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The Cane scrutiny Carolina is no match for Detroit, but history sure isPosted: Monday June 03, 2002 5:40 PMUpdated: Monday June 03, 2002 9:42 PM
The 2002 Stanley Cup final -- or as it is known among the keepers of actuarial tables, the 'Canes vs. the Men with Canes -- looks like the biggest mismatch since goalie Dominik Hasek mussed up a reporter in Buffalo a few years ago. The Carolina Hurricanes are a nice team but the Detroit Red Wings are a classic one, nearly as deep as they are old and talented. Try this at home: Get a legal pad, draw a line down the center, put "Wings" on the left column and "'Canes" on the right. Now jot down any areas in which Carolina might have a distinct edge over Detroit. Anyone? Anyone? (Gee, I always wanted to sound like the teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off.) Now if you wrote "Faceoffs," you might be right. But even that would be a stretch you were compelled to make because a) you respect Hurricanes captain Ron Francis; b) you are partial to the BBC line of Rod Brind'Amour, Bates Battaglia and Erik Cole; or c) that Hurricanes column looked awfully lonely. The Red Wings move the puck well enough to burst Carolina's trap, are robust enough to get to the rebounds that goalie Arturs Irbe invariably leaves, get offensive support from their defensemen (a Hurricanes' weakness) and have gamebreakers to respond in the third period of close games. Carolina has proven itself a capable road team in the playoffs -- it won every Game 6 away from Raleigh and took all three in Toronto in the junior varsity series -- but simply does not have enough weapons to frighten Detroit in a seven-game series. To think otherwise would be to suggest Tobacco Road has set aside some acreage for a different type of leaf. My inner Dionne Warwick is whispering "Sweep," but through sheer dint of effort the 'Canes should be able to win one game somewhere and somehow. This will be a loud series -- along with San Jose, Detroit and Raleigh offer the most boisterous crowds in hockey -- but not a long one. Here's a better matchup: Red Wings owner Mike Ilitch vs. Hurricanes owner Peter Karmanos, bitter rivals since their days running minor hockey teams in Detroit. Ilitch once kicked Karmanos' junior team out of Joe Louis Arena, forcing it to relocate. Karmanos got his revenge by signing restricted free agent Sergei Fedorov to an offer sheet after the 1998 Olympics, a six-year, $38 million deal that had a ludicrous $12 million bonus if the team that held his contract reached the conference final that year; Detroit was forced to match and come up with the scratch that summer. The homeboy owners should settle their dispute honorably. We recommend nude Jell-O wrestling. Because of the presumably lopsided nature of the final, the Wings will be pitted against a more daunting foe -- history. They have already been labeled by the uninformed or the overheated as the "best team ever assembled," what with nine future Hall of Famers. This is either flat wrong or we haven't calculated the exchange rate properly. Maybe nine U.S. is the equivalent of 11 Canadian, the number of players on the 1973 Montreal Canadiens' Cup-winning team that wound up in the Hall. In fact, that '73 team was not nearly as good as Montreal's 1956-60 or 1976-79 powerhouses. Among the 11 Hall of Famers in 1972-73, Henri Richard was in his final year and Larry Robinson, Steve Shutt and Guy Lafleur were several seasons from their best hockey. All of which brings us back to the Men with Canes. Of the nine players likely to be enshrined -- Hasek, Fedorov, Steve Yzerman, Brett Hull, Igor Larionov, Nicklas Lidstrom, Luc Robitaille, Brendan Shanahan and Chris Chelios -- only Lidstrom and Fedorov are somewhere near their prime. The 40-year-old Chelios, who must have a portrait in his attic, had a brilliant season and Yzerman might be splendid enough to win a Conn Smythe Trophy on one good leg, but the others are in various states of decline from the pinnacles of their spectacular careers. In an era of big payrolls, maybe Detroit general manager Ken Holland's ability to ice nine players of such conspicuous pedigree is more noteworthy than Sam Pollock having 11 Hall of Famers 30 years ago, but even a sweep would leave these Wings well short when assembling a list of the greatest teams in history. Sports Illustrated senior writer Michael Farber covers the NHL beat for the
magazine and is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com.
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