The DPE, an oral history
- Thread starter DickSmehlik
- Start date
The Panther
Registered User
War, plague, famine, the DPE... It's not easy to say which is worst.
K Fleur
Sacrifice
- Mar 28, 2014
- 15,565
- 26,151
I know We’ve all seen this classic photo from a Wings/Devils game in 1998 but I just wanted to share it again.
overpass
Registered User
- Jun 7, 2007
- 5,310
- 2,922
Does anyone else remember the two conferences playing different styles in this time? I remember staying up late to watch the Western game on CBC and being struck by the rushes and passes through the middle and the end to end play. We just didn't see that in the East. Even the geriatric Dallas Stars looked fast and exciting, with Modano's rushes and Zubov's passes.
Memories from a young Eastern fan. Much of this seemed normal at the time, and only after the 2005 lockout did we realize how messed up it was.
The puck spending seemingly minutes at a time along the boards. In one end, out across the blueline, through the neutral zone, into the other end...board battles all the way. That was even strength play as we knew it.
Shayne Corson, barely able to move anymore at age 35, playing centre - centre! for 20 minutes a game in the playoffs and keeping the scoring area clear using old man strength, brutal stickwork, and sheer hatred.
That stupid graphic after the second period which reminded us that the team with the lead hadn't lost a game where they led in the third period for about five and a half seasons. Why did we watch third periods, again? For all that I hate the mathematical inelegance of the loser point and three point games, don't forget the problem it was created to solve was far worse.
Bad goalies with great stats. Lalime, Cechmanek, Turek...Seeing Ed Belfour play was an absolute revelation after he came to Toronto. Like, oh, this is how the position is supposed to be played. (Hasek didn't count, he wasn't human).
Jacques Martin's Senators, Larry Robinson's Devils, and their ruthlessly efficient trap and counter-attack. At least you'd see them score a couple of third period goals if they had the lead.
Was I crazy or did old Jeremy Roenick in Philly, broken knees and all, actually look quick and dangerous off the rush? I think that's just how bad the meta at C in the Eastern conference got.
There were still a lot of good players in the league. It was just a terrible style of play. And a few games into the 2005 season, most of them adapted just fine to playing with a bit of open ice.
Memories from a young Eastern fan. Much of this seemed normal at the time, and only after the 2005 lockout did we realize how messed up it was.
The puck spending seemingly minutes at a time along the boards. In one end, out across the blueline, through the neutral zone, into the other end...board battles all the way. That was even strength play as we knew it.
Shayne Corson, barely able to move anymore at age 35, playing centre - centre! for 20 minutes a game in the playoffs and keeping the scoring area clear using old man strength, brutal stickwork, and sheer hatred.
That stupid graphic after the second period which reminded us that the team with the lead hadn't lost a game where they led in the third period for about five and a half seasons. Why did we watch third periods, again? For all that I hate the mathematical inelegance of the loser point and three point games, don't forget the problem it was created to solve was far worse.
Bad goalies with great stats. Lalime, Cechmanek, Turek...Seeing Ed Belfour play was an absolute revelation after he came to Toronto. Like, oh, this is how the position is supposed to be played. (Hasek didn't count, he wasn't human).
Jacques Martin's Senators, Larry Robinson's Devils, and their ruthlessly efficient trap and counter-attack. At least you'd see them score a couple of third period goals if they had the lead.
Was I crazy or did old Jeremy Roenick in Philly, broken knees and all, actually look quick and dangerous off the rush? I think that's just how bad the meta at C in the Eastern conference got.
There were still a lot of good players in the league. It was just a terrible style of play. And a few games into the 2005 season, most of them adapted just fine to playing with a bit of open ice.
DitchMarner
It's time.
I remember that in Toronto's first season in the EC (1999), the Leafs were absolutely dominant against the West and very mediocre (at best) versus the East.
They beat DET three times and went something like 24-4 against the WC, I believe. Maybe they would have been better off not switching Conferences. BUF had their number all year in '99.
There's a reason from 95-03 the only eastern team to win the cup was the devils. They were also the only team to look competitive when losing(in 01).
Panthers,Flyers,Capitals were all swept. Hurricanes were non competitive, Sabres were only competitive because of Hasek(no offense to Peca et all). The real SCF was in the western conference final all those years except 2003.
It wasn't until 2004 where a half decent Tampa team beat a very overachieving Flames. After all the western powerhouses got old and fell apart(before detroit retooled).
overpass
Registered User
- Jun 7, 2007
- 5,310
- 2,922
Heh, I wondered to myself "How did the Leafs score so much in Pat Quinn's first season?" as I was writing the post, but it wasn't the kind of post to look something up. Thanks for bringing the facts.
Yeah, that 2004 Tampa team was the most entertaining team in years. If only more DPE teams had taken the same approach.
The Macho King
Back* to Back** World Champion
- Jun 22, 2011
- 48,868
- 29,481
There was just such a talent gap that I don't know if it's style or just one had all of the better players. Even the lesser teams in the west tended to have some solid stars - Anaheim had Kariya and Selanne, Vancouver had Bure until he went East, and you obviously have the Stars/Avs/Wings dominating. The East you have the Devils who mastered the trap style, and then you had a few shallow teams like the Pens and the Flyers who had some stars.
I'll say this - the DPE was way worse than people who are fond of it speak of when they reminisce. They'll say "oh look at that Wings/Avs rivalry it was so intense and the games were fun." And yeah, that's true - but they played 78 games against other teams and it was an interminable bore. Was anyone staying up to watch a Kings/Oilers game back then? Hell no. The game is so much healthier now.
Yeah, games between the Habs and Coyotes are super exciting in 2023-24 lol.
Who doesn't love watching the buffalo sabres play defense like a pee wee team and have zero physicality for a decade?
Once Yashin had fled, there was a time when Radek Bonk was a #1 centre. He was seen as a good defensive centre, and he had a neat trick on the back check where instead of skating back to the zone, he could hook on to an opponent and coast back with them.
Near the end it seemed like the Sens had a rock-paper-scissors relationship with the Flyers and Leafs, where they'd never quite put Toronto away, but unlike the Leafs had no issues with winning against the Flyers.
Garth Snow deciding to protect the 4x6 net with his 4x6 pads.
Nieuwendyk and Lalime, Lidstrom and Cloutier. If it's so tough to get by the trap, why not shoot at these Michelin Man goalies from outer space?
The early years featured the foot in the crease rule which featured several minutes of dumb replays. Saved Mike Richter's bacon a few times against New Jersey though. And the 99 Finals where Brett Hull was following the puck into the crease, which was allowed, but no one cared because if we were loud enough the rule would go away.
That Gretzky fellow was good at playing behind the net. Why not dedicate more room in the offensive zone to the space behind the goal line? Also Gretzky passes to the slot sliding by Niklas Sundstrom, who apparently didn't want to get his stick tape wet.
Goodbye tag-up offsides.
Hello random big forwards who will follow in the footsteps of Eric Lindros and...well I guess he didn't really go anywhere special. Everyone saw something in Chris Gratton though, and was willing to believe Keith Primeau should be a superstar (which he kind of was. For half a playoff run in May 2004).
Concussions for everyone! The Stevens on on Lindros hit was the famous one but it almost seemed like a set play for New Jersey's LD to abandon his post and look for a killshot on the puck carrier at the blue line.
Near the end it seemed like the Sens had a rock-paper-scissors relationship with the Flyers and Leafs, where they'd never quite put Toronto away, but unlike the Leafs had no issues with winning against the Flyers.
Garth Snow deciding to protect the 4x6 net with his 4x6 pads.
Nieuwendyk and Lalime, Lidstrom and Cloutier. If it's so tough to get by the trap, why not shoot at these Michelin Man goalies from outer space?
The early years featured the foot in the crease rule which featured several minutes of dumb replays. Saved Mike Richter's bacon a few times against New Jersey though. And the 99 Finals where Brett Hull was following the puck into the crease, which was allowed, but no one cared because if we were loud enough the rule would go away.
That Gretzky fellow was good at playing behind the net. Why not dedicate more room in the offensive zone to the space behind the goal line? Also Gretzky passes to the slot sliding by Niklas Sundstrom, who apparently didn't want to get his stick tape wet.
Goodbye tag-up offsides.
Hello random big forwards who will follow in the footsteps of Eric Lindros and...well I guess he didn't really go anywhere special. Everyone saw something in Chris Gratton though, and was willing to believe Keith Primeau should be a superstar (which he kind of was. For half a playoff run in May 2004).
Concussions for everyone! The Stevens on on Lindros hit was the famous one but it almost seemed like a set play for New Jersey's LD to abandon his post and look for a killshot on the puck carrier at the blue line.
The Panther
Registered User
For myself, I'd much rather watch two bad teams play to a 7-6 finish than watch two bad teams play to a 1-0 finish.
tabness
GUCCY 🇵🇸
- Apr 4, 2014
- 2,425
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This period always gives me dissonance. It's my childhood preteen/early teen era, I started really playing and thus getting into everything hockey the very years the Wings started to win all those cups. So I have mostly an idyllic view of it, the quality of many games was good because the Wings were so good, but later on going back, getting into the old games collecting scene, the early and mid nineties was just better all up as far as I'm concerned looking at it now (don't get me wrong dead puck era is still way better than the powderpuff new NHL).
2003 Giguere's pads behind the trap in the playoffs was probably the first time I really looked at the product and thought, yeah this is absolute garbage lol
We didn't have cable for much of the time but the games were usually on both channel 50 and CBC which we picked up in Detroit (just needed to tweak that antenna a bit). I was pissed as more and more games went on Fox Sports Detroit in the early 2000s. Strader was leaving and Ken Daniels was starting, Mickey was a constant and it will absolutely suck when he retires. The voice of the Wings for me. Would also listen on the radio, loved Ken Kal's high pitched "SCORES" call. Paul Woods did color and had the funny Canadian hockey player way of talking which I enjoyed. National broadcast games obviously had Thorne/Clement and Cole/Neale which were awesome.
I remember pouring over the boxscore pages of the newspaper in the late nineties, where they also showed league leaders. Stats were a lot harder to get back then, and it was frustrating and got me into stats a lot at the time, but now with the easy availability of stats and our modern data centric zeitgeist, there's just way too much stats and most everyone always just points to stats talking hockey which I find annoying now.
Later when the internet came to our house (a bit late in 1999), I'd kill a bunch of time on the NHL website. It had some charm, and what I remember and miss the most from that is that after the games you could vote for three stars online. The ESPN website was really nicely done as one of the early Web 2.0 websites in the early 2000s, and I used that a lot. HF was apparently around but I didn't know about it until post lockout.
No HFBoards at that time meant that I and everyone I knew actually liked all the players on the team. I was somewhat shocked going on HF later and seeing the fans rip into so many of the players of their own team, like I wasn't exposed to this sort of stuff before. Sports radio and the beat writers of the Wings at the time I got into it were handling the team with baby gloves, I missed the really juicy part of the mid nineties I guess. There was a bit of drama with Fedorov of course, but I really didn't care about the business aspect of it so much, I just loved having him come back to the team late during the 1997-1998 season and was bummed when he left after 2002-2003. I first understood free agency with regards to Mike Vernon, when I asked a friend if he was traded and he responded "he traded himself".
I remember Lemieux's comeback and I didn't like him much then. I knew who he was from the hockey cards and a bit from his retirement season but he seemed to rack up so many points despite not really playing at an impressive level commensurate with the stats. Now having watched real prime Lemieux from the early nineties, I think he's probably the best player I've seen, definitely best player in terms of finesse skills.
When the Wings started retooling and making splashes in free agency, I was always excited. We'd always look forward to a marquee name joining the Wings in the spring or after the playoffs. Murphy, Chelios, Verbeek, Clark, Hasek, Hull, Robitaille, Joseph, Hatcher, and so on. The most interesting one was after the 2002 cup, when the Avs got Kariya and Selanne, and so the Wings loaded up with Hatcher. Of course, there wasn't another meeting in the playoffs, and the new additions didn't make nearly as much of a splash as their names would indicate. None of this cap garbage back then, but it seems that a subset of fans really geek out on this stuff now so that's another way to get engagement.
After the Wings, I mostly followed the Avs, then the Stars as the obvious big threats. The Blues were getting kinda good too in the division. Joe Thornton on Boston was like the first player beyond that that I tried to really follow for a while until the lockout.
I got into the drafts in the early 2000s (even though I had stopped playing, I was still buds with and had played with guys who continued on into the NAHL, including one who made it to major juniors with Plymouth (another eventually played NCAA for UConn), and they were really into that stuff). The anecdote that sums up that period the best is my bud mocking the scouting mantra of the time "you can't teach size" (poor guy maxed out at 5'11" lol).
Eric Staal was the first junior player I remember being really interested in, and then as the lockout loomed I started to hear about Crosby for the first time. I have no idea if this story is true or not, just a friend of a friend narration, so take it for what it's worth, but I heard that Crosby's work ethic was so high, that girls would come up to him offering themselves to him, and he'd be like "mmm... after practice" lol (my friend would say this in an extremely dorky voice lol)
Easton was big in the stick/skates thing (I'm talking even pre Synergy), I always wanted an Easton stick from that period but never got my hands on one. Lots more brands at that time, I rocked a Koho for a bit, and the last stick I had before quitting playing (things were starting to get real expensive in the early 2000s) was a Nike aluminium which I thought was the coolest thing ever.
Roller/street hockey was everywhere back then. I actually enjoyed it more than ice. Started off with those cheap $20 buck blades from like Kmart but eventually picked up a pair of Missions which were the shit back then if you remember. Us neighborhood kids would always talk about bearings and stuff that we didn't really know about. We'd play as Wings vs Avs of course, and it would suck when your group was the Avs, I remember when I first started playing, one game, I was told I was Forsberg and I was like "who the hell is this guy? I wanna be Yzerman or Fedorov" and they were like "no he's really good" lol
Since I was getting into the whole hockey thing I also got into hockey cards, and since there was a glut of the early nineties produced cards, I had a lot of them years later, and I'd try to figure out the anachronisms of the high point totals and projections from back then into the current game. That along with the contempraneous complaints about the quality of hockey at the time made it so I never thought I was actually in the golden age of hockey at the moment, more like it had just passed, which is interesting. I was also incredibly psyched for the new NHL as it entered, but almost instantly turned off by the penalty fest and wussification that I saw happening. It's never been softer now as far back as I can remember... sigh
Late into the nineties the NHL started tweaking crap to increase scoring and there was a lot of media discussion around the lower point totals of the stars and why that was. I even did an article for my school paper in journalism class on this topic. It was my first real "research" into the evolution of hockey, unlike a lot of my other crap I wrote for the paper in that class, I really gave an effort for this assignment.
Yzerman was climbing up the all time scoring leaderboards at the time, which somewhat got me into the history of hockey, wondering who are all these players are. Same with Roy passing Sawchuk's win record which was a huge deal. Also the appearances of guys like Howe and Lindsay from Detroit's original six era during the late nineties success.
I remember Marty Turco (I think) was the first goalie in like forever/since it was tracked, to post a sub 2.00 GAA and it was a big deal. Barry Melrose was always talking about how save percentage was the best goalie stat, because back then, people seemed more into wins and GAA.
If you asked me back then who the best player was, it was obviously Gretzky, because of his "greatness" popular acclaim, even though the player that seemed the "best" on the ice watching would obviously be Lindros, and Gretzky honestly wouldn't register as close to the best at that time.
Smallworld online fantasy hockey was big late in the early 2000s, and that was my first exposure to it (never did the degenerate gambling pools pre internet thankfully... the amount of gambling promotion nowadays is yet another nail in the coffin of NHL hockey today). I remember I made a team called the "Nutty Canucks" where I spent most my budget on Naslund and Bertuzzi and Niclas Havelid did good for me as a league minimum defenseman lol
In terms of video games NHL 2000 was the thing man (also had NHL 99 which had the best intro even though its successor leapfrogged it). Never saw too much need to get the later releases. I still really like the way that you could see the entire roster 4 lines/3 D pairings on one screen. I did try some of the later games like 2009/2012/2013 and it was just like bleh with the user interface among other things.
Despite hockey's zenith moment probably happening earlier in the nineties, the media culture was still very strong around the late nineties, so many choices for hockey magazines and cards and equipment brands and all that. It seems far more constricted today even with the proliferation of the internet, because even if there are far more voices, the big ones have all seemed to consolidate.
2003 Giguere's pads behind the trap in the playoffs was probably the first time I really looked at the product and thought, yeah this is absolute garbage lol
We didn't have cable for much of the time but the games were usually on both channel 50 and CBC which we picked up in Detroit (just needed to tweak that antenna a bit). I was pissed as more and more games went on Fox Sports Detroit in the early 2000s. Strader was leaving and Ken Daniels was starting, Mickey was a constant and it will absolutely suck when he retires. The voice of the Wings for me. Would also listen on the radio, loved Ken Kal's high pitched "SCORES" call. Paul Woods did color and had the funny Canadian hockey player way of talking which I enjoyed. National broadcast games obviously had Thorne/Clement and Cole/Neale which were awesome.
I remember pouring over the boxscore pages of the newspaper in the late nineties, where they also showed league leaders. Stats were a lot harder to get back then, and it was frustrating and got me into stats a lot at the time, but now with the easy availability of stats and our modern data centric zeitgeist, there's just way too much stats and most everyone always just points to stats talking hockey which I find annoying now.
Later when the internet came to our house (a bit late in 1999), I'd kill a bunch of time on the NHL website. It had some charm, and what I remember and miss the most from that is that after the games you could vote for three stars online. The ESPN website was really nicely done as one of the early Web 2.0 websites in the early 2000s, and I used that a lot. HF was apparently around but I didn't know about it until post lockout.
No HFBoards at that time meant that I and everyone I knew actually liked all the players on the team. I was somewhat shocked going on HF later and seeing the fans rip into so many of the players of their own team, like I wasn't exposed to this sort of stuff before. Sports radio and the beat writers of the Wings at the time I got into it were handling the team with baby gloves, I missed the really juicy part of the mid nineties I guess. There was a bit of drama with Fedorov of course, but I really didn't care about the business aspect of it so much, I just loved having him come back to the team late during the 1997-1998 season and was bummed when he left after 2002-2003. I first understood free agency with regards to Mike Vernon, when I asked a friend if he was traded and he responded "he traded himself".
I remember Lemieux's comeback and I didn't like him much then. I knew who he was from the hockey cards and a bit from his retirement season but he seemed to rack up so many points despite not really playing at an impressive level commensurate with the stats. Now having watched real prime Lemieux from the early nineties, I think he's probably the best player I've seen, definitely best player in terms of finesse skills.
When the Wings started retooling and making splashes in free agency, I was always excited. We'd always look forward to a marquee name joining the Wings in the spring or after the playoffs. Murphy, Chelios, Verbeek, Clark, Hasek, Hull, Robitaille, Joseph, Hatcher, and so on. The most interesting one was after the 2002 cup, when the Avs got Kariya and Selanne, and so the Wings loaded up with Hatcher. Of course, there wasn't another meeting in the playoffs, and the new additions didn't make nearly as much of a splash as their names would indicate. None of this cap garbage back then, but it seems that a subset of fans really geek out on this stuff now so that's another way to get engagement.
After the Wings, I mostly followed the Avs, then the Stars as the obvious big threats. The Blues were getting kinda good too in the division. Joe Thornton on Boston was like the first player beyond that that I tried to really follow for a while until the lockout.
I got into the drafts in the early 2000s (even though I had stopped playing, I was still buds with and had played with guys who continued on into the NAHL, including one who made it to major juniors with Plymouth (another eventually played NCAA for UConn), and they were really into that stuff). The anecdote that sums up that period the best is my bud mocking the scouting mantra of the time "you can't teach size" (poor guy maxed out at 5'11" lol).
Eric Staal was the first junior player I remember being really interested in, and then as the lockout loomed I started to hear about Crosby for the first time. I have no idea if this story is true or not, just a friend of a friend narration, so take it for what it's worth, but I heard that Crosby's work ethic was so high, that girls would come up to him offering themselves to him, and he'd be like "mmm... after practice" lol (my friend would say this in an extremely dorky voice lol)
Easton was big in the stick/skates thing (I'm talking even pre Synergy), I always wanted an Easton stick from that period but never got my hands on one. Lots more brands at that time, I rocked a Koho for a bit, and the last stick I had before quitting playing (things were starting to get real expensive in the early 2000s) was a Nike aluminium which I thought was the coolest thing ever.
Roller/street hockey was everywhere back then. I actually enjoyed it more than ice. Started off with those cheap $20 buck blades from like Kmart but eventually picked up a pair of Missions which were the shit back then if you remember. Us neighborhood kids would always talk about bearings and stuff that we didn't really know about. We'd play as Wings vs Avs of course, and it would suck when your group was the Avs, I remember when I first started playing, one game, I was told I was Forsberg and I was like "who the hell is this guy? I wanna be Yzerman or Fedorov" and they were like "no he's really good" lol
Since I was getting into the whole hockey thing I also got into hockey cards, and since there was a glut of the early nineties produced cards, I had a lot of them years later, and I'd try to figure out the anachronisms of the high point totals and projections from back then into the current game. That along with the contempraneous complaints about the quality of hockey at the time made it so I never thought I was actually in the golden age of hockey at the moment, more like it had just passed, which is interesting. I was also incredibly psyched for the new NHL as it entered, but almost instantly turned off by the penalty fest and wussification that I saw happening. It's never been softer now as far back as I can remember... sigh
Late into the nineties the NHL started tweaking crap to increase scoring and there was a lot of media discussion around the lower point totals of the stars and why that was. I even did an article for my school paper in journalism class on this topic. It was my first real "research" into the evolution of hockey, unlike a lot of my other crap I wrote for the paper in that class, I really gave an effort for this assignment.
Yzerman was climbing up the all time scoring leaderboards at the time, which somewhat got me into the history of hockey, wondering who are all these players are. Same with Roy passing Sawchuk's win record which was a huge deal. Also the appearances of guys like Howe and Lindsay from Detroit's original six era during the late nineties success.
I remember Marty Turco (I think) was the first goalie in like forever/since it was tracked, to post a sub 2.00 GAA and it was a big deal. Barry Melrose was always talking about how save percentage was the best goalie stat, because back then, people seemed more into wins and GAA.
If you asked me back then who the best player was, it was obviously Gretzky, because of his "greatness" popular acclaim, even though the player that seemed the "best" on the ice watching would obviously be Lindros, and Gretzky honestly wouldn't register as close to the best at that time.
Smallworld online fantasy hockey was big late in the early 2000s, and that was my first exposure to it (never did the degenerate gambling pools pre internet thankfully... the amount of gambling promotion nowadays is yet another nail in the coffin of NHL hockey today). I remember I made a team called the "Nutty Canucks" where I spent most my budget on Naslund and Bertuzzi and Niclas Havelid did good for me as a league minimum defenseman lol
In terms of video games NHL 2000 was the thing man (also had NHL 99 which had the best intro even though its successor leapfrogged it). Never saw too much need to get the later releases. I still really like the way that you could see the entire roster 4 lines/3 D pairings on one screen. I did try some of the later games like 2009/2012/2013 and it was just like bleh with the user interface among other things.
Despite hockey's zenith moment probably happening earlier in the nineties, the media culture was still very strong around the late nineties, so many choices for hockey magazines and cards and equipment brands and all that. It seems far more constricted today even with the proliferation of the internet, because even if there are far more voices, the big ones have all seemed to consolidate.
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tabness
GUCCY 🇵🇸
- Apr 4, 2014
- 2,425
- 4,360
couple other dead puck era game things that stand out:
As concerns about the flow of the game grew, the usual whistle when the puck was stalled in a board battle was phased out as refs were encouraged to keep the play going, and that's something that sticks with us to today. You watch games from just a bit before in the early nineties and you see how quickly refs were willing to blow the play dead in those scenarios.
While many of the attempted rule changes in the late nineties had to do with the size of zones to counter the trap as well as temporary resolutions to crack down on obstruction, there was a recognition even back then by the league that the little slash plays were also hindering star players, and there was even a fleeting attempt at the time to crack down on it. While the new NHL really came down hard on obstruction from the get go, it took quite a bit longer for them to get rid of the little slashing, and that has seemed to be one of the factors in the recent uptick in scoring the past five years or so.
As concerns about the flow of the game grew, the usual whistle when the puck was stalled in a board battle was phased out as refs were encouraged to keep the play going, and that's something that sticks with us to today. You watch games from just a bit before in the early nineties and you see how quickly refs were willing to blow the play dead in those scenarios.
While many of the attempted rule changes in the late nineties had to do with the size of zones to counter the trap as well as temporary resolutions to crack down on obstruction, there was a recognition even back then by the league that the little slash plays were also hindering star players, and there was even a fleeting attempt at the time to crack down on it. While the new NHL really came down hard on obstruction from the get go, it took quite a bit longer for them to get rid of the little slashing, and that has seemed to be one of the factors in the recent uptick in scoring the past five years or so.
DickSmehlik
Registered User
Look at Straka's blatant interference on this game 7 series winning OT goal (#82 in the video).
The fact that no one blinked an eye and protested after it was scored tells you how much interference was woven into the fabric of the game.
The fact that no one blinked an eye and protested after it was scored tells you how much interference was woven into the fabric of the game.
tabness
GUCCY 🇵🇸
- Apr 4, 2014
- 2,425
- 4,360
yes lol the Sabres player looks more mad at himself than anything
The Wings forwards would waterski so much back then and if they didn't Scotty would probably bench them or chew them out
today you'd have a 50 page topic on hf
Gary Thorne loves this takeaway, today it's two hooks the ref could call
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I've been watching hockey consistently since 00-01 and I saw the final two games of the 99-00 Final. I remember being amazed by the 99-00 Final. But I remember finding that 04 Final painfully boring because of the Flames.
JianYang
Registered User
- Sep 29, 2017
- 18,357
- 16,966
I don't think the standard of officiating really changed in dpe compared to the higher scoring eras before it.
You watch a game from the early 90s or late 80s, you still see blatant hooks and interference going on, but I think the coaching and goaltending particularly became more technical, and that science was mostly skewed towards low event hockey games, which leveraged off the advantage of the referee's high tolerance on many infractions.
You watch a game from the early 90s or late 80s, you still see blatant hooks and interference going on, but I think the coaching and goaltending particularly became more technical, and that science was mostly skewed towards low event hockey games, which leveraged off the advantage of the referee's high tolerance on many infractions.
Yozhik v tumane
Registered User
- Jan 2, 2019
- 1,897
- 2,011
Not sure if it works sharing instagram links, but we had DPE hockey in Sweden as well! Here’s a sequence from the 1996 finals between Frölunda and Luleå, known as perhaps the best and also the worst finals in the history of the SEL/SHL:
White #10 is Tomas Holmström. Notice how the ref eventually found a punishable misdemeanor there!
Frölunda head coach at the time was Lars Falk, who had a long standing feud with head of the Swedish hockey federation Rickard Fagerlund, who detested Falk’s defensive 1-3-1 systems which he’d found great success with, including winning European club championships against the top Russian teams twice (iirc), then with Djurgården. The Swedish league was the first to get rid of the red line under Fagerlund, who also assigned Hardy Nilsson as national team coach because of his “torpedo system” having looked the antidote to trap hockey.
White #10 is Tomas Holmström. Notice how the ref eventually found a punishable misdemeanor there!
Frölunda head coach at the time was Lars Falk, who had a long standing feud with head of the Swedish hockey federation Rickard Fagerlund, who detested Falk’s defensive 1-3-1 systems which he’d found great success with, including winning European club championships against the top Russian teams twice (iirc), then with Djurgården. The Swedish league was the first to get rid of the red line under Fagerlund, who also assigned Hardy Nilsson as national team coach because of his “torpedo system” having looked the antidote to trap hockey.
Theokritos
Global Moderator
- Apr 6, 2010
- 12,622
- 4,992
A few years ago Finnish veteran Kai Suikkanen said something similar when he laughingly recalled playing against the Soviet Union with the Finnish national team in the 1980s: "I was up against Sergei Makarov. I was holding him all the time, he skated and laterally dragged me along. If you play defence like this today you're in the penalty box all the time."
JianYang
Registered User
- Sep 29, 2017
- 18,357
- 16,966
What I don't miss is the clogfest in the neutral zone. The best teams going into the 3rd period with the lead were virtual locks to hang on in a very low event period. The drama was cut out in too many cases.
What i do miss is the sheer physicality and hatred that teams had for each other particularly in the playoffs.
It's a give and take for me in today's game.
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