Darren McCarty knows better than anybody how intense the Detroit Red Wings’ rivalry was with the Colorado Avalanche at the turn of the millennium.
The gritty right winger is considered one of the best Red Wings players of all time. Although he was never an elite player, goal scorer or All-Star, he won four Stanley Cups in Detroit and spent 13 different seasons with the Red Wings. He also grew up just 40 minutes away from Detroit in Ontario, spending his childhood going to Joe Louis Arena, the Red Wings’ old home arena.
It doesn’t hurt that McCarty was not only considered the enforcer of those Red Wings teams that won Stanley Cups in 1997, 1998 and 2002, he was at the epicenter of the pinnacle of the rivalry with the Avalanche on March 26, 1997.
Detroit had lost the previous season in the conference Finals to Colorado after winning a regular season record 62 games. The loss itself was painful enough considering the Red Wings hadn’t won the Stanley Cup sine 1955, but Avalanche enforcer Claude Lemieux laid a dirty hit from behind on Red Wings center Kris Draper – McCarty’s best friend – that led to Draper suffering a broken jaw and a concussion.
Lemieux showed zero remorse for Draper’s injuries and didn’t apologize. It eventually led to a major brawl between McCarty and Lemieux on March 26, 1997 that saw McCarty bloody the Avalanche star in a sequence he calls “Detroit D-Day.”
“This story in life and in sports, bad things happen,” says McCarty in a one-on-one interview. “This is the story of karma, and what happens when you don’t have respect for a fellow human being.”
Claude Lemieux’s Lack Of Remorse Led To Bloody Brawl on March 26, 1997
The four-time Stanley Cup winner recounts the events in Vice TV’s “The Grudge,” which details sports’ greatest rivalries between teams, players and coaches. In this episode, it looks back at arguably the greatest rivalry in NHL history between the Red Wings and the Avalanche.
McCarty explains how Lemieux’s lack of remorse is what led to him bloodying the Avalanche veteran, who was the most hated NHL player at the time. However, Lemieux was also a proven playoff performer, having won the Conn Smythe Trophy while leading the New Jersey Devils to a Stanley Cup win over the Red Wings in 1995.
“It would have changed the fact that it would have been more the code of the game, and he would have got fought, but it would have been more respectful,” says McCarty had Lemieux apologized. “I’m a Gen Xer. I was raised by John Rambo. He drew first blood. I wouldn’t ever condone the things that I did that day, because you’re not supposed to knee guys, not supposed to slash a guys’ face against the boards.”
The game itself featured 18 fighting major penalties and 144 minutes in penalties, including just a double-minor for roughing against McCarty. In today’s game, he would have been given a suspension and ejected from the game after kneeing Lemieux in the head.
“I was raised a little bit different,” says McCarty. “Obviously I only got four minutes for roughing, a 10-minute misconduct and stayed in the game. You can argue all you want, but I’d do the exact same thing again.”
McCarty ended up scoring the overtime game-winning goal that night, leading Detroit to a 6-5 win over their hated rivals.
“If you would have gave me a pen to write down how I wanted it to play out, I would have missed it,” says McCarty. “The big guy (Lemieux) made me the star. It’s amazing, sports has the ability to only write its own narratives that we can’t even touch.
“I slayed the dragon, getting the revenge on Lemieux,” McCarty continues to say. “I got the girl, I stayed in the game, I got four minutes for roughing for felonious assault. The ref didn’t see it, nobody called it and I stayed in the game. Even scored the overtime winner too, that was the karma, that’s the God shot, that’s him saying there’s right and wrong. This was Lemieux not apologizing for breaking Draper’s face was the biggest thing out of it.”
The moment is also notable because it marked the first time the Red Wings had defeated the Avalanche since losing to them in the conference finals in 1996. It also led to Detroit snapping their Stanley Cup drought when they defeated the Philadelphia Flyers in 1997.
“The bottom line for March 26, it wasn’t about getting the revenge, we had to win the game,” says McCarty. “Just psychologically, because we knew we’d have to play them in the playoffs and there was no better time for everything to culminate than that March 26 game.”
Why The NHL Won’t Replicate Red Wings-Avalanche Rivalry
Between 1996 and 2002, the Red Wings and Avalanche met five teams in the playoffs, with most of those years the winner moving on to win the Stanley Cup. Detroit won two of those matchups, with Colorado emerging victorious in three of those years.
It’s not a far-fetched thing to say this was the NHL’s last true great rivalry, with the Red Wings and Avalanche frequently fighting each other in a pre-lockout era NHL where physicality was more embraced. It also doesn’t hurt that they were two of the most stacked teams in the league with multiple Hall of Fame players such as Steve Yzerman, Patrick Roy, Peter Forsberg, Joe Sakic and Sergei Federov spread throughout.
“The whole gravity to it is that if you have break it down, you have two teams with probably eight-to-10 Hall of Famers on it, the elite of the elite talent wise, but also the hatred that’s built into the fan bases to everything else,” says McCarty. “This was as good as it got. I’m biased, but I consider this one of the greatest rivalries in sports.”
McCarty details why it’s hard to see the NHL replicate that sort of rivalry and hatred between two teams these days, pointing towards how the salary cap was implemented after the lockout ended in 2005.
“When the NHL went to the Salary Cap and I ended up going to Calgary (in 2005), that just changed sort of things,” says McCarty. “You look at (Gary) Betman hockey, Betman hockey is about parity. Betman hockey is about the end of the season. There’s five teams vying for one spot or two spots – it’s a different game. Back then, it was more rivalries, like the Battle of Alberta, Edmonton and Calgary. Toronto, Montreal, Boston and New York.”
When the Red Wings and Avalanche matched up in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, it was usually a matchup of two of the best teams in the NHL. The Dallas Stars were one of the elite teams in the league at the time, winning the Cup in ‘99 before losing in the Finals in 2000. As McCarty points out, there was more of a pecking order in the pre-salary cap era compared to now, where it’s a lot of parity and different teams vying for the Cup year in and year out.
“It would come down to a few teams for us when it came to winning the Cup,” says McCarty. “We knew we had to either get through Colorado or Dallas, those were the two teams. We had to get through St Louis, Chicago and Winnipeg, but we own them. The same way that we didn’t want to get owned by Colorado, we had to prove it.”
He also notes how today’s players grow up knowing and playing against each other as kids. In other words, they grow up and enter the NHL as friends rather than as enemies as they did back in the day.
“Anybody who’s grown up playing sports in the 70’s and 80’s, it was different,” says McCarty. “You didn’t have the internet, you didn’t know the guy in the next town. You didn’t play all these summer camps and All-Star teams with them. Everybody knows everybody. It takes that edge off, where you have to prove yourself.”
McCarty explains how the parity and how teams are no longer as stacked as they used to be in the pre-salary cap era have led to less intense rivalries.
“All these great teams with all these Hall of Famers made it better,” McCarty continues to say. “You get those rivalries in the non salary cap. Now you want to start a rivalry with this team, but you got to worry about this team because it’s a three-point game (over a team in a season). You can’t lose.”
