Hockey was a secondary sport to me as a kid. I went to my fair share of Caps games back in Bondra/Oates years and I could name a decent number of players from hockey cards & video games, but I couldn’t tell you any game that I remember watching before 2008. The games were always on so late and my child attention span couldn’t keep up with the games even in the trap-era. Football & Pokemon consumed most of my time.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the game today and the era that I came up in. The early Ovechkin/Boudreau Capitals hooked me on the sport and stars like Nathan MacKinnon keep me watching games today. There’s a certain lore associated with the 90’s, though. I always felt like I missed out on this time because I wasn’t paying close enough attention. My first hockey game was in 1998 and I had no idea I was watching four Hall of Famers at the time. Everything just went over my head at the time & games were mostly background noise to me.
I’ve been interested in tracking some classic games for that reason. It was a different era of hockey that I don’t know much about beyond the stories I hear on podcasts. Tracking the Miracle On Ice game for Chris Peters’ ESPN article was a cool introduction to this, because the game almost looked like a different sport compared to what I’m used to watching. While hockey in the 90’s wasn’t that much of a culture shock, it was a different game. The pace is slower, big-hitting defensemen had more value, goalies were free to make bad decisions, icing the puck was another way to get a line change among other things. I’ve watched only a handful of games from then, but I can already tell there were a lot of things (and penalties) that you could get away with then that you can’t now.
Still, the greats from this era are legendary. I always wondered how guys like Gretzky, Lemeiux, Jagr, Sakic and Yzerman would grade out compared to today’s game. Comparing across eras is a tough exercise because the rules and playing styles were so different (especially goalies), but I always wanted to see how some of the old greats look through the view of more modern stats. Not so much to debunk any myths, but more to see just how good some of the old dynasties like Detroit were. That and I’m a sports nerd at heart, so these types of research projects are what we live for.
Since we’re all grounded indefinitely, I figured now is a good time to start this and the 1996 double overtime classic between the Blues & Red Wings is one I’ve had my eyes on for awhile. It’s only a second round series, but it was a year before Detroit won their first Stanley Cup and on the other side, you had a Blues team featuring Wayne Freaking Gretzky as their captain. Nick Lidstrom was also one of my favorites to watch when I started tracking games in 2011. Even at 41, he was one of the best in the league at leading breakouts and disrupting entries at the blue line so I wasn’t passing up a chance to watch him in his prime.
I also like that it’s a scoreless game up until the end. That’s the reputation the late 90’s had and I like tracking games that aren’t dictated by one team sitting on a lead for a period. Plus, it’s got the full vintage ESPN package with Gary Thorne and Bill Clement that I’ve always enjoyed on the highlights. Now that the short biography is over, let’s get on with the game.
The Energy Line 