Winging It

Even now that he is a Detroit Red Wing, Chris Chelios puts his pants on one leg at a time—although one day last week he had to do it twice. Picking at his fried eggs the morning after his debut in a jersey that looked as incongruous on him as shoes on a pig, Chelios was recalling how he had to put on his uniform a second time because he was so jittery in front of his new teammates that he had forgotten to remove a pair of gym shorts the first time. "I never had felt that nervous before a game," says the 37-year-old Chelios, who also mistakenly put on his elbow pads before his shoulder pads. "I felt like it was my first game in the league."

If the most accomplished American-born hockey player of all time had cold sweats about being a Red Wing, imagine how the rest of the NHL felt. In an unprecedented six-hour trading frenzy on March 23, Detroit general manager Ken Holland refocused the playoff picture, taking the reeling two-time champions (Detroit was 34-30-6 at the time) and turning them into a potential Stanley Cup monster. There have been other trading deadline makeovers in recent years—a nip here, a tuck there, a character graft received by the New York Rangers in 1994—but nothing involving a group of players of such stature. Holland began the day intending to get a goal-scoring forward and a durable defenseman, but as he noted, "We had a lot of lines in the water." Then Moby Dick just sort of jumped into the rowboat.

For six draft choices and two marginal players, Holland procured Chelios, defenseman Ulf Samuelsson, left wing Wendel Clark and goalie Bill Ranford, a quartet that boasts a combined five Stanley Cups, a Conn Smythe Trophy and three Norris Trophies. If the earth didn't move in Dallas and Denver, home to the other Western Conference powers, at least the odds did. One Internet gambling service promptly dropped the odds on the Red Wings' winning the Stanley Cup from 6 to 1, to 2 to 1, making them the favorites over the 3-to-1 Stars, who at the time had the NHL's best record (43-14-12) by far.

On Deadline Day the Red Wings left their morning practice buoyed by the knowledge that Holland had gotten Clark, who has scored more than 300 NHL goals, from the Tampa Bay Lightning for third-string goalie Kevin Hodson and a draft pick; but the subsequent deals for Chelios, the heart of the Chicago Blackhawks, and the Rangers' Samuelsson, the personification of nails scratching on a blackboard, stunned the Detroit players. Word of the other trades spread like an urban legend. Center Igor Larionov found out about them in a telephone call from a friend, who said he had heard the news on the radio. Forward Brendan Shanahan, who swears he never listens to sports talk radio, listened to it in his car on the way home from that practice and wound up spreading the word about Chelios to people in a store where he had stopped to pick up a few things. The Detroit players' phones kept ringing with details, confirmation, comment, giddy disbelief. The next morning the entire team was on the ice 15 minutes early for an optional 10:30 game-day skate. Forwards Kris Draper and Joe Kocur went over to Holland and shook his hand.

"This gave us our excitement back," Shanahan says. "We didn't think two straight Stanley Cups would secure our place in history. We know we need to win a third. But you have to understand, we've played until June the last two years. We'd lose a game this season, the other team would be celebrating on the ice, and we'd be on a bus or a plane later that night wondering if we would have been that excited if we had won. Probably not. We were all looking forward to something like this. A lot of teams could have done this, but our management was the one that did. You have to play for today in this game. You have to respect what might happen down the road, but sometimes when you plan for the future, it never comes."

In Samuelsson and Ranford, Detroit has found only temporary help. Holland calls the 35-year-old Samuelsson, an unrestricted free agent who is expected to join the team in a week or so, once his broken right foot mends, "a rental." As for the 32-year-old Ranford, whose play has been in decline over the past three seasons, Holland says he's "an insurance policy" in case his top two goalies, Chris Osgood and Norm Maracle, falter. But Clark, 32, is auditioning for full-time work (he will earn $1.8 million if Detroit picks up his option for 1999-2000), and he had an auspicious beginning, scoring on a wrist shot in a 2-1 victory over the Buffalo Sabres, his first game as a Red Wing. It wasn't exactly a whistling wrister from Clark's salad days in Toronto; defenseman Nicklas Lidstrom's shot from the point struck Clark on the wrist, hit the shaft of his stick and found its way into the goal. "By summertime that one will have gone top shelf," says Clark, who also scored the game-winning goal in a 3-2 overtime victory against the Philadelphia Flyers on Sunday. Those goals gave him 30 on the season, a statistic not lost on Holland.

Chelios is the definite keeper. To get Chelios to waive his no-trade handshake agreement he had with Blackhawks owner William Wirtz, Holland had to tack on two years at $5.5 million each beyond the $3.7 million the defenseman will earn next season. Chelios, a Chicago native, said leaving his beloved Blackhawks, for whom he had played the past nine years of his 16-year NHL career, was more about security than money. Compulsively honest, Chelios said he would have gone to any of the teams that pursued him—the Flyers, Carolina Hurricanes or San Jose Sharks, in addition to the Red Wings if they had extended his contract, a risk the Blackhawks were not willing to take.

When Chelios learned six days before the trading deadline that Chicago veterans Bob Probert and Dave Manson were about to be put on waivers, he called Wirtz's lawyer to ask about adding two more years to his deal. "When I didn't hear back," Chelios says, "I took it as a no." Word quickly spread that Chelios was available. Detroit, which had been rebuffed in earlier attempts to obtain him, offered Blackhawks general manager Bob Murray two first-round draft picks and promising, albeit fleshy, 24-year-old defenseman Anders Eriksson; he also offered Chelios an extension as well as a shot at a Cup. Done. An hour after the trade Chelios tried to find a buyer for the building he owns near the United Center on West Madison Street, which is also the home of his restaurant, Cheli's Chili.

On the day of the trade Chelios turned on the television in his Detroit hotel room and saw a four-month-old clip of himself saying he would never play for the Red Wings. The notion of going to his despised Central Division rival seemed preposterous in December and was only slightly less so the first time he walked into the Red Wings dressing room last week. In Detroit, Chelios was basically a Toyota. Of course, the rugged Chelios is reviled in most NHL rinks, but Joe Louis Arena is the only one in which he has been hanged in effigy. He recalled three brawls with Detroit captain Steve Yzerman, passionate wars against grinders such as Draper, Martin Lapointe and Kirk Maltby, and the $500 fine the league slapped him with in 1994 after he slashed Sergei Fedorov. "Ah, I used to do everything to Sergei," Chelios says. "Those were the old days when you could elbow a guy and not worry about getting suspended. I took advantage of that." Chelios sounds wistful. "I can't believe I'm in the room. They can't believe I'm in the room. But I think they're happy about it, and maybe the fans will forgive me."

Apparently they have. Joe Louis Arena concessionaires sold a combined 187 sweaters with Chelios's number 24 and Clark's 71 the night following the trades. Chelios played 25 minutes against the Sabres and then a total of 49 in the next two games, a 6-1 victory over Tampa Bay last Friday and that 3-2 win against Philadelphia two days later. Seventy-four minutes in his first three Wings games contrasts with the ridiculous 106 he played in his last three matches as a Blackhawk and underscores a reason Chelios should be even more effective in Detroit than he was in Chicago. Because of their depth on the blue line and the ability to spread out minutes, the Red Wings have been a haven for older defensemen such as Mark Howe, Slava Fetisov, Mike Ramsey, Bob Rouse and especially Larry Murphy, whose career was reborn when he came from the Toronto Maple Leafs in a deadline deal two years ago. "We're hockey's equivalent of Viagra," says assistant coach Dave Lewis.