I’m young for a hockey fan, not yet 30 years old, but I’ve been around long enough to see a lot of changes in the NHL. Lockouts, a salary cap, the start and end of the dead-puck era, the demise of the enforcer, shootouts. When I start making a list, the game has seen some pretty dramatic shifts in the time I’ve been a fan of it.
But there have been a few constants, too. One of them is that the Detroit Red Wings are old, and they’re going to be in real trouble when their current stars decline and retire.
I’m not sure when I first became aware that the Red Wings were an old team—probably sometime in the late 1990s when they were still coached by Scotty Bowman. The defence was leaning on old-timers such as Larry Murphy, Dmitri Mironov and Slava Fetisov. Steve Yzerman was closing in on 35, and guys like Igor Larionov and Doug Brown were important secondary pieces.
The names have changed over the years, and with each loss, hockey punditry has wondered if this would be the one that would end Detroit’s reign as an NHL power. The departures of Yzerman and Sergei Fedorov ...
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Article written by Jonathan Willis
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