. And, as coach, he may have jeopardized his own career by insisting on patience, with the Russian players, who needed time to adapt to the NHL style.
THE ARRIVAL OF BOWMAN
The last piece to the puzzle was Scotty Bowman. It's true Hitch was ready to hire Mike Keenan before the 1993-94 season. Devellano and Lites talked him out of that and into hiring Bowman, who has won seven Stanley Cups and is the winningest coach in NHL history Keenan was instead hired by Smith in New York, and the Rangers won the Stanley Cup that year. But Keenan lasted just that one year, and Bowman “puts personalities together better than anyone,” Lites said.
Loaded with stars, Bowman brought important role players to the Red Wings — Bob Rouse, Mike Ramsey, Doug Brown and Bob Errey.
“Now,” Devellano said, “I hope we're at the final level.”
He clicked off the litany of success his team has had:
“In the last nine years, we have six first-place division finishes. Two times we finished second. Only one time did we bottom out and not make the playoffs.
“We have three consecutive Western Conference championships,” Devellano said. “Two consecutive Presidents Trophies (best regular-season record) and a trip to the Stanley Cup finals last year.”
Detroit also set an NHL attendance record in 1993-94, averaging 19.820 fans per game. The Red Wings consistently draw above capacity (using standing room), and they are considered the most successful franchise in the league.
After this record regular season, they are heavy favorites to win it all.
Despite all that success, you don't have to look far for non-believers.
“I was surprised they came back so strong after the way they finished last season,” Smith said of the Red Whigs' 0-4 showing in the finals last year.
Oh. yes, the Stanley Cup drought, now 41 years old, is the longest such mark in the league.
“Unfortunately for us, we won't get the recognition this type of team deserves,” Devellano said, “unless we win the Stanley Cup.”