Red Wings Try To Forget Pain Of ‘95, ‘96 Defeats

For Steve Yzerman the Campbell Bowl, awarded to the winners of the Western Conference finals, brought back too many painful memories.

The Red Wings won the bowl in 1995, too. Yzerman, when handed the bowl on that occasion, hoisted it over his head. He turned, beaming joyously as the crowd in Joe Louis Arena showered the team with cheers.

“The last time we won it, it was the first time for everybody and we were pretty excited,” said forward Darren McCarty.

The 1995 euphoria didn’t last, however. Detroit was swept in the finals by the New Jersey Devils.

But the story gets worse.

The Red Wings bring a lot of heavy baggage to this year’s finals with the Philadelphia Flyers, which open Saturday.

Last year, the Red Wings scored goals by the truckload as they won an NHL-record 62 games. Yet they didn’t reach the Cup finals, eliminated instead in six games by the Avalanche in the conference finals.

“You realize that finishing second means absolutely nothing,” Yzerman said.

And it’s not just the players on this team who are suffering. It’s the entire franchise. The Red Wings, after all, have not won a Cup championship since 1955. Their 42-year drought is the longest in the NHL.

“We haven’t won anything yet,” said Brendan Shanahan, one of many players brought in to change that. “We knocked off the defending champions, but that doesn’t make us champions, yet.”

Fans in this title-hungry town seem to feel this, too. They roared after Monday night’s 3-1 triumph sent the defending champion Avalanche packing. Yet there wasn’t so much as a single octopus tossed on the ice. True, the slimy sea creatures - an old playoff tradition in Detroit - were banned by the NHL this year. But almost everybody expected at least one or two would be pirated past security.

“The way the city and the state has supported this team, it will be chaos for the entire summer if we win it,” said goalie Mike Vernon, who has a hard-earned 1.17 goals against average during these playoffs.

It is a minor miracle that Vernon is even on this team. Two years ago, he was labeled as the fall guy after Detroit was swept by the Devils. This year, the Red Wings made sweeping changes. The emphasis was on getting bigger, stronger and younger.

Detroit was no longer interested in scoring a ton of goals and winning regular season titles. Playoff hockey is different. So the Red Wings threw all their energies into becoming a better playoff team.

Popular players like Paul Coffey, Dino Ciccarelli and Keith Primeau were sent packing. They were replaced by players like Shanahan, Martin Lapointe and Larry Murphy.

For most of the season, Chris Osgood was Detroit’s regular goalie. It looked for all the world as though Vernon might also be traded. But Scotty Bowman, trying to become the first coach to win Cup championships with three different teams, went with Vernon in the playoffs.

“It’s been a long year for us,” Vernon said. “But we keep getting better as a team. We keep gaining more and more confidence.”