The rematch
A year ago, it almost seemed inevitable that the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins would meet again in another Stanley Cup final.
But the Penguins lost some key pieces of their puzzle over the off-season, including local favourite Ryan Malone, and more importantly, superstar Marian Hossa, who signed with… Detroit, as a free agent. And halfway through the season, neither club looked likely to make it: Detroit was having all sorts of defensive and goaltending woes, while Pittsburgh didn’t so much as have hold of a playoff spot.
But here we are, and they’ve both made it, and done so in pretty impressive fashion.
There are a host of reasons why this particular matchup is highly intriguing:
- It’s the first back-to-back Stanley Cup finals rematch since 1983-1984, when the New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers faced off in successive years.
- It’s the first opportunity for a team to win back-to-back Cups since New Jersey made the finals in 2001 after winning in 2000. The bid was unsuccessful – the last team actually to win two in a row was… Detroit, in 1997-1998.
- It pits Hossa against the team he left because he felt he could win the Cup in Detroit (even signing for much less money than he could have received elsewhere). Naturally, there are folks who say that karma will get him, and Pittsburgh will win….
- It pits probably the two most skilled teams in the NHL. It is so nice to see the cream rise to the top.
- It offers a chance for redemption to Evgeni Malkin, who virtually disappeared halfway through the 2008 playoffs, apparently when he was taking a physical pounding early in the Philadelphia series. This year, he has only seemed to get stronger as the postseason has progressed.
As for that first point, there are further reasons why this matchup is being compared to the earlier one. In 1983, the Islanders were finishing up a four Cup run, while in 1984, the Oilers began a dynasty of their own, winning five Cups in seven years. Meanwhile, the Wings are the closest thing to a dynasty the NHL has, winning four Cups in the previous 11 seasons and accumulating far more wins (whether playoff or regular season) than anyone else. Given the salary cap, there’s such relative parity it’s unlikely any team will ever manage four or five Cups in a row like the dynasties of old, so the comparison to the Islanders is legit. Not to mention, like the Islanders, this is a veteran team with a lot of savvy.
And the Penguins’ depth down the middle evokes the Oilers of old, with Crosby and Malkin (superstar 1a and superstar 1b) standing in for Gretzky and Messier. (Don’t forget Jordan Staal as a third line center.) With a young talented goaltender who has proven himself a winner (Marc Andre Fleury), one could be tempted to think of Grant Fuhr, whose achievements were measured more in wins than in goals-against average. Unsurprisingly, given the youth of the Penguins, many folk do see a dynasty in the making here.
Like the dynastic Islanders, the Wings have a reputation of being built on defense, while the Penguins strike fear into opposing netminders with almost superhuman scorers.
And then there’s the matchup itself. Like the Oilers, who learned what it took to win by absorbing a punishing defeat at the hands of the Islanders in 1983, the Penguins look to have learned the lessons of 2008 and are back to set the record straight. Their sweep of Carolina shows that they are on a mission.
Yet, for all the comparisons, both teams are very different from the teams whose memory we are evoking.
Take Pittsburgh. Neither Crosby nor Malkin plays like either Gretzky or Messier. Although Sergei Gonchar is an excellent offensive defenseman, he cannot take over a game the way Paul Coffey could. And there are no wingers that could remotely correspond to Jari Kurri (probably the greatest two-way player of his era) or Glenn Anderson. (While late acquisition Bill Guerin was a big scorer at one point in his career, he’s past that now.) The latter two points are relative weaknesses; with regard to Crosby and Malkin, though, it’s more a matter of style. In this year’s playoff run, in the absence of a sniper like Hossa, Crosby has become goalscorer almost of necessity, using his strength down low to control the vicinity of the net. That’s something Gretzky could not do, and Messier did not. Their roles were simply different.
Or take Detroit. While the Islanders had plenty of scoring power (Bossy, Trottier, Tonelli and of course, the overtime specialist Nystrom), they were essentially a defensive team that scored opportunistically. In 1983, it could be argued that they were outplayed, but Edmonton could not win because they couldn’t control the puck where it really counted (in front of the net), and when they could, they were stoned by Billy Smith. The Red Wings, in contrast, are one of the greatest puck control teams in history, and on most nights they outshoot their opponents by a fairly wide margin. While the Red Wings are far underrated for toughness, the size of their players compared to most of the rest of the league reflects the fact that this is a pure skill team, while the Islander’s star center Bryan Trottier was the sort of player who would just as soon run over you as skate around you. It’s true that both the Islanders and the Wings built their team style outward from the defense, but the respective styles are as radically different as Denis Potvin and Nik Lidstrom.
So while the scenario is similar, the teams involved in 2009 are not very like the teams they evoke. But that’s okay, because there is certainly enough to this series to make it the most intriguing matchup we’ve seen in quite some time.