Desire

I remember covering the 1995 Stanley Cup Final in which New Jersey swept Detroit 4-0.  The day after Game 3, a Jersey blowout Scotty Bowman called the most embarrassing loss of his coaching career, Bowman showed up at lunch clutching a memo from the NHL that looked like it was about 100 pages long.  It was a freshly-issued set of new rules for the care and feeding of the Stanley Cup itself.  There were all sorts of stipulations: The Cup had to be insured for a ton of money, had to travel with a security guard appointed by the League at all times, and on and on and on.  I'll never forgot Bowan sitting there with a group of reporters, saying of his players, "Maybe they read this thing and decided they don't want it anymore."

I suggested yesterday that maybe the Wings don't want it this year as much as the Coyotes seem to, basing the observation on the fact that when they had a chance to go down and block a shots that wound up being Phoenix goals in yesterday's 5-2, Game 6 loss, neither Dan Cleary nor Drew Miller did.  In short, neither player appeared willing to, as they say almost exclusively in hockey, "pay the price."

Well, maybe they saw this and decided they didn't want it anymore:



Now I want to say something about what happened here to Ian Laperriere. His technique was awful.  That is no way to block a shot.  You should never put yourself in the kind of position where it is going to be your face and not your body doing the blocking. It was stupid, and I know full well how awful it sounds to say that. I appreciate that his heart was in the right place, but his head, literally, was not.

But as far as the heart being in the right place, we'll find out all about Red Wings' hearts on Tuesday night in Phoenix, and one of the ways we'll tell is by how often they are willing to pay the price by going all out to stop those Phoenix shots before they get to the Detroit net.