Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 26, 1995 TAG: 9506260131
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEN RAPPAPORT ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: EAST RUTHERFORD, N. J. LENGTH: Long
It was a season that almost wasn't because of an owners' lockout. And it ended far too quickly for the Detroit Red Wings.
Before you could turn around, the unheralded Devils had won the Stanley Cup by embarrassing the league's best team. It was shocking finish to perhaps the most bizarre season in NHL history.
The season already was dragging before it started when a contract dispute between owners and players threatened the game. The sides were never more divided, not even during the players' strike in April 1992.
This time, the owners believed it essential to curb salaries. Many said they couldn't stay in business otherwise.
The players thought the owners were not being truthful about their economic problems, and wanted what they considered their fair share of the growing hockey market.
The NHL, with a new network TV contract, hoped to capitalize on the spurt of interest caused by the New York Rangers' Stanley Cup victory in the spring of 1994. But the league took a public relations beating when the owners refused to start the season without a new collective bargaining agreement.
The players were ready to go. They had, in fact, completed training camp when the owners locked them out on the eve of the season.
By the time the issue was settled in January, the NHL had lost its All-Star Game and was down to a 48-game schedule instead of the planned 84 - just enough time, commissioner Gary Bettman said, to squeeze in a legitimate season.
Bettman was asked if he felt this year's champion should have an asterisk by its name.
``I don't think that's valid,'' he said. ``One thing we made sure we did was to play a full playoff schedule because we wanted a true champion.''
It got one, but it was a team in turmoil - in keeping with the tenor of this year.
John McMullen, the Devils' owner, waged a battle over his lease with the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority. He threatened to move his team to Nashville, Tenn., which was waiting with open arms and a cash windfall.
Like many of the NHL owners, McMullen claimed he was losing money. He wanted to change the lease he had with the authority that extended into the next century.
The issue became a cause celebre for fans, including New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman, who appointed her husband mediator. Then Whitman took issue with Bettman, a pragmatist who had intimated that perhaps the metropolitan area couldn't support three hockey teams and the Devils might be better off leaving.
The Quebec Nordiques did just that. The financially troubled franchise was sold to a Denver group before the playoffs had finished. Winnipeg managed to save its Jets, another team with financial problems, with an 11th-hour local effort.
The Nordiques proved one of the surprises of the 1994-95 season with the best record in the Eastern Conference. They also were surprising losers to the Rangers in the first round of the playoffs.
While not as much of a surprise, the Devils certainly were not considered the best team in the East during the season - and certainly not the best team in hockey. That honor went to the Red Wings, who finished with a 33-11-4 record and were just about everyone's favorite to win the Cup.
It had a nice symmetry to it: The year before, the Rangers had broken the longest Cup-less streak in the NHL when they won the league title for the first time in 54 years.
And now Detroit could break a 40-year famine, at this time the longest streak going.
The Red Wings certainly looked the part while going through Dallas, San Jose and Chicago in the first three rounds. The Devils found the going a little tougher in eliminating Boston, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, a team that had wiped out the Rangers in four games.
The finals featured a delicious irony - McMullen and Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch had been hard-liners during the lockout and supported closing down the season if no agreement could be reached with the players.
No one could have guessed the outcome of the series, but there were signs in Game 2 when the Devils came back from a one-goal deficit to win with Jim Dowd, a New Jersey native, scoring the winning goal.
It became a portent when the Devils, stocked with no-name players united by coach Jacques Lemaire's superb team concept, completed the sweep of a Detroit team considered far superior.
The Devils' system had beaten the Detroit stars. New Jersey suddenly had a star of its own in Claude Lemieux, the playoffs' most valuable player with 13 goals, and a brilliant defensive style for other teams to emulate: the notorious neutral-zone trap.
``Jacques and all the coaches were hired to do the job,'' Lemieux said. ``There was an immediate positive response. They deserve all the credit and so much more respect.
``They've been jabbed and put down and all the comments about the trap can be put in the garbage. If you don't like our style, too bad, you can go watch another show.''
But none was more interesting than the show in 1994-95.
Keywords:
HOCKEY
by CNB