Estimated reading time: 12 minutes
Time to continue a look at the most dramatic and significant overtime goals by the Red Wings in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
We all know that few moments in sports can compare to the excitement of an overtime hockey goal.
In Part 1, I looked at four overtime goals from the Wings’ early playoff runs in the 1930s and 1950s. Those goals were in 1934 by Herbie Lewis, the first overtime playoff game in team history; in 1936 by Mud Bruneteau, which ended the longest game in NHL history in the sixth overtime; in 1950 by Pete Babando, which was the NHL’s first overtime goal in Game 7 of the finals; and in 1954 by Tony Leswick, another overtime goal in Game 7 of the finals.
The Wings won their seventh Stanley Cup in 1955 without any overtime games, sweeping the Maple Leafs and surviving the Canadiens in seven games. Detroit waited for 42 years for its eighth Stanley Cup.
In 1956, for the first time in eight seasons, the Wings did not finish atop the standings, and Montreal exacted its revenge in the finals, four games to one. In 1957, the Wings finished first again but lost in the semifinals to the Bruins (back in the day when for some stupid reason the playoffs pitted Nos. 1 versus 3 and Nos. 2 versus 4).
As general manager Jack Adams dealt away players at a record clip, the Wings’ dynasty ended with a whimper. But for a decade — from the 1947-48 season through the 1956-57 season, the Wings topped the standings eight times, won four Stanley Cups and lost in the finals three times.
From 1957 to 1988, the Wings finished first only once, in 1965. They reached the finals four times — 1961, 1963, 1964 and 1966 — each time as the last playoff qualifier. Against the Leafs in 1964, they were poised to win the Cup at Olympia Stadium, but they lost Game 6, 4-3 in overtime. The goal came at 1:43 by defenseman Bob Baun, who left in the third period after a Gordie Howe shot fractured his ankle. In Game 7 at Maple Leaf Gardens, Baun was in the lineup and Johnny Bower shut out Detroit, 4-0.
Onto happier overtime times:
JUNE 11, 1995
Slava Kozlov scored at 2:25 of the second overtime in Game 5 against Chicago to send the Wings to the Stanley Cup finals for the first time in 29 years.
A 103-day lockout delayed the 1994-95 season until Jan. 20, 1995. Teams played a 48-game schedule. At 33-11-4, the Wings won the Central Division by nine points over St. Louis and finished five points ahead of the Quebec Nordiques for the league’s best record. It was their fifth division title in eight years, but they had only one trip to the conference finals to show for it.
At training camp in September. After the lockout in January. Throughout the winter. In the playoffs. The Wings repeatedly said they had one goal: the Stanley Cup.
En route to the Cup finals, the Wings went 12-2. They blitzed Dallas in five games, routed San Jose in a tennis score (6-0, 6-2, 6-2, 6-2) and took out the Blackhawks in five games.
The Chicago series, though, was no cakewalk. All four Detroit victories came by one goal and three came in overtime. The Wings barely outscored the Hawks in the series, 13-12. Plus, captain Steve Yzerman missed the first three games recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery, and Sergei Fedorov missed Game 4 with a separated shoulder.
In Game 1, Nicklas Lidstrom scored at 1:01 of overtime for a 2-1 victory. In Game 3, Vladimir Konstantinov scored at 9:25 of the second overtime for a 4-3 victory. In Game 5, Yzerman and Fedorov were together for the first time, and the Wings pummeled Chicago’s Ed Belfour with 47 shots.
Denis Savard scored on a Chicago power play midway through the first period. Yzerman tied it midway through the second. The next goal didn’t come for 54 minutes and one second, until after the clock passed midnight.
Gathering a pass from Fedorov, Kozlov skated in from center ice, stopped in the high slot and wristed a shot that slipped between Belfour’s pads. “Everybody just screamed,” Kozlov said.
“To the finals!” blared the morning’s Free Press, a front page so popular it was sold on T-shirts.
“I dreamed about this all my life,” said forward Shawn Burr, who grew up in Sarnia, Ontario. “I can’t believe it. My heart just stopped.”
Alas, although heavy favorites, the Wings were swept in the finals by the New Jersey Devils and their left wing lock — 2-1, 4-2, 5-2, 5-2 — extending Detroit’s Stanley Cup drought to 40 years.
MAY 16, 1996
Yzerman scored at 1:15 of the second overtime in Game 7 against St. Louis to send the Wings to the 1996 conference finals.
Although Yzerman scored 692 goals and 70 more in the playoffs during his 22-year career, most Wings fans consider this 1996 goal his most memorable. A team that had won 62 games, an NHL record, fell behind the sub-.500 Blues, three games to two. Then Yzerman spoke for his teammates and said the Wings would win Game 6 and bring the series back to The Joe. And before Game 7 he declared: “We’re going to win.”
Through four periods, neither team scored. The Wings held a 38-29 edge in shots. Seven of those shots came from Yzerman, whose line with Fedorov and Darren McCarty or Doug Brown had shut down the Blues’ big line of Wayne Gretzky, Brett Hull and Shayne Corson.
To start the second overtime, Yzerman threaded a pass to Fedorov, forcing Jon Casey to make a point-blank save. On Yzerman’s next shift, the Wings cleared their zone as the Blues completed a line change. Konstantinov tried to hit Bob Errey streaking through the neutral zone but mishit his pass. Gretzky reached behind his back with one hand and deflected the pass at the blue line. The puck hit his skate as he tried to gather it. Yzerman swooped from behind, grabbed the loose puck and crossed the red line. As he neared the blue line at full speed, Dino Cicceralli moved out of his way, two Blues defensemen retreated and Gretzky tried to chase him down. Yzerman wound up before the blue line and unleashed a slap shot as he crossed it.
His 55-footer flew past Casey, hit the crossbar, bounced into the netting and chased away the Blues 75 seconds into the second overtime and 18 minutes before midnight.
“It’s the kind of goal every player dreams about in his career,” Yzerman said.
Alas, although heavy favorites, the Wings lost to the Colorado Avalanche in the Western Conference finals. Detroit finished with 27 more points than Colorado, but the Avs finished off the Wings in six games. As a final indignity, Colorado’s Claude Lemieux sent Kris Draper face first into the boards with a cheap shot from behind, breaking his orbital, cheek and jaw bones and sparking hockey’s bitterest and most entertaining rivalry/soap opera.
MAY 8, 1997
Brendan Shanahan scored at 17:03 of the second overtime on the road to complete the Wings’ sweep of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks in the 1997 conference semifinals.
For all the critical overtimes the Wings played in the 1990s and the 2000s, this one often got overlooked. Maybe because plenty of fans were asleep when Shanahan finally delivered the series clincher at 3:27 a.m. Eastern time.
But the victory was vital on several fronts:
- Although only four games, the series had been hard fought, tense and draining. Games 1, 2 and 4 went to overtime. Those overtimes added one hour, 19 minutes and one second to the series. So in essence, the four-game sweep lasted 5 1/3 games.
- The sweep led to a seven-day break between the Anaheim series and the conference finals against Colorado, which held home-ice advantage.
- If the Wings would have played a Game 5 at The Joe and lost, hardly a remote possibility in such a close series, they would have needed 2,000-mile flights out and back to California, adding further wear and tear in their pursuit of Detroit’s first Stanley Cup since 1955.
In Game 1, the Wings won, 2-1, when Martin Lapointe scored 59 seconds into overtime. In Game 2, on a Sunday afternoon, the Wings won, 3-2, when Kozlov scored at 1:31 of the third overtime. In Game 3, the Wings trailed, 2-0, in the first period, tied it at 3 late in the second period and went ahead, 5-3, when Fedorov and Kozlov scored 24 seconds apart early in the third period. That was the final score.
In Game 4, the Wings had to rally twice. Joe Sacco scored early in the first period for the Ducks; Brown answered 15 minutes later. Brian Bellows scored in the second period for the Ducks; Lidstrom tied it at 9:09 of the third period. Lidstrom had been denied on his first 47 shots in the playoffs.
The scoreboard didn’t change again for 48 minutes.
By the end of the first overtime, the Wings had fired 57 shots on Mikhail Shtalenkov, forced into action when Guy Herbert was injured in Game 2. By game’s end, he had made 70 saves, a franchise record.
Before the second overtime, Lapointe, the Game 1 OT hero, told his teammates that it was a great feeling to score an overtime game winner and urged a new hero to come to the forefront.
The Wings unleashed 16 shots in the second overtime and held the Ducks without a shot for 17 of the final 20 minutes.
The Wings’ tenacity paid off in the end. A three-on-two developed as Shanahan carried the puck along the left boards in the Anaheim zone. When he reached the corner, he passed to Yzerman, but the Ducks knocked the puck back in the corner. Shanahan retrieved it and sent a pass to the point. When Aaron Ward’s shot went off the side of the goal, Yzerman grabbed it behind the end line and threw a backhander that hit the side of the goal. The puck bounced to Lapointe, who fired a backhander that hit Shtalenkov as seven players converged on the goal. The rebound squirted to Yzerman, who fired a shot that hit Shtalenkov’s torso, took a big bounce, hit a skate and rolled to the open side of the crease, where Shanahan deposited it into the gaping goal.
“We felt we deserved to win,” Shanahan said. “We knew we were going to keep getting our chances. We didn’t want to be flying across the country anymore.”
In the end, the series statistics were ridiculous. The Ducks led for 1:06:20 compared to the Wings’ 40:49. Detroit outscored Anaheim, 8-2, in third periods and overtimes and outshot the Ducks, 112-59, in those periods. Detroit’s Russian Five accounted for 17 points on six goals and 11 assists.
Alas, 30 days after the Wings dispatched the Ducks they ended their Stanley Cup drought. Detroit eliminated the Avalanche in six games and then swept the Philadelphia in the finals. The Conn Smythe Trophy for MVP of the playoffs went to goaltender Mike Vernon, who against the Ducks had more penalty minutes (12) than goals allowed (eight).
JUNE 8, 2002
Igor Larionov scored at 14:47 of the third overtime in Game 3 of the Stanley Cup finals against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Three times during the 2002 playoffs the greatest collection of talent ever assembled by the Red Wings appeared on the brink of not fulfilling its manifest destiny.
After losses to Colorado in the second round in 1999 and 2000 and a first-round loss to Los Angeles in 2001, the Wings restocked their roster with three future hall of famers: goalie Dominik Hasek, right wing Brett Hull and left wing Luc Robitaille. They already had six future hall of famers: Chris Chelios, Fedorov, Larionov, Lidstrom, Shanahan and Yzerman. The Wings also added a stellar Russian rookie, Pavel Datsyuk, who will be eligible for Hockey Hall of Fame this year but his candidacy could be stalled because of the war in Ukraine.
The 2002 Wings, in some circles, were called the Hockey Gods.
The Wings’ first playoff crisis came when they opened at The Joe by losing Games 1 and 2 to Vancouver. They won the next four, though, highlighted by a 4-0 Hasek shutout in Game 5 and a Hull hat trick in a 6-4 Game 6 victory.
Then Detroit eliminated St. Louis in five games. Hasek started the series with a 2-0 shutout and ended it with a 4-0 shutout.
The Wings’ second playoff crisis came when Peter Forsberg scored at 6:24 of overtime in Game 5 at Joe Louis Arena. That gave the Avalanche a 3-2 lead in the conference finals with Game 6 at Denver. But Hasek posted back-to-back shutouts (2-0 and 7-0), although Game 7 was best remembered for how the Wings blitzed Patrick Roy. Tomas Holmstrom scored on the Wings’ first shot, Fedorov on the second shot and Robitaille on the fifth shot. Roy departed after Fredrik Olausson made it 6-0 at 6:28 of the second period.
Heavy favorites against the Hurricanes, the Wings played poorly in Game 1 at The Joe and lost, 3-2, when Ron Francis scored on a redirected pass 58 seconds into overtime. The Wings played much better in Game 2 but were deadlocked at 1-1 late in the third period. Then Lidstrom and Draper scored 13 seconds apart for a 3-1 victory. All Lidstrom did was play 34:38, score the winning goal, set up the insurance goal and dominate the ice.
The series moved Raliegh, North Carolina, and Game 3 turned into an epic instant classic. The Wings’ third playoff crisis loomed in the waning moments of regulation time. They trailed, 2-1, until Hull tipped a Lidstrom point shot past Arturs Irbe with 74 seconds left.
In the first overtime, Irbe stoned Datsyuk with his left pad, Shanahan fired inches wide on a two-on-one with Fedorov and Olausson hit the crossbar.
In the second overtime, the Hurricanes killed a penalty, and Iribe made a diving glove save on Yzerman.
To keep their energy levels up, the Wings consumed bananas and oranges between periods. They also had a secret weapon: Pedialyte, the children’s drink that replaced important minerals, especially when suffering diarrhea. Trainer John Wharton said Pedialyte had more electrolytes than sports drinks and a faster rate of absorption.
In the third overtime, the NHL’s oldest player skated circles around tired legs. Larionov, a 41-year-old center who scored in the second period, received a pass from Holmstrom on a rush, stickhandled past a diving defender, used rushing defenseman Mathieu Dandenault as a screen and roofed a backhander past Irbe.
The Wings finally led the series, two games to one. Larionov became the oldest player to score in the finals. The winning goal came with 5:13 left in the third overtime. The goal ended the third-longest finals game in history at 114:47. (It would have been the longest had it lasted another 27 seconds.) The goal came at 1:15 a.m.
“This is the biggest goal of my career,” Larionov said. “It’s obviously huge for me.” Alas, the triple-overtime thriller turned the tide in the series. The Wings never trailed again. Two nights later, they won Game 4, 3-0. Three nights after that, they won Game 5, 3-1. It was a title for the ages for a team for the ages.
