A lot of my early memories of the Detroit Red Wings were painful ones. Watching the Wings in the late 1970s and much of the 1980s was frustrating, to say the least. The days of Gordie Howe, Terry Sawchuk, and the 1950s dynasty were long gone, and the Steve Yzerman-Nicklas Lidstrom teams of the 1990s and 2000s were still a long way away.
There never was, and never will be, another player like Howe. He had had plenty of help in the early 1950s, when Detroit won the Stanley Cup four times in six seasons while wearing those simple, classic, red-and-white uniforms with the winged wheel, a design that’s changed little to the present day.
But when I began watching them, I didn’t realize that the Red Wings were headed for their own low ebb. Despite the presence of stars such as Marcel Dionne and Mickey Redmond in the 1970s, and John Ogrodnick and a young Yzerman in the ’80s, the Red Wings were lost in the NHL wilderness for most of those two decades.
It took a while after Mike Ilitch bought the team, but, by the 1990s, the Red Wings were relevant again. By the middle of the decade, they were in the Stanley Cup Final for the first time in 30 years, and, in 1997, the Cup returned to Detroit for the first time in 42 years.
Players like Yzerman, Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Pavel Datsyuk, and Henrik Zetterberg triggered a stretch that saw the Red Wings win the Cup four times from 1997 to 2008 and get to Game Seven of the Final in 2009. With the passage of time, it’s easier to see that those teams were among some of the best ever to take the ice.
The Red Wings performed one of hockey’s great feats by qualifying for the playoffs for 25 consecutive seasons—something no NHL team has done since the 1990s wave of expansion began—before coming up short in 2016–17. The young talent in the system bodes well for a quick return to the top.
I owe a debt of thanks to Julie Ganz and the folks at Skyhorse Publishing for their hard work in sanding and polishing my raw product into the finished version you hold in your hands.
Now it’s time to get ready. Strap on your shin guards, sharpen your skates, buckle up your helmet, and let’s get started.