The man who coached the Pittsburgh Penguins to their last Stanley Cup championship, Scotty Bowman, was also behind the bench for the Detroit Red Wings' most recent victory, in the spring of 2002.
Those championship seasons came a decade apart, proof that even Bowman's teams didn't win every single year. It just seemed that way.
Bowman won nine Stanley Cup titles as a coach and a 10th in the 1990-91 season as the Penguins' director of player development and recruitment. He's trying for his 11th, starting this Saturday, when the Penguins will meet the Red Wings, the team for which he currently consults, in a much-anticipated Stanley Cup final.
"Not very often do you get the two top teams in the Stanley Cup final," Bowman said on the telephone yesterday. "Pittsburgh didn't finish first, they finished second, but arguably if [Sidney] Crosby had played the whole year, they would have.
"The way they finished the season and the way they've gone through the playoffs, there's no question they were the best team in the East."
Bowman sees a lot of similarities between the teams, but one major difference - Detroit's experience on the blueline. Good as Sergei Gonchar, Ryan Whitney, Hal Gill and Brooks Orpik have been for the Penguins this spring, it is hard to put them at the same level as Nicklas Lidstrom, Brian Rafalski, Niklas Kronwall and Brad Stuart.
The Penguins have no blueliners who've won the Stanley Cup, and just two other players, Gary Roberts and Petr Sykora, with rings. The Red Wings have 10 players who've won a total of 23 rings, including Lidstrom with three, Rafalski with two and Chris Chelios with two.
"You've got tremendous young forwards on both teams and experienced defence in Detroit," Bowman said. "There are a lot of intangibles there. The fact that both teams have been real strong at home - Detroit has lost one [home playoff] game and Pittsburgh didn't lose any."
Bowman went to Pittsburgh in the summer of 1990, not to coach, but to beef up the Penguins' front office. He joined the organization the same day as coach Bob Johnson, hired by general manager Craig Patrick to bolster the experience of an organization that had missed the playoffs in seven of its eight previous seasons. Patrick's decision to hire two ambitious, larger-than-life personalities was heavily scrutinized at the time. In hindsight, Patrick's courage proved wise.
The Penguins won back-to-back championships in 1991 and 1992 - first with Johnson as the coach, then with Bowman, who took over the bench after Johnson died. The Penguins finished either first or second in their division for the next six years, decent results for a franchise that had been the model of mediocrity for its first 23 years.
Bowman left Pittsburgh after the 1992-93 season to join Detroit. His replacement behind the Pittsburgh bench, Eddie Johnston, remains the Penguins' senior adviser of hockey operations. Gilles Meloche, who was with the Penguins in Bowman's days, is back as their goaltender coach. The Penguins' chairman is Mario Lemieux, who led the team to those back-to-back titles.
Much as the focus in the Stanley Cup final will be on the scorers - Crosby and Evgeni Malkin on the one side, and Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg on the other - Bowman believes championships are ultimately won with defence. Even the most precocious offensive teams in NHL history - his Penguins of the 1990s and the Oilers of the 1980s - eventually learned to batten down the hatches in the playoffs.
"Defence, that's the thing," Bowman said. "That's what happened to us in Pittsburgh [in 1992]. When we fell behind Washington, all of a sudden, all those great players, they kept asking, 'How are we going to win?' Well, we weren't going to win 7-5. And this, I think, is what happened in Pittsburgh [this year], that and making the deal at the deadline to get [Marian] Hossa and [Pascal] Dupuis."
The Red Wings have a few threats of their own. But the subplot of youth versus experience will be what a lot of people, not just Bowman, will be watching with interest, to see how it all plays out.
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