Red Wings Aim to Join Group of Elite Teams

The game was just an exhibition, but don’t tell that to Darren McCarty, who sported a red welt under his right eye from a fight with Carolina center Keith Primeau.

McCarty is passionate about the game and knows others on the Detroit Red Wings feed off his intensity.

“You don’t have to question our team about whether we’re going to be hungry or going to want to play,” he says.

If things go right for the Red Wings, they could do something few NHL teams have done: win a third straight Stanley Cup championship. It isn’t something McCarty and his teammates dwell on, but they’ve clearly thought about it.

“That’s not our main motivation, to say let’s three-peat,” McCarty says. “We want to win because we want to win. We know what it’s like to win. We know what it’s like not to win. We want to keep this winning feeling going.”

Only five times in NHL history have teams won three or more championships in a row, and no team has done it since the New York Islanders took four straight from 1980-83.

There have been some mighty good teams since then, too. The Edmonton Oilers, with Wayne Gretzky in his prime, won the Cup four times in five years between 1984-88. The Pittsburgh Penguins, with Mario Lemieux, won the Cup in 1991 and 1992, but got sidetracked by Montreal on the way to the finals in 1993.

Red Wings defenseman Larry Murphy played with those Pittsburgh teams and says he thinks the ’93 team was the best of the three.

“You can’t take anything for granted,” he says. “A lot of things just have to go your way in order to win the Cup. That could happen with this team, that it could be the best team in the last three years and yet not win.”

But this team is virtually unchanged from the one that swept the Washington Capitals in the finals last spring. About the only unknown appears to be coach Scotty Bowman. He has missed training camp and will probably miss the early part of the season while recovering from heart and knee surgery.

The 65-year-old Bowman has said he’s leaning toward returning for a shot at an unprecedented ninth championship. That would break the record he shares with his mentor, Toe Blake. Associate coaches Barry Smith and Dave Lewis are running the team in Bowman’s absence.

When the Red Wings finally broke through in 1997, it had been 42 years since their last Cup title.

But the joy was shattered six days later when a limousine accident seriously injured defenseman Vladimir Konstantinov and trainer Sergei Mnatsakanov. The Red Wings, despite a 59-game holdout by high-scoring Sergei Fedorov, dedicated themselves in 1998 to winning another championship for their two injured comrades.

Mnatsakanov is paralyzed on his left side and uses a wheelchair. Konstantinov, recovering from severe head injuries, took a few tentative steps across the stage during the Red Wings’ victory rally in June.

Both attended a farewell last month for Vyacheslav Fetisov, who retired and took a coaching job with the New Jersey Devils.

So what do the Red Wings use for motivation now? Senior vice president Jimmy Devellano, who helped build those great Islanders teams in the early ‘80s, believes a place in history might be enough motivation.

“Three straight championships would certainly make them the greatest team in the history of Detroit sports,” Devellano says.

None of the four Detroit teams has ever managed a three-peat. The Lions won the NFL championship in 1952 and 1953, but lost the 1954 title game to Cleveland. The Pistons lost in seven games to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1988 NBA finals, then won the next two championships.

The Red Wings, who have won the Cup nine times, won successive titles in 1936-1937 and again in 1954-1955.

“Good teams have won one. Some outstanding teams have won two in a row. Very few have won three,” captain Steve Yzerman says. “It’s a difficult thing to do because everybody’s got to stay healthy, and pucks bounce a lot of strange ways. You can’t control everything.”

Strong competition will probably come from Dallas and Colorado, but the Red Wings controlled what they could this year.

Uwe Krupp was brought in to stabilize a defense that lost Bob Rouse and Dmitri Mironov to free agency, in addition to Fetisov.

Team chemistry was so important to general manager Ken Holland that he used draft picks to get back Doug Brown from Nashville after the Predators took him in the expansion draft.

“I was always a Red Wing,” says Brown, who never told his children they might be moving to Tennessee. “Kenny has really tried to keep the same team here.”

If nothing else, the Red Wings could possibly carve their niche in history on character alone.

An example: Igor Larionov, one of three Russians on the team, waited until Labor Day to take his turn keeping the Stanley Cup for a few days. He waited so his newborn son could be photographed in the silver bowl atop the trophy.

“He fell asleep in it,” Larionov says.