The NHL / Jerry Crowe : Team Kings Beat at Forum Wasn’t Real Norris Champion Red Wings

You’ll have to excuse the newly crowned Norris Division champion for spending more time celebrating last week in Los Angeles than preparing for a relatively meaningless game against the Kings.

Just two seasons ago, when they lost a club-record 57 games, the Detroit Red Wings had the worst record in the National Hockey League.

They were known, not always affectionately, as the Dead Wings.

No more.

Last season’s 34-36-10 record was the Red Wings’ best in 14 seasons, but their ride through the playoffs to the Campbell Conference finals was attributed almost as much to the ineptitude of the Norris Division as to the improvement of the Red Wings.

This season, though, the ersatz Dead Wings have moved into the NHL’s upper echelon.

From Dec. 27, when they lost to the Minnesota North Stars to fall out of first place with a 15-16-4 record, to last Thursday, when they clinched their first division championship in 23 years, the Red Wings were 24-8-5.

And, after Steve Yzerman, their captain and leading scorer, went down with a season-ending knee injury March 1, they didn’t lose until the division title was wrapped up, going 7-0-1.

“The last five games, they played the best I’ve ever seen our team play,” Yzerman, a five-year veteran, said last week before the Red Wings’ 7-4 loss to the Kings.

Most observers attribute the turnaround to Coach Jacques Demers, who was spirited away from the St. Louis Blues in the summer of 1986 and was the NHL coach of the year last season.

Yzerman, though, said the credit should be spread around.

“Jacques has had a lot to do with it,” he said. “He’s an excellent coach and he’s really motivated our team. He gets guys to play hard. But we’ve had some young players really develop--like (Steve) Chiasson and (Jeff) Sharples, (Bob) Probert, Shawn Burr. These guys have really developed into excellent hockey players.

“Last year, we were considered just a hard-working team without much talent. With these young guys coming up, we’re a very talented team.”

But are they ready to challenge for the Stanley Cup?

“I haven’t seen anything that’s told me we couldn’t,” said Jim Pavese, who was obtained in a trade with the New York Rangers two weeks ago. “Sometimes it comes down to the right team at the right time. Maybe it’s Detroit’s time. I wouldn’t be surprised.”

According to Sports Illustrated, Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics revealed for the first time in a speech last month that when he gazes into the rafters before games at Boston Garden, he fixes his eyes not on the Celtics’ 16 championship banners, but on the retired No. 4 that belonged to the Bruins’ Bobby Orr.

Bird went on to say that he had met Orr only once and had never seen him play, but that he had heard how great he was as a player and learned how much Bostonians admired him as a person.

Orr, who was in the audience and unaware of Bird’s feelings, reportedly was so overwhelmed that he was brought to tears.

“My God,” Orr said. “My God.”

Vyacheslav Koloskov, director of the Soviet hockey program, said last week he fears that, should they be allowed to join NHL teams next season, Soviet players would become “targets” for NHL enforcers.

“You know what these games sometimes turn into,” Koloskov said in an interview with Lawrence Martin of the Toronto Globe and Mail. “And, of course, each of the professionals will test our hockey players for toughness.

“Those who are more clever, I think, would be better to play in Japan, Switzerland or Austria. From a sporting point of view, however, they want to test themselves at the highest level.”

Koloskov also said that the “sporting passion” that prompts Soviets to want to play in the NHL “goes away very quickly when one gets under the conditions of NHL activity. One has to play a minimum of 80 games per year--80 tough games, and in every game there’s a battle.”

Koloskov said that 90% of NHL games are “mediocre” but, because of advanced marketing skills, the league is able to fill its arenas.

Forgettable quote: During his team’s club-record 15-game winless streak this season, Borje Salming of the Toronto Maple Leafs said: “Everyone is down because we’re losing, but I still believe this team can do a lot of damage, as we showed in the playoffs the last couple of years. I believe we can win the Stanley Cup.”

After losing to Vancouver Canucks, 5-3, Tuesday night, the Maple Leafs are 20-45-10 and only two points ahead of the Minnesota North Stars, who have the worst record in the NHL.

Darren Pang, the Chicago Blackhawks’ 5-foot 5-inch rookie goaltender, is so popular in Chicago that the Blackhawks’ other goaltender, Bob Mason, is booed whenever he is introduced as the starter at Chicago Stadium.

Pang is also a hit with reporters, who have found his self-depreciating humor--”Hey, I sign autographs for 12- and 13-year-olds bigger than me”--to be a delight.

Until about a year ago, though, Pang worried that he might spend his career buried in the minors. It got so bad at one point that he phoned Blackhawk General Manager Bob Pulford and told him that, in case the Blackhawks needed another goaltender, Pang was alive and well and playing for the team’s International Hockey League affiliate at Saginaw, Mich.

“I just wanted to make sure he knew where I was,” Pang told the Sporting News.

Pulford’s reaction?

“I heard a little chuckle in the background,” Pang said.

The last laugh belongs to Pang, whose No. 40 is the second-most popular Blackhawk jersey at Chicago Stadium souvenir stands behind Denis Savard’s No. 18.