1 Steve Yzerman wasn’t named captain of the Red Wings when he showed up as a rookie in 1983, though it might have seemed that way.
When Yzerman was drafted in 1983, Danny Gare had completed his first season as Detroit’s captain, after succeeding defenseman Reed Larson. Gare had been a 50-goal scorer twice with the Buffalo Sabres before the Red Wings acquired him in a six-player trade on December 2, 1981.
Unfortunately for the Wings, Gare’s biggest scoring seasons were behind him. He dropped from 46 goals with the Sabres in 1980–81 to 20 in 1981–82, though 13 of those 20 came in 36 games with the Red Wings after the trade. That was enough to convince the Wings to name Gare as their new captain, which they did prior to the 1982–83 season.
Gare was wearing the “C” when Yzerman arrived after being taken with the No. 4 selection in the 1983 NHL Draft, and he continued to serve as captain through 1985–86. When the Red Wings opted to let Gare leave as a free agent (he signed with the Edmonton Oilers and played 18 games before retiring), coach Jacques Demers decided that even though Yzerman was just 21 years old, he should get the captaincy.
No one could have known that Yzerman would never skate another NHL game without a “C” on his sweater.
Yzerman spent the next 20 years, until his retirement in 2006, as Detroit’s captain. He received the Stanley Cup from NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman after the Red Wings ended their 42-year championship drought in 1997, and again in 1998 and 2002.
One of Yzerman’s regular linemates was Gerard Gallant, who had 39 goals, 93 points, and 230 penalty minutes with Yzerman as his center in 1988–89. Gallant was an alternate captain during his time in Detroit, and he wore the “C” while Yzerman was injured late in the 1988–89 season.
But all good things must come to an end, and that included Yzerman’s NHL career. Yzerman hung up his skates after the 2005–06 season and was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame in 2009, the first year he was eligible, after having turned over the captaincy to defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom. Lidstrom kept it for six seasons, until he retired in 2012, joining Yzerman in the Hall of Fame three years later.
2 As much as some fans might long for the days when all NHL players wore numbers from 1 to 30, the facts are that numbers today go all the way to No. 98; No. 99 has been retired around the NHL in honor of Wayne Gretzky.
Of course, not nearly as many players have worn numbers above 30, and as the numbers get higher, some have been worn rarely, if at all. Though every number from 00 to 99 has been worn by someone in the NHL, not all of them have been worn by a member of the Red Wings.
No Detroit player had worn No. 45 until the 2005–06 season, when it was issued to defenseman Kyle Quincey, the Red Wings’ fourth-round pick (No. 132) in the 2003 NHL Draft. Quincey wore it for one game that season after being recalled from the Grand Rapids Griffins of the American Hockey League.
Quincey bounced back and forth between the Wings and Grand Rapids for the next two seasons, and when he played six games for Detroit in 2007–08, he did it while wearing No. 4. The Red Wings lost him on waivers to the Los Angeles Kings in October of 2008. The Kings sent him to the Colorado Avalanche on July 3, 2009, and he returned to the Red Wings in a trade on February 21, 2012. He wore No. 27 with the Red Wings through the 2015–16 season.
No. 65 had never been worn by a Red Wing until they signed college free agent defenseman Danny DeKeyser on March 29, 2013. DeKeyser, a native of Macomb, Michigan, had drawn attention from several NHL teams after playing three seasons at Western Michigan University. He’s worn that number throughout his time with the Detroit and has played more than 350 games with the Red Wings.
Defenseman Kyle Quincey, who also wore No. 45, is one of two players in Red Wings history whose last name started with the letter “Q.” (Muéro at English Wikipedia; License: CC0, via Wikimedia Commons; Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24647650)
No Detroit player had worn No. 76 until Swedish forward Fabian Brunnstrom joined the Red Wings for the 2011–12 season. Brunnstrom had been the object of a bidding war in 2008 before signing with the Dallas Stars. He had a hat trick in his first NHL game, against the Nashville Predators on October 15, 2009, and finished the season with 29 points (17 goals, 12 assists) in 59 games. But he had just 11 points (two goals, nine assists) in 2009–10 and ended the season in the minors.
The Red Wings signed Brunnstrom as a free agent on July 26, 2011. After spending a season with Grand Rapids in the AHL, his debut with Detroit was further delayed by the lockout that shortened the 2012–13 season to 48 games. He made the Red Wings after training camp but played only five games and had one assist. Brunnstrom wound up back in Sweden and spent the rest of his career in Europe.
As for No. 54? It’s still waiting for the first Red Wing to wear it.
3 Terry Sawchuk and Chris Osgood each won more than 300 games wearing the winged wheel, but they were far from perfect during their time with Detroit. Through the 2017–18 season, 67 goaltenders have won at least one game—but only one has a victory without a tie or overtime loss.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Tom McCollum.
The Red Wings actually had big plans for McCollum after they made him the last player (No. 30) picked in the first round of the 2008 NHL Draft. It came after he went 25–17–6 with a 2.50 goals-against average in his second season with the Guelph Storm of the Ontario Hockey League. Though the Red Wings were coming off their fourth Stanley Cup championship in 12 seasons, goaltenders Dominik Hasek and Osgood each were on the far side of 30, so the hope was that McCollum could grow into the No. 1 job.
McCollum went back to junior hockey in 2008–09, splitting the season between Guelph and the Brampton Battalion, finishing with a 34–16–4 record and going 13–8 in the playoffs for Brampton.
That was McCollum’s last season in juniors. He spent most of the 2010–11 season with Grand Rapids, the Red Wings’ farm team in the American Hockey League, but made his NHL debut on March 30, 2011, when he relieved Joey MacDonald in the second period of what turned out to be a 10–3 loss to the St. Louis Blues. McCollum entered the game at 5:23 of the second period and allowed three goals on eight shots. MacDonald returned to the game and played the third period.
Then it was back to the minors. McCollum spent most of the next three seasons in Grand Rapids, with a couple of stints at Toledo of the ECHL. He helped Grand Rapids win the Calder Cup championship in 2013 and was playing for the Griffins in 2014–15 when injuries left the Red Wings short in goal and McCollum got his second call-up.
McCollum made his second NHL appearance on January 18, 2015. Again he came on in relief, this time after Petr Mrazek allowed three goals on seven shots in the first 13:37 against the Buffalo Sabres at Joe Louis Arena. The Red Wings tied the game with three goals in the second period, then scored three more in the third. McCollum allowed one goal on eight shots and got credit for the 6–4 victory.
McCollum made one more appearance, stopping all 17 shots he faced in relief during the third period of a 5–1 road loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning 11 days later. Soon after, he was returned to Grand Rapids, never to play for Detroit again.
McCollum remained in the Red Wings’ system through the 2015–16 season, then signed with the Calgary Flames on October 15, 2016. He spent the 2016–17 season with three minor-league teams before being reacquired by the Red Wings on July 1, 2017. McCollum went 20–14–2 with a 2.64 goals-against average and a .912 save percentage with Grand Rapids in 2017–18.
McCollum signed with Milwaukee, the AHL affiliate of the Nashville Predators, on July 17, 2018, meaning that his status as the only goaltender in Red Wings history to have at least one victory with no losses or ties could last a while.
4 The Red Wings and Chicago Blackhawks, originally known as the Black Hawks, entered the NHL together as part of the league’s expansion in 1926, and the Wings have largely had their way with the Hawks during their nine-plus decades together on the ice.
Entering the 2018–19 season, the teams had played 735 times in the regular season, with Detroit winning 368, losing 269 in regulation, eight in overtime, and six in shootouts, and tying 84 times. They are 219–108 with 33 ties and six overtime/shootout losses in home games and 150–161 with 51 ties and eight OT/SO losses in road games. In the 1950s, the Black Hawks were the home team in six games against the Red Wings that were played in Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Omaha, and Detroit was 5–0–1 in those games.
Detroit’s domination of its Midwest rival really took off after World War II, when the Red Wings became one of the NHL’s elite teams and the Hawks hit the skids. The Wings won 11 in a row against Chicago from March 2, 1947 (3–1 at Chicago Stadium) through January 1, 1948 (4–1 at Chicago).
The Wings ran off 12 straight wins against the Hawks from December 19, 1950 (6–1 at the Olympia) through November 15, 1951 (3–1 at Detroit). They also went 18–1–1 in a stretch of 20 games from January 30, 1954 (4–2 at Detroit) through March 12, 1955 (3–2 at the Olympia).
The Black Hawks began to come out of their tailspin in the late 1950s and started to have more success against the Red Wings. They were 13–1–2 during a 16-game stretch from October 28, 1965 (5–1 at Detroit) through October 23, 1966 (4–1 at Chicago), and went 14–0–1 from October 15, 1970 (2–1 at Detroit) through January 17, 1973 (6–4 at Detroit).
Detroit had a pair of seven-game winning streaks in the 2000s. The Blackhawks won seven in a row from February 21, 2012 (2–1 at Chicago) through April 12, 2013 (3–2 at Chicago). However, four of the seven wins came past regulation, meaning the Red Wings got a point.
The Red Wings’ most recent shutout (through the 2017–18 season) came on January 14, 2018, when they won 4–0 at Chicago. The Blackhawks haven’t shut out the Wings since winning 3–0 at Joe Louis Arena on December 23, 2009.
5 The NHL instituted the Jack Adams Award in the 1973–74 season to honor its Coach of the Year, meaning that it came along too early for Sid Abel. The longtime Wings star took over behind the bench midway through the 1957–58 season and stayed there through 1969–70. The Red Wings made the Stanley Cup Playoffs eight times under Abel, and advanced to the Final in four of those seasons but were never able to bring home a championship.
Had the Jack Adams been around in 1964–65, Abel might well have won it. The Red Wings finished first that season by going 40–23–7, though they were upset in the Semifinals.
Scotty Bowman has more wins (1,244) in the regular season than any coach in NHL history, but perhaps amazingly, he won the Jack Adams just twice. The first time was in 1976–77 with the Montreal Canadiens, who had set NHL single-season records for wins (60) and points (132) in an 80-game season. The second came with the 1995–96 Red Wings, who broke that record for victories by winning 62 games and finishing with 131 points in an 82-game season.
Alex Delvecchio was a Hall of Famer and one of the greatest players in Wings history. He took over for Abel as center on the famed “Production Line” and played his entire career with Detroit until retiring in 1973. The Red Wings wasted no time putting Delvecchio behind the bench, but he was much less successful as a coach than he’d been as a player. Delvecchio coached parts of four seasons with the Red Wings, going 82–131–32 and failing to get them into the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Hall of Famer Alex Delvecchio was honored with his own statue by the Red Wings. (Kevin Ward—https://www.flickr.com/photos/kw111786/3183526997/; License: CC by -SA 2.0; Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28832211)
Bobby Kromm came to the Wings in 1977 after two spectacularly successful seasons with the Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association that included an Avco Cup (the WHA’s version of the Stanley Cup) in 1976. He took a team that hadn’t made the playoffs since Abel’s last season in 1969–70 and led the Wings to the postseason with a 32–34–14 record and 78 points, a 37-point improvement from 1976–77. They scored 69 more goals and reduced their goals-allowed by 42. Detroit swept its best-of-three Preliminary Round series against the Atlanta Flames before losing to the Canadiens in five games in the Quarterfinals. The improvement earned Kromm the Jack Adams Award, the first Red Wings coach to be honored as the NHL’s best.
But the Red Wings struggled under Kromm in 1978–79, and he was fired late in the 1979–80 season. Kromm never coached in the NHL again, though his son, Richard Kromm, spent 10 seasons as a player with the Calgary Flames and New York Islanders. His record with Detroit was 79–111–41. He died in 2010 at age 82.
“I’ve been on teams that were better or equally as good that just didn’t win,” forward Paul Woods told Mlive.com. “It [the 1977–78 club] was a team that came together. That’s what a coach can do.
“They should have kept him; we could have turned it around.”
Ted Lindsay, the general manager who hired Kromm, said he did so because of his success in the World Hockey Association.
“Bobby and I were supposed to bring aggressive hockey back to the Motor City,” Lindsay told Mlive.com. “He was the coach of the year and I was the [general] manager of the year, and then three years later they fired us.
“He was a no-nonsense coach,” Lindsay said. “All he wanted was your best effort.”
6 Yes, once upon a time (actually until 2005), NHL games that were tied after overtime (or after the regulation 60 minutes from 1942 to 1983), ended that way. No shootouts. Just one point for each team and on to the next game.
In all, the Red Wings played 815 ties from 1926 through the end of the 2003–04 season. After the lockout that wiped out the 2004–05 season, the new-look NHL resumed play using the penalty-shot competition to decide games that were tied after 65 minutes.
The Red Wings finished the 2003–04 season with 11 ties. (They also lost two other games in overtime but earned a point.) The 11th tie of the season—and ultimately the last one in Red Wings history—came when the Phoenix (now Arizona) Coyotes hosted Detroit at Glendale Arena and each team left with a point after a 1–1 tie.
Neither team scored in the first period, but the Red Wings grabbed a 1–0 lead at 11:40 of the second when Brendan Shanahan scored his 24th goal of the season, putting the puck in the net from just inside the right circle after Henrik Zetterberg won a faceoff. It was Shanahan’s 557th NHL goal, moving him into 17th place on the NHL’s all-time list.
The Red Wings dominated play throughout the third period, outshooting the Coyotes, 20–7. But the Coyotes got their lone goal when rookie center Erik Westrum, playing in just his seventh NHL game, scored the only goal of his NHL career by beating Curtis Joseph at 2:11. Joseph made a sprawling save of Fredrik Sjostrom’s initial shot and dived to poke the puck away from the top of the crease, but Westrum took the puck off the goalie’s outstretched stick, stepped to the right and put a shot into the wide-open net.
Detroit spent the rest of the period unsuccessfully trying to get the go-ahead goal past Brian Boucher, who stopped all 20 shots. He got a break when Shanahan’s shot with two-tenths of a second remaining bounced past Boucher off Mathieu Schneider’s skates, but referee Mike Leggo had blown his whistle just before the puck went into the net.
Boucher also survived a power play after Jeff Taffe of the Coyotes was penalized with 6:09 left in regulation. Boucher made three saves and three other shots barely missed the net. He even played 10 seconds without his stick after it was knocked behind him while he was sprawled on the ice.
The point moved the Red Wings four points ahead of the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference standings. It also extended Phoenix’s winless streak to 14 games, but it allowed the Coyotes to finish the season series with Detroit 1–1–2.
Coincidentally, the last tie at Joe Louis Arena was also a 1–1 game. Tomas Holmstrom’s second-period goal gave the Red Wings a 1–0 lead against the Tampa Bay Lightning, but Fredrik Modin beat Manny Legace with 6:21 remaining in regulation time and neither team scored again.
7 If you were a goaltender who wanted to pile up some points, playing after the 1967 expansion that doubled the size of the NHL from six to 12 teams (on the way to 31 in 2017–18 and 32 in a couple of years) was the thing to do.
Three goaltenders in the first post-expansion era share the Red Wings record for assists during a career at 15. All three began their time with the Wings after 1980.
Greg Stefan was the first, joining the Red Wings for two games during the 1981–82 season. He played 35 games in 1982–83 without getting an assist, then began a seven-year scoring streak by getting three assists during 1983–84, when he went 19–22–2 in 50 games. After picking up two assists in each of the next two seasons, Stefan had a career-high four in 1986–87, when he was 20–17–3 in 43 appearances, and he had at least one assist in each of his final three seasons with Detroit to finish with 15.
Tim Cheveldae overlapped briefly with Stefan. His first NHL appearances (two games, both losses) came in 1988–89, and he played 28 games in 1989–90, Stefan’s final season with the Wings (and in the NHL). Cheveldae had one assist in those 28 games, then piled up 13 in the next three seasons, five coming in 1990–91, four in each of the next two. Assist number 15 came before he was traded to the Winnipeg Jets on March 8, 1994. Cheveldae played in the NHL through the 1996–97 season but had only one more assist.
One reason the Red Wings felt they could trade Cheveldae was the arrival of Chris Osgood, who took the starting job in 1993–94 and went 23–8–5 with a 2.86 goals-against average. Osgood had nine assists with the Red Wings before being lost to the New York Islanders in the waiver draft before the 2001–02 season. Osgood had a career-high four assists with the Islanders that first season with them, but he didn’t have another in the NHL until returning to the Red Wings during the 2005–06 season. He then had seven more assists with Detroit, including three in 2007–08. He retired after the 2010–11 with 19, all but four of which came with the Red Wings.
None of those three goaltenders came close to the 734 games played with Detroit by Hall of Famer Terry Sawchuk, but Sawchuk managed just three assists with the Wings and seven in his career. With Detroit, he had one each in 1953–54, 1954–55, and 1960–61.
8 Brett Hull, Gordie Howe, and Ted Lindsay are all in the Hockey Hall of Fame, but none of them could do what another Hall of Famer, Steve Yzerman, did in 1988–89: score goals in each of the first six games of a season.
Yzerman was already an established star who was coming off a 50-goal, 102-point season, each an NHL career high, when 1988–89 began. So it wasn’t a surprise when he scored Detroit’s first goal of the new season, a power-play tally 5:22 into the opener against the Los Angeles Kings at the Forum in Inglewood, California, on October 6.
Unfortunately for Yzerman and the Wings, that was about the last thing that went right that night. Wayne Gretzky, making his debut with the Kings two months after being acquired from the Edmonton Oilers, tied the game at 12:54 and assisted on three goals in what turned into an 8–2 rout.
Yzerman, who was born in Cranbrook, British Columbia, made it two goals in two games two nights later, when the Red Wings continued their road trip against the Vancouver Canucks at Pacific Coliseum. This time, the results were better for Yzerman and his teammates. His goal at 11:52 of the third period cut Vancouver’s lead to 3–2, and he had the primary assist when Dave Barr scored at 16:08 to give the Red Wings a 3–3 tie and a point.
The trip continued two nights later against the Calgary Flames (who went on to win the Stanley Cup), and so did Yzerman’s streak. Yzerman scored a power-play goal at 13:50 of the first period that tied the game, 1–1. Paul MacLean scored to put the Red Wings ahead, 2–1, after one period, but Calgary scored four unanswered goals in the second period and cruised to a 5–2 win.
The Red Wings headed home with an 0–2–1 record to play the St. Louis Blues at Joe Louis Arena on October 14—and the teams played the wildest home opener in NHL history.
Detroit appeared to have a comfortable 7–3 lead after two periods, with Yzerman scoring one of Detroit’s four goals in the second. But the Blues scored five times in the third period, before MacLean’s goal with 30 seconds remaining tied the game, 8–8. Each team left with a point after the scoreless overtime, and Yzerman’s goal-scoring streak was now four games.
The Wings jumped right on a plane for the short trip to Toronto and a game the next night at Maple Leaf Gardens. This time it was the Red Wings’ turn to overcome a third-period deficit. They trailed, 3–1, after Dave Reid scored for Toronto at 2:08, but the rest of the period belonged to Detroit. Yzerman set up Adam Graves’s goal at 5:30, Miroslav Frycer tied it 27 seconds later, Barr put the Red Wings ahead at 8:30, and Yzerman’s goal with 30 seconds remaining sealed the 5–3 win.
Back at home against the Chicago Blackhawks on October 18, Yzerman used every possible second to extend his streak to six games. The Hawks led, 3–0, after Duane Sutter scored at 11:27 of the second period. But Shane Burr started Detroit’s comeback when he scored 25 seconds later. Lee Norwood cut the margin to 3–2 at 17:45 of the third period, and MacLean’s goal 45 seconds later sent the game to overtime.
Time was running out on Yzerman’s streak when he broke in and scored at 4:59 of overtime to give the Red Wings a thrilling 4–3 win (spoiling the NHL debut of another future Hall of Famer, Ed Belfour in the process). The goal streak did come to an end three nights later, when Yzerman was limited to an assist, as the Maple Leafs got some revenge with a 4–2 win at Joe Louis Arena.
Yzerman couldn’t keep up the goal-a-game pace, but he did go on to have his best offensive season with 65 goals and 155 points, totals no Detroit player has approached since.
9 The NHL in the late 1980s and early 1990s was vastly different than the game in the 21st century. Though the pace of the game was much slower than today, there were a lot more goals scored, usually more than seven per game. (The average since 2005–06 is about 5.5.)
One reason there were more goals was the abundance of power plays, when it wasn’t unusual to see a team receive seven opportunities or more. Combine that with the presence of some of the great scorers in NHL history—Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, and Detroit’s Steve Yzerman—and you wind up with a high-scoring era.
With lots of goals on an average night, especially power-play goals, teams scoring three man-advantage goals in a period wasn’t unusual. But even in that high-scoring era, getting three on the power play was unique.
Fans at Maple Leaf Gardens probably came back from the second intermission of their December 27, 1989, game feeling pretty good. Toronto had scored five goals in the second period and took a 7–3 lead into the final 20 minutes against the Red Wings.
But Toronto defenseman Tom Kurvers had taken a hooking penalty with three seconds left in the second period, negating the final 10 seconds of a Maple Leafs power play. Steve Yzerman jumped onto the ice after his penalty expired, and Jimmy Carson made the Maple Leafs pay when he scored at 53 seconds to make it 7–4.
There were some rumbles when Yzerman scored at 2:24 to make it 7–5: Could the Leafs really blow a four-goal lead in the third period? The answer turned out to be yes, because Toronto couldn’t stop filling the penalty box.
The teams were already playing four-on-four when Toronto’s Wendel Clark was called for interference at 9:53, and things got worse when John McIntyre went off for high sticking at 11:18.
With the Red Wings playing five-on-three, Carson scored again at 11:44 to make it 7–6. Detroit still had a five-on-four power play because of McIntyre’s penalty, and it took Carson just 30 seconds to complete his power-play hat trick in the third period and tie the game, 7–7.
The Red Wings had two more power-play chances and the Maple Leafs got one, but neither team was able to score again, and the game ended, 7–7. Carson joined Ted Lindsay (March 20, 1955) as the only Red Wings to score three times in one period. Zetterberg (February 17, 2007) and Tomas Holmstrom (February 24, 2007), joined them, but Carson is the only one to get all three of his on the power play.
10 If you’ve come this far, you know that Gordie Howe didn’t wear No. 9 when he began his career with the Red Wings.
In fact, No. 9 was one of those numbers that got passed around a lot. The only Red Wing to wear it for more than three straight seasons was Mud Bruneteau, who wore it from 1937–38 through 1945–46, but he didn’t have it exclusively. No less than eight other players wore No. 9 for at least one game during that stretch. The most famous was Sid Abel, who wore it briefly in 1945–46.
Abel actually spent most of his time in Detroit wearing No. 12, which the Red Wings retired on April 29, 1995. He went back to his usual No. 12 after the 1945–46 season, and that opened up No. 9 for forward Roy Conacher, who was acquired from the Boston Bruins for Joe Carveth in August 1946.
Conacher had scored 26 goals as a rookie in 1938–39, and he had 24 each in 1940–41 and 1941–42 before heading off to fight in World War II. He missed nearly four full seasons while serving in Canada’s military, then picked up where he left off. In fact, he had a career-high 30 goals for the Red Wings in 1946–47, finishing second in the NHL to the 45 scored by Maurice Richard of the Montreal Canadiens. He ended up seventh in the NHL with 54 points.
That same season, the Red Wings finished 22–27–11, fourth in the six-team NHL, and were eliminated in five games by the Toronto Maple Leafs in the Semifinals. General manager Jack Adams wasn’t happy and decided moves had to be made.
On October 22, 1947, the Red Wings traded Conacher to the New York Rangers for forward Ed Slowinski and future considerations. But Conacher refused to report to New York, and the trade was voided.
Nine days later (and with Adams no doubt steaming by now), Conacher was sold to the Chicago Black Hawks. Conacher continued to excel with the struggling Hawks, scoring at least 22 goals in each of the next five seasons and winning the Art Ross Trophy as the NHL’s scoring champion in 1948–49. He retired after playing 12 games in 1951–52 and was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1998.
Conacher’s departure freed up No. 9, which Howe wore until 1970–71. It was retired on March 12, 1972.
Okay, you’ve made it through OT. But you’re not done yet. Time to dig down deep for those last few questions. On to the shootout!