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Brian Burke has some words of warning for NHL opponents trying to ape the success of the Detroit Red Wings, the team that followed his Anaheim Ducks as Stanley Cup champions on a steamy night in Pittsburgh last June.
"To me, if you want to play Detroit's style, you better have some players that can do it," said Burke, the Ducks' garrulous general manager. "A lot of teams don't.
"That's why I think it's easier to fix the snarl on your team than it is to fix the skill. If you put players in your lineup like [Henrik] Zetterberg, [Pavel] Datsyuk and [Nicklas] Lidstrom, then, yeah, you can play Detroit's way. But those guys are hard to find."
There is a copycat element to team building in the NHL, according to Burke, which leaves teams with an essential conundrum going into the new season: Do you try to win with brawn, as epitomized by the Ducks in 2007, when they became the first team since the Philadelphia Flyers of the Broad Street Bullies era, to lead the league in fighting and win the Stanley Cup?
Or with skill, as embodied in the elegant and sophisticated style of the go-go Red Wings, a team that pretty much had the puck all year and wouldn't let anyone else play with it. Except for a brief January downturn, fuelled mostly by injuries, the Red Wings were above the crowd from start to finish last season.
"Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery — and I don't think there's any question that teams copycatted us last year after we won a championship the year before," Burke said.
He added: "Detroit is a more physical team than people realize, but there's no question, our styles are completely different."
"They like to hang on to the puck and beat you with puck possession and special teams. Hitting is not the cornerstone of their game. Our philosophy can be summed up very succinctly: Either we have the puck or we are in aggressive and determined pursuit of the puck in all three zones. Body contact is a staple, fighting is a staple. That's clearly different than Detroit's approach."
Burke's counterpart with the Red Wings, general manager Ken Holland, would agree.
"The last two years, two different philosophies won the Stanley Cup, so yes, different philosophies can win the Stanley Cup," Holland said. "The big thing is you've got to have a philosophy and stick to it. We draft skill. That's our philosophy — and it's hard to change mid-stream because we're drafting kids at 18.
"It took us a decade, from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties, to really get it going. And we got lucky — a third-round pick became a superstar on defence [Lidstrom]; and then we got lucky two more times when two late-round picks [Datsyuk and Zetterberg] became superstars up front."
When the Red Wings launch their title defence next week, they are even stronger on paper than they were a year ago, after coaxing prized free-agent Marian Hossa to sign with them in the off-season. Hossa made it to the Stanley Cup final with the Penguins last season and was a mainstay on their top line with Sidney Crosby.
Several teams offered Hossa generous long-term contracts that would have guaranteed him well over $50-million (all currency U.S.), but instead, Hossa elected to sign a one-year, $7.4-million contract with the Wings. He believed the Red Wings give him the best chance of winning a championship.
That, naturally, represents the Red Wings' biggest challenge — finding the motivation to win again. Once upon a time, the NHL was a league of dynasties. In a 15-year span from 1976 to 1990, three teams — the Montreal Canadiens, Edmonton Oilers and New York Islanders — won 14 Stanley Cups.
More recently, the pattern has shifted and Stanley Cup champions in one year tend to fall on hard times the next.
It is something Holland is uniquely qualified to deal with, given that the last team to win back-to-back championships was the Red Wings in '97 and '98. Not only was Holland GM back then, there are a handful of holdovers from that era on the current team — Lidstrom, goaltender Chris Osgood, plus forwards Kris Draper, Kirk Maltby and Darren McCarty. If anyone understands the challenges awaiting them, it is the Red Wings' leadership group.
However, Holland believes in taking matters one step at a time.
"Obviously having a few guys here who've been through it in '97 and '98 is an advantage, but my big thing is making the playoffs," Holland said.
"If you want to win a Stanley Cup, you need to be one of 16 teams that make the playoffs. Then you focus on beating one team in the first round. It's a process and so much has to go right.
