Are the Red Wings Bad for Hockey?
Basketball has the Lakers. Baseball has the Yankees and football has the Patriots. The Detroit Red Wings are the NHL’s counterpart to the perennial winners in the other major sports. But the Wings are the only one of the group that has a legitimate chance to win the championship every single year. Detroit is about to put the finishing touches on what will very likely be their fifth championship in 12 years, in this, their sixth Stanley Cup Finals appearance in the last 14 years. The road to winning the cup almost always goes through Hockeytown.
If you look at the Stanley Cup Finals history since 1995, only four times were the teams to make the finals not required to defeat the Wings en route. The Red Wings are the only team to make the playoffs every single year during that period.
While this is obviously awesome for Red Wings fans – arguably the most popular team in the league – is this a good thing for the sport as a whole?
Generally speaking, three of the four major sports are intentionally set up to allow for parity to be prevalent. Teams can go from worst to first in relatively short order. And vice-versa. Between salary caps, draft order, strength of schedule modification and free agency rules, getting to the top is easier than staying there. Only baseball still allows the richest teams to buy the best talent. It’s no coincidence that the four most highly paid players in the history of the game all currently play for the same team.
Source: jeffslater.net
Realistically, the NHL is accomplishing their exact goal. Teams like Washington, Chicago and Pittsburgh are rising to the top largely in part due to the performance of their top draft picks. Furthermore, teams like Dallas, Colorado and New Jersey peaked as expected and faded gradually – as is the intended order of things. The Red Wings are the only anomaly in the system.
About three weeks ago Dan Wetzel wrote a pretty insightful piece about the efficiency of the Wings’ system – it’s definitely a good read and illustrates the point well. Wetzel wrote:
[Ken] Holland was no fool. He smartly invested in scouting European prospects and loaded up on Swedes, Finns and Czechs when much of the league was still suspicious of their toughness. Detroit had won a couple of Stanley Cups, though, counting on Russians, sometimes putting five on the ice at the same time. They had no fear of Europeans and had a history of late-round steals.
The Wings grabbed Henrik Zetterberg in the seventh round, Jonathan Ericsson in the ninth and Tomas Holmstrom in the 10th.
In this case Holland knew how to exploit a loop hole; the luxury of allowing a guy to grow overseas was immense. So in that same 2002 draft that landed Hudler, Holland selected Filppula and didn’t even bother trying to bring him to Detroit…
I personally think that it is a very good thing that the Penguins were able to return to the Finals for a rematch with Detroit. Many people around the country will disagree with that, as they want to see different teams compete every year. But there’s an ongoing storyline that has marinated over the last 12 months. First, the Wings smoked Pittsburgh in last season’s finals in six games. Crosby and the gang showed a lot of fortitude and put up a good fight, but in the end, they simply didn’t have the talent or the depth to get to the top of the mountain.
Then, on July 1st, Marian Hossa, in highly publicized fashion, fueled the fire by rejecting
Source: zimbio.com
Pittsburgh’s multi-year contract offer reportedly worth $7 million a season, to sign a one-year, $7.45 million deal with Detroit, stating that he felt his best chance to win the Stanley Cup would be by donning a sweater sporting the Winged-Wheel. Hossa, with 26 points in last year’s playoffs, was a main part of the puzzle that got the Penguins as far as they were able to go. Abandoning them incensed the fans in Pittsburgh and he is subsequently booed by them whenever the Red Wings visit.
Furthermore, it was reported that Hossa stated publicly that he wants to stay in Detroit long term and is willing to take less money than he’ll likely make elsewhere to do so. That’s the thing about the Wings’ organization. Once you arrive, you never want to leave.
Now the Pen’s have climbed the mountain again, but they’ll have to overcome the same obstacle – that hockey juggernaut that beat them the year before – to get to the pinnacle of their sport. They are better this year, more confident, tougher and stronger. Their young superstars are a year older and much wiser. But do they have what it takes yet?
I think the answer lies largely as a matter of personal preference. Personally, I feel that when there are one or two dominant teams in the league – teams that you know are going to be there at the end when it matters most – that creates animosity, which leads to rivalries. Rivalries are what drive the fire to follow a team. College football thrives on rivalries, as do most professional sports where one team and their fans despise another. It fuels the passion that is essential when it comes to fanaticism. So my answer is no, the Red Wings’ dominance is not a bad thing for the NHL.
What do you think? Is the presence of a ‘team to beat’ good for the sport as a whole? Or is it better for the league to get more exposure by having different teams fight for the title like you often see in the NFL? Drop a comment or send me an email, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
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