The Wings have certainly dug themselves a hole in their second round match-up against the San Jose Sharks. A 2-0 series lead for San Jose obviously looks very favorable for a team that’s trying to advance to their second consecutive Conference Championship appearance.
However, according to Gregg Krupa of the Detroit News, many experts are not counting the Wings out. One of those individuals not counting the Wings out is their former head coach Jacques Demers who coached the team 1986-87 to 1989-90.
“You don’t look that far ahead,” said Jacques Demers, a former Red Wings coach. “The Detroit Red Wings are blessed with a tremendous amount of character. They have a great captain and one of the best coaches in the league. It has to start right there.
“Great leaders like Nick Lidstrom and Mike Babcock will say the right things, and they will have the right approach. These are not clichés. It is what works.”
Demers is familiar too with trying to coach a team out of a 0-2 hole. He did it on two separate occasions the first in 1987 when he was able to lead the Wings to a game seven victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs after falling 2-0 early in the series. In 1993 he was also able to lead the Montreal Canadiens to victory over the Quebec Nordiques after trailing Quebec by 2 in that series. Montreal went on to win the Stanley Cup that year over the Los Angeles Kings.
“We focused on our team and what we had to do, not on any of that other stuff or even the other team,” said Demers, a Canadian senator who also analyzes Canadiens games in the playoffs for the French-language broadcaster RDS. “We said, ‘Don’t worry about what everyone else is saying or the other team is doing. Think about what we need to do.’
“I told them, ‘Boys, all I want you to do tonight is win the first period.’ If you start thinking too negatively about how you have to win four out of five, or what happens if we don’t win the third game, you will never make it. You try to simplify things.
“And we won that first period, both times. Against Toronto, we then won that game and three out of the four after that. With Montreal, we won that game and three more straight against the Nordiques.”
