Battle Stations

They are as competitive a trio as rock, scissors and paper. The rebuilt Detroit Red Wings have won two straight Stanley Cups and have the best coach in sports. The Colorado Avalanche has three of this season's top 10 scorers and the best playoff goalie in history. The Dallas Stars have a savvy, veteran team that ran away and hid so effectively during the regular season that the rest of the league couldn't find them with the Hubble telescope. They all play in the Western Conference. Heading into the postseason, these three teams find themselves in the most crowded scene since Groucho's stateroom in A Night at the Opera.

"The only time I can think of when you had three teams like this bunched in one conference was the '80s, with Edmonton, Calgary and Chicago," says Stars coach Ken Hitchcock. "You knew the playoff road was going through those teams. This season Detroit made those moves at the trading deadline [acquiring defensemen Chris Chelios and Ulf Samuelsson, left wing Wendel Clark and goalie Bill Ranford] and got a lot stronger; Colorado has huge impact players [goalie Patrick Roy and forwards Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic and Theo Fleury]; and we keep moving along. We're all better than we were last year."

According to NHL protocol, an Eastern Conference team must fill one spot in the Stanley Cup finals, reasonable enough considering that neither the New Jersey Devils nor the Ottawa Senators look as if they have a case of the shorts, although they may need a pair of Bermudas by the time the playoffs are over. Game 7 of the finals—a fond wish given four years of sweeps—is scheduled for June 22, and if that's when the champion is crowned, it would mark the first time an NHL season had spanned the fall, winter, spring and summer. So while waiting to throw those all-season radials on your Zamboni, ponder the following playoff questions.

Will the other Great One retire?

After Chelios's and Clark's first game with Detroit, Suella Bowman opined to an old acquaintance that the end of the 1998-99 season would be a fine time for her 65-year-old husband, Scotty, the Red Wings' coach, to call it a career. Of course, she was tugging her soul mate gently in that direction last summer, but Bowman bulled on—through the death of his brother, Jack; through knee-replacement surgery; through a heart procedure. Bowman has now coached his teams to 1,096 regular-season wins to go with a record-tying eight Cups, the last two with Detroit. What more does he need to accomplish before he's ready to retire?

"The decision is Scotty's," Detroit general manager Ken Holland says. "In the past I think what's happened in the playoffs—our winning the Cup—has had some impact on his decisions to return. If we win the Cup and Scotty gets the record [Bowman shares it with Toe Blake], maybe it'll have an impact in a different way."

If Ottawa wins the Stanley Cup, will hockey as we know it end?

Absolutely. Just five years ago the question was, Can a team with a strong European component win the Cup? The 1994 New York Rangers, who had four Russians, were the first to answer affirmatively, though if the distinctly Eurocentric Senators triumph—in a given game eight of their nine top forwards and three of their six best defensemen are Europeans—the question becomes, Can you win a Cup without a significant European presence?

Ottawa might be quietly revolutionizing the game in other ways as well. The Senators, who had the fewest penalty minutes in each of the last three seasons, have redefined traditional notions of hockey toughness. They show their mettle with puck pursuit, speed and discipline. "For us, toughness is bouncing up quickly after getting knocked down and not backing down," right wing Daniel Alfredsson says. "You don't need stupid penalties, especially in the playoffs."

At the trading deadline first-year general manager Rick Dudley swapped his only certified roughneck, forward Chris Murray, to the Chicago Blackhawks for a skilled smurf, forward Nelson Emerson. "I think people are already starting to emulate what's been going on here," Dudley says. "When you finish with more than 100 points, it gets noticed."