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15 Years Later: The 2008 Red Wings, a Retrospective – June 14, 2023
(Original author: Sam Stockton)
Fifteen years ago this month, the Detroit Red Wings lifted the Stanley Cup for the eleventh time in franchise history. It was the team’s fourth title in eleven seasons. If you are the kind of person who is stringent in their application of the label “dynasty,” perhaps believing that a minimum of three consecutive championships is an essential criterion, then you might not count the Red Wings from the late nineties through the late aughts, but you couldn’t put any other hockey team in front of them during that span. In the nascent days of the NHL’s salary cap era, the ‘08 Wings provided the league with an aspirational gold standard.
In June of 2008, you would be in rare company if you suspected that the end of a golden age was imminent, but with the benefit of hindsight, maybe it wasn’t so surprising. To be sure, there was one more big run left—the following season’s journey to a Cup Final rematch with the Penguins, a home defeat in Game 7, and symbolic torch-passing to Sidney Crosby, but beyond that, precious little.
In the four seasons spanning the NHL’s 2005 return from another lockout and that 2009 Game 7 loss in Detroit, the Red Wings won nine playoff series. They twice won the Western Conference and took home the big prize in 2008.
From the 2009-10 season to the present, the Wings have won just two playoff series, both of them prior to joining the Eastern Conference before the '13-14 season.
In 2017, Detroit missed the playoffs for the first time since 1990—a streak generally accepted as a core cause for the depth of the ensuing and ongoing rebuild.
In other words, at the rate of a trickle, the band broke up, and, within a decade, the notion of the Detroit Red Wings as a standard for excellence around the league was laughable.
Yet the legacy of the 2008 Red Wings could not be so easily forgotten. With the possible exception of Darryl Sutter’s Cup-winning LA Kings, they remained the supreme example of possession-based hockey in the NHL. Conveniently, the ‘07-08 season is the first for which we have (mostly) reliable shot data and thus a sort of year zero for modern analytics. With those tools at our disposal, we can better express the extent of those Red Wings’ dominance.
At fifteen years' remove, it’s striking that this wasn’t a team of preposterous talent up and down the lineup, layering one scoring line on top of another in the style of the ‘15 Blackhawks or the ‘16 and ‘17 Penguins. To be sure, they weren't bereft of talent, but you wouldn't confuse the lineup for an all-star team.
At the top of the lineup, there was glimmering skill: Datsyuk, Zetterberg, Lidsrom, Rafalski. But from a depth perspective, these Wings were more dependent on brawn than skill. Up front it was Draper, Maltby, and Drake. Along the blue line, Lebda, Lilja, and whatever remained of Chris Chelios.
It was during the 2008 postseason that Johan Franzen, with his eighteen points in sixteen games, emerged as one of the best power forwards in the league.
Read the full article here