It’s hard to believe today marks the 24th anniversary of the Red Wings enacting revenge on Claude Lemieux and the Colorado Avalanche for what happened to Kris Draper less than a year prior in the Western Conference Finals.
I don’t need to get into the overarching details of what happened at this point since every Red Wings fan is fully aware of the reasons behind what was probably one of the most significant events in Detroit sports history.
As Gary Thorne put it on the ESPN broadcast, it’s “what had to happen”.
I’ll probably point this out every year too this comes around, but what’s probably the most remarkable thing about what happened is not the fight itself, but Darren McCarty scored the game-winning goal in overtime to give Detroit the 6-5 victory.
Now it’s not the fact that a player like McCarty — who typically wasn’t viewed as a goal scorer — lit the lamp on the deciding tally, it’s the fact that he was able to continue in the game at all.
Remember, McCarty, swiped his arm away from a linesman to take out Lemieux from behind. If this happened in today’s NHL McCarty undoubtedly would’ve earned himself a game misconduct and probably a multi-game suspension. And speaking of game misconducts, in a matchup that saw 148 total penalty minutes, there were only two handed out altogether, one to Colorado’s Brent Severyn who had a total of 20 penalty minutes and one to Detroit’s Aaron Ward who had a total of 15 penalty minutes.
At the tend of the game too, there were more players on both teams who had penalty minutes as opposed to those who didn’t.
There were also five total players who had double-digit penalty minutes and those players include the aforementioned Brent Severyn and Aaron Ward who again had 20 and 15 minutes respectively. Colorado’s Adam Deadmarsh had 14 total penalty minutes while Detroit’s Darren McCarty and Jamie Pushor had 11 and 12 penalty minutes respectively.
It certainly was a different time, certainly a fun time if you were a Detroit Red Wings fan.
