9701140329
DETROIT FREE PRESS
970516
Friday, May 16, 1997
METRO FINAL CHASER
1A
Photo JULIAN H. GONZALEZ/Detroit Free Press
Detroit's Martin Lapointe turns away as Colorado's Mike Ricci,
left, celebrates his game-winning goal with Claude Lemieux.
The Avs lead the best-of-seven series 1-0. Game 2 is Saturday.
Detroit goalie Mike Vernon and forward Igor Larionov manage to
stop Colorado's Adam Deadmarsh on this scoring attempt in the
first period Thursday night in Denver.
MITCH ALBOM
SEE RELATED STORY, PAGE 1F
Copyright (c) 1997, Detroit Free Press
A PASS, A SHOT -- A SENSE OF DEJA VU
LIGHTS GO OUT FOR RED WINGS AS AVS WIN, 2-1
DENVER -- With all the voltage being fed into this Colorado-Detroit
hockey clash, maybe it's no surprise the power blew in McNichols Arena less
than an hour before they dropped the puck. Talk about a sputtering entrance.
For a while, the whole place was on auxiliary juice. Lights were out in the
lower-level tunnels. All four chillers that cool the ice were out. TV
reception was gone in much of the building. The poor radio announcers were
stuck using telephones to broadcast. The air was hot and moist, the ice was
soft and the fans seemed to have big, wet towels over their faces.
At times, during the first two periods, the place was so quiet you could
have yelled for a player to pass you the puck.
This was the NHL Western Conference final we've been waiting for?
Well. It was the Red Wings and the Avalanche. It was Shanahan and Yzerman
and Vernon and Fedorov against Sakic and Forsberg and Roy and Lemieux. At
least I think it was them. They had their uniforms, if not their moves, their
speed or their vigor. But then, playing in soup can do that to you. Soggy ice.
Dim lightbulbs. For a series it had touted as Big Time Sports, the NHL came
off looking rather rinky-dink.
Pardon the rink pun.
But good drama means knowing how to finish -- despite your theater. So the
Wings and Avs came out for the third period and scored twice within the first
three minutes. And the fans woke up. And the energy increased. And, folks, we
had ourselves a hockey game.
And then we had a bad sense of deja vu. Here came a fast break by the very
fast Avalanche players -- who make Pat Riley's Showtime Lakers look as if
they wore cement boots. Boom, boom, boom. A terrific setup pass by wondrous
Joe Sakic, a rifle assist by evil Claude Lemieux and a quick death score by
omnipresent Mike Ricci.
Avalanche 2, Wings 1.
"They don't need many chances to cash in," sighed Brendan Shanahan.
In fact, that would be all they needed. The rest was just a portrait of
Wings frustration -- a deja vu of its own. It was Sergei Fedorov at
point-blank range, smacking the puck off of Patrick Roy's stick, and Vladimir
Konstantinov slapping a dead- sure shot off of Roy's body, and Martin Lapointe
digging and digging and finally chipping the puck free from Roy's skate --
only to have the whistle blow with the puck an inch from pay dirt.
The pundits were right. This game had less to do with fighting than
finesse. Oh, there were a few scuffles and a few rabbit punches and a few
angry glares. But mostly, this was about who could skate away from tight,
holding defenses and finally put the biscuit in the basket.
Colorado did it twice. The Wings did it once.
If it makes you feel any better, the electricians didn't have such a good
night, either.
A ton of hype
"Did you feel you let a winnable game get away?" someone asked Shanahan,
after the Wings outshot the Avs, 35-19, but still went in a one-game hole in
this emotional best-of-seven series.
"Yeah," he said, "but that's playoff hockey. Sometimes it works the other
way, too. It was a tight game, and I guess we all knew the referees and the
NHL brass would be watching every move we made."
Naturally. The way these two teams had been pitted against each other,
you'd have thought they'd been rivals for 30 years, not one. The Detroit and
Denver newspapers both put the game on the front pages. "BAD BLOOD!" read one
Denver headline. "THE FEUD RESUMES TONIGHT" read another. You half expected
the players to come out with guns, not sticks.
The funny thing is, neither of these teams is particularly rough or dirty
when they're not playing each other.
But after March 26 -- the fightfest at Joe Louis Arena -- everybody was a
little bloody. The Canadians. The Americans. The Russians. The Swedes.
Nonfighters such as Peter Forsberg and Igor Larionov. Hey. Even the goalies
had stitches.
And so Thursday night became one of those turf wars, where nobody is
neutral. Denver fans may have only had a hockey team for a year, but they've
quickly learned how to add "RED WINGS S ---!" to every cheer in the building.
Still, for all the noisy buildup, the first period was almost like a quiet
backstage pass, where you watch the famous men work and you realize they are,
after all, only men. The Wings and Avs could do little more than feel each
other out, and, more important, feel out the ref. They quickly learned that
the whistles were on a short tongue. Within the first three minutes, Fedorov
drew a hooking penalty from Mike Keane, but moments later, Shanahan was
whisked away for roughing -- on the face-off!
The face-off?
It was like that all night. Add the heat of the referee's focus to soft,
mushy ice, and little wonder the Wings seemed to be battling uphill. "With bad
ice, it takes lots more steps to go the same distance," Kris Draper said. "It
wears you down."
This is a disgrace for a game as big as this. Anyone in the NHL can tell
you this arena -- built for basketball -- is a time bomb for hockey. In the
hallway after the game, commissioner Gary Bettman clenched his jaw.
"We don't ever want this to happen again," he said. "I think we all agree
Denver needs a new building, the sooner the better."
Can they finish it by Saturday?
A blown opportunity
Not that the Wings can blame this loss on the power outage -- unless you
mean their own.
"I thought after we scored, we sat back for just a bit," said Shanahan,
who gave the Wings a 1-0 lead that lasted all of 27 seconds. "You can't relax
against this team -- not for one, two or three minutes."
He's right. Joe Sakic -- who seems to always rise to the occasion -- found
the right spot on the ice and pushed a quick shot through Mike Vernon's legs.
Five minutes later, he made that great pass to set up the Ricci goal.
And suddenly, we were back to last year, with the Wings unable to stop the
Avalanche stars when they had to, and unable to solve Roy when they had the
chance. Even their six power- play chances were dry. Colorado has stopped 51
of 54 power plays in the playoffs.
"We're not walking out with our heads down," said captain Steve Yzerman.
"It was one of those games that can go either way."
But it went the Avalanche way. And so the Wings begin this series just as
they began last year's -- down a game. Still, there were reasons to be
optimistic. They played well. No one got hurt. Vernon was generally
excellent. And all they realistically hoped to do out here was win one game.
If the teams play a similar contest Saturday, the Wings have a chance.
Of course, so do the Avs. But no one said this would be an easy series.
They did say the lights would work.
THIS ELECTRONIC VERSION MAY DIFFER SLIGHTLY FROM THE PRINTED ARTICLE.
GAME; RED WINGS; HOCKEY; MAJOR STORY; WESTERN CONFERENCE FINAL