| Friday, July 14
By Jeff Bradley
ESPN The Magazine |
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You've got to love the taste of blood, sweat and snot and the festive colors that that combo creates when you splatter a loogie on the ice. Really, you've got to cherish it. You've got to love the way it feels when your face gets pressed up against Plexiglas while an aluminum-shaft stick saws into the small of your back. In fact, this feeling should make you smile and say, "A little to the right, now, please. Ahh, that's it."
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I hated John Ferguson. When I was growing up in Kelvington, Saskatchewan, I was a Maple Leafs fan, and Ferguson, a left wing, was the toughest son of a gun the Montreal Canadiens had. In the playoffs, guys like Jean Beliveau, Henri Richard and Yvan Cournoyer were scary. But the Hab we feared most was Ferguson. He could play and he could fight. He was the Big Nasty -- the ultimate playoff warrior. In 14 playoff games in 1968-69 he had four goals, seven points and 80 penalty minutes. If you're picking playoff gladiators, he's my guy from the 1960s. In the 1970s, Bob Gainey and Bobby Clarke were money guys in the playoffs. But Boston had two guys who were brutal to play against: right wings Wayne Cashman and Terry O'Reilly. Cashman was so gritty in the corners and in front of the net -- all the places on the ice you didn't want to be. O'Reilly was the prototypical hard-working right wing who would drive through defensemen and crash the net looking for goals. He and left wing Clark Gillies of the Islanders had legendary fights in the playoffs. Gillies would be my pick for the early 1980s, and Kevin McClelland and Dave Semenko of the Oilers would get the nod in the latter half of the decade. McClelland was a 6'2" right wing, big for that era, and a rugged role player who learned how to influence a playoff game -- just as Gillies and Bobby Nystrom of the Islanders had before him. Semenko was a monster left wing who rode shotgun for Gretzky and, because he was so tough, cleared a lot of room on the ice for The Great One. In 1983-84, the first year the Oilers won the Cup, Semenko had five goals, 10 points and 44 penalty minutes in 19 games. By the 1990s, the game changed -- at least in the playoffs. Fighting is out, but toughness and intimidation still matter. I love Dallas right wing Mike Keane, who won three Cups with three different teams (Dallas, Montreal and Colorado). I also like right wing Claude Lemieux of the Devils, who won Cups in Montreal, New Jersey and Colorado, and right wing Darren McCarty, a two-time Cup winner in Detroit. These are the guys I'd want to go to war with.
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You have to enjoy both the tingle that runs down the back of your neck when, at 30 mph, you run into something you didn't see and the smell of ammonia that follows. And you have to look forward to throwing back a handful of Advil every six hours and to the muscle cramps you get every morning, and you have to like the way you look with a gray complexion, sunken eyes and some ratty whiskers on your chin.
You've got to love all this stuff.
This is playoff hockey. A truth: You can't get to the Stanley Cup playoffs without stars. A bigger truth: You can't win the Stanley Cup without gladiators. Warriors. Avengers.
This is a story about the war within the war.
"Sixteen wins," says the Red Wings' Martin Lapointe. "And you've got to be willing to do anything it takes to get them. That means hitting and blocking shots. That means getting slashed and crosschecked and not retaliating. That means playing through pain. Basically, you do anything and everything for 16 wins. No questions asked."
No questions. If it means having an acupuncturist stick pins in your groin, like the Wings' Darren McCarty is doing these days, you do it. "It works for me," McCarty says. "If swimming in the Detroit River worked for me, I'd do that. Whatever."
No questions. If it means turning the other cheek, even though your instincts are telling you to drop the gloves and throw, you do it. "You've got to keep your emotions under control," says Colorado defenseman Adam Foote. "You take your licks, and if there's got to be a payback, you've got to pick the right time and place for it." And when payback time comes, you can't be afraid to hurt your opponent, to bruise him, cut him -- break him.
You do what it takes. And it takes a lot.
Playoff hockey is not about spin-o-rama moves and clinical passing combinations. "It's about accountability," says the Wings' Doug Brown. "You want to come back to the bench after every shift feeling like you've helped the team's cause. You're aware that one mistake could cost you the game."
Forget all that talk about "protecting the stars" and "opening up the game" until next October. During the playoffs, no one cares about your contract, your endorsements or your numbers. All they want to know is: Are you in or out? "It's a war," says Avalanche coach Bob Hartley. "And you prepare with that mentality. You go in knowing you're going to have to fight for every inch of ice."
It's no wonder that winning the Stanley Cups so often depends on guys called "grinders" and "muckers" and much worse in opposing dressing rooms. Remember The Grate One, Esa Tikkanen? Good chance Wayne Gretzky would have one or two fewer rings if that guy hadn't caused so much playoff commotion back in the days of the Edmonton dynasty. And when you mention the name Lemieux, well, sorry Mario, but a certain a-hole named Claude has one more ring than you -- and he may not be finished yet.
Why is this? "When you play against a team in a series," says Detroit's Brendan Shanahan, "there's so much scouting and so much preparation on how to stop the other team's big guys that sometimes guys you overlook end up being the heroes. And let's face it, some guys just have the game that's perfectly suited for the playoffs."
Those would be the guys who finish every check, come away with every loose puck and leave every ugly confrontation with a smile on their face and a look that says, "Go ahead, take a swipe at me, dude, I'm right here."
Guys like the 5'11", 215-pound Lapointe, a human bumper car who apologizes to teammates when he takes a shift without nailing somebody. And McCarty, who is the lead singer in a rock band called Grinder. (Their best song, he says, is titled "Step Outside.") "If I run a guy the first four times he goes back to pick up the puck behind his net," McCarty said gleefully the morning the Wings and Avalanche began their Western Conference semifinal series, "pretty soon he's going to dread going back there, ya know? You want them thinking, 'Oh no, I'm going to get hit again.' And maybe that's when they forget about the puck and we capitalize."
In the opposing dressing room, the Avs were talking about not letting the Wings get inside their collective team brain. "It's so important for us to keep our composure," said Colorado defenseman Aaron Miller. "We can't let their agitators -- you know -- agitate.. We've got to win the game played between the whistles. Sometimes that can be hard against them, especially that third line of Kirk Maltby, Kris Draper and Martin Lapointe. They're so relentless it's a real pain in the butt."
By the end of Game 1-a 2-0 Avalanche victory-McCarty was shaking his head in frustration. "It's not going to be easy to lay as many hits on these guys as we did on L.A.," he said, referring to Detroit's first-round sweep of the Kings. "They move the puck so well out of their zone, if you always go looking for a hit, you just end up running around and tiring yourself out."
Score one for composure, if you want, but don't overlook the little things the Avs did that sent nonpassive messages. Like Foote riding Sergei Fedorov out of a play, then washing his gloves in the Russian's face before knocking him to the ice. Or the many discreet whacks Peter Forsberg planted on the ankles and wrists of Detroit defenders every time he raced for a puck.
The playoffs are all about messages sent: In Philadelphia's first-round series with Buffalo, Keith Jones of the Flyers made it his mission to harass goalie Dominik Hasek any chance he could. After hitting Hasek behind the Sabres' net in one game, the two men found themselves under a pileup -- Jones' hands around Hasek's throat. "I want this more than you do," Jones said to Hasek. The Flyers won in five games.
In the first period of Game 1 of the Stars' second-round series with San Jose, Dallas forward Scott Thornton, in front of the Sharks bench, laid out San Jose's best player, Owen Nolan, with an elbow to the face. The entire Sharks bench rose and peered over the boards to see their captain -- the heart of their team-sprawled on the ice. "I know they're going to come after me," said Nolan, who sat out Game 2. "Actually, I expected it to be worse. They were physical, don't get me wrong. But I expected to get hit five or six times a shift, not just two or three." Series ain't over yet.
In Game 2 of the Devils-Maple Leafs second-round series, Toronto's Alexander Karpovtsev found himself behind the net with the Devils' Lemieux -- the ultimate playoff warrior. Karpovtsev crosschecked Lemieux not once, not twice, but three times across the back of the neck in one sequence. As Karpovtsev was escorted off to the penalty box, Lemieux was rubbing his neck and wincing. The Devils won the game, but Karpovtsev was speaking for the Leafs, who could not get past the Eastern Conference finals last season. "We understand there is another level we have to reach in order to win the Cup," his crosschecking said. "We will pay that price."
The Avalanche forked over that price in 1996 -- the same year the Red Wings paid the piper. Detroit had won an NHL-record 62 regular-season games but were ousted by the former Quebec Nordiques, who were playing their first season in Denver. The most indelible play in that series occurred when Lemieux, then with the Avs, crosschecked Kris Draper face-first into the boards, turning Draper's mug into something out of Fight Club. Draper suffered a concussion, a broken jaw, a fractured orbital bone and busted teeth and needed 30 stitches for his facial cuts. The Wings tried to keep their cool, but in the end regretted that no one retaliated. The Avs won in six, and a couple of days later, they introduced Denver to something called Lord Stanley's Cup. Meanwhile, Detroit seethed, having to watch the Avalanche skate around with their Cup while Lemieux, of all people, was a runner-up for the the playoff MVP award. Over the next three seasons, whether in the regular season or the playoffs, Avs and Wings was like happy hour: cheap shots all around. |  | | Lapointe: "Sixteen wins. You've got to be willing to do anything it takes to get them." |
Whether it was McCarty playing vigilante on Lemieux, or Foote and Shanahan pairing off just about every time the two clubs met, blood was spilled. As for the hockey, the Wings got revenge in '97, when they killed off the Avs in a six-game conference final series en route to their first Cup in 41 years. Then last year, it was the Avs who slashed Detroit's three-peat dream, overcoming a 2-0 series deficit in the conference semifinals and knocking the Wings out of the playoffs in six games. Colorado's outlook on playing the Wings may have changed forever in that series because of something that happened in the second period of Game 1. Forsberg, the Avs' best player and perhaps the best all-around player in hockey today, figured out early that he was being targeted by the Wings. Anytime he touched the puck, he was hammered. He snapped and crosschecked Shanahan Lemieux-style into the boards, earning a game misconduct. Suddenly, it was like a light went on. In their run to the '96 Cup, the Avs had veteran grinders in Mike Keane, Mike Ricci and Chris Simon to handle the grunt work. Now, here was their star taking matters into his own hands. After dropping Game 2 in Denver, the Avs pulled together. With Chris Drury, the rookie center, becoming even more of a menace than he'd been during the regular season and right wing Adam Deadmarsh throwing his body around like a fly inside a lampshade, the Avs went into Joe Louis Arena and won a pair to even the series, then blew away the defending champs in Games 5 and 6. During the regular season this year, the Wings took four of five from an injury-riddled Avalanche team. The bloodshed subsided. But no one expected the playoff series would be so calm.
"It's a rivalry," said Foote, who claims to respect Shanahan despite refusing to room with him at the '98 Olympics. "There will be some cheap shots. We've played them so many times, obviously some stuff's going to happen. With me and Shanahan, he's trying to get to the net, and I'm trying to stop him. Sometimes it's clean, and sometimes it's not. It's playoff hockey. Whoever wants to win has to go through whatever's in their way."
Gretzky tells a story about the first year his Edmonton Oilers got to the Cup Finals. They were swept by the New York Islanders and, as he and teammate Kevin Lowe were leaving Nassau Coliseum, they walked past the Islanders' dressing room. He expected to see glee and celebration. Instead, he saw exhausted men lying on the floor, covered with ice packs. The Islanders had just won their fourth straight Cup and Gretzky saw the price that had to be paid. He knew then and there, his team hadn't fought hard enough.It's not a stretch to say the only reason Pat Verbeek, at 35, still plays professional hockey is because of the playoffs. Well, maybe that and the fact that the pay's real good, but you get the idea. Verbeek won a Cup for the first time in Dallas last year, and now he's back trying to win another in Detroit. His face and body are scarred from an 18-year career, and he knows there will be body parts that kill him this summer. But right now, he's pain-free. "There have been years when the playoffs have ended and, like a couple of days later, I'll realize I've been injured," Verbeek says. "But during the playoffs you're oblivious to pain. Your body and mind shut those things off. You get focused and you don't feel a thing." How else can you explain the way NHL players crank it up every other night during the playoffs? A guy like Dallas defenseman Derian Hatcher lays a dozen monster hits on opponents each game and takes a large number himself, yet he's out there every 48 hours for eight weeks as his team marches toward the Cup. San Jose's Nolan skates gingerly on an ankle that was bruised while blocking a shot by St. Louis defenseman Al MacInnis in Round 1. And he endures the slashes to the injury from the sticks of the Stars in Round 2. Forsberg fights off the pain of a vicious slash to his wrist by Detroit's Chris Chelios and later levels Detroit's Fedorov with an open-ice check. "You really target the playoffs in your mind," says McCarty, who played but 24 regular-season games this year because of a contract holdout and injuries, "and then the adrenaline must kick in and take over your entire body, because you play through stuff that would have you out of action during the regular season. You don't even give it a second thought." With that "target" in mind and a groin pull nagging him, McCarty turned his playoff fate over to an acupuncturist with about a month to go in the regular season. "It was as much for the whole Eastern philosophy as the acupuncture," says McCarty. "I just connected with this guy. It was awesome. And I really believe the acupuncture has worked for me because I've been accepting of it. I get acupuncture done to my groin, my knees, my ankles, my feet, my stomach, my ears and my head. And it's working."
And it has to be about mind over matter for these guys. There's just no way it's fun to go into what Verbeek calls "the dirty areas" in front of the net. But that's where most playoff goals are scored. That's why they're scored by guys like Verbeek and Colorado's Drury. Because they're unafraid of the rump-kicking they're going to take in those spots. And because they know how to protect themselves with elbows and butt-ends. "That type of work may not get noticed as much in the regular season," says Shanahan, "and, honestly, it's not easy to do that kind of work every night. But once you get into the playoffs, everyone knows, that's the work that wins you games."
Sixteen wins in eight weeks. "Eat, sleep and hockey," says Colorado's Miller. "There's no time for anything else. You have to have a one-track mind until it's over. Everything else in your life takes a backseat." That means not only asking for your family's understanding that you'll be preoccupied, but also asking everyone you come into contact with to understand that you're zoning. Teams virtually pull a shroud around themselves during the playoffs. Because no one can be trusted, curtains shield the doctors and trainers from the media. All injury talk stays in-house. Anything that leaks out is usually false. The last thing any player wants is for the opposition to know the specifics of an injury, because that would mark that body part with a target for the rest of the series. Sound barbaric? Tough.
Nolan, on his ankle injury: "I'm not going to get into specifics, because as soon as I tell you, [the Stars] are going to come after me there." Too late. ABC showed taped footage of him blocking MacInnis' shot. The Stars saw the tape. In old-school baseball, when you got hit with a pitch, you never rubbed it. Well, that's still true in the hockey playoffs. If your hand is throbbing from a slash, don't dare take your glove off and shake it, because that's just a signal to an opponent to whack you again. If you're limping around with a bad groin, you can bet some guy's going to croak you with his stick the next time he gets the chance. The war within the war. How much will you endure? How much will you sacrifice? Players like the Avs' Ray Bourque, so open about his desire to finally get a ring in this, his 21st season, will be hit over and over again and probably asked, up close and very personal by some foul-breathed goon, "You sure you want this, Raymond?"
Same thing for stars like Forsberg and Fedorov, Mike Modano and Jaromir Jagr. They'll be marked men every time they hop the boards. Marked by the gladiators, who don't care how much they make or how many goals they've scored. "The guys who are on the ice the most," says Detroit's Kirk Maltby, "you have to make those guys pay a price for all that ice time." That's why you've got Keith Jones saying to Dominik Hasek, hands around his neck, "I want this more than you do."
Last man standing wins.
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