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Bruce Dowbiggin

When Russians Were Cool: How Detroit Brought Down The Wall

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The Ukraine invasion has caused repercussions everywhere— even in hockey. The NHL, IIHF and the CHL have all responded in different ways to punish the aggression shown by Vladimir Putin. The CHL, in particular, has banned the drafting of Russians and Belorussians teenagers in this year’s bantam draft.

This overreach is all the rage with officials offended by Putin (the Metropolitan Opera fired one of its star soloists, Russian Anna Netrebko, for not condemning Putin enough). Not since the 1980s, when the dying USSR forbade the drifting on players into the NHL, has there been such distrust of Russians for political reasons.

In our new book Inexact Science, my son Evan and I recalled how the Detroit Red Wings, under chief scout Neil Smith, cracked the bias against Soviet (Russian) players in the historic 1989 draft as they poached a Hall of Fame defence man from Sweden and two Russian stars— Sergei Fedorov and Vladimir Konstantinov, in the middle rounds of that draft. And how it could have been much greater with a third Russian who got away.

“In 1986, Smith had been sent on a mission to find a full-time European scout for Detroit. Visiting Sweden, he encountered Christer Rockstrom. Smith was already somewhat acquainted with this scouting whiz, because Christer had been the cab driver who would take him to and from games he was scouting. Realizing he was dealing with a hardcore but perceptive fan who knew the players inside and out, Smith persuaded the Wings to give the Swede some scouting employment on a part-time basis, and then promoted him to the full-time European scout role a couple years after. It was a partnership that paid huge dividends.

The results of the organization’s new dedication to searching deeply into Europe was never more evident than with their third-rounder in the 1989 draft. That pick (number 53) may just be the best mid-round steal in NHL draft history. Rockstrom had put in tremendous diligence to find him, alerting his higher-ups to this thin, wiry kid playing for VIK Västerås HK of the Swedish Elitserien. A teenaged defenceman who had drawn into only 20 games in 1988–89 with just two assists to show for it, this player didn’t get much ice time when he actually did find his way into the lineup. Nonetheless, he happened to catch Rockstrom’s eye. That D-man was none other than Nicklas Lidstrom. 

Fearing Lidstrom would be lost to them in the 1990 draft, when he’d be considered a first-round-worthy prospect, Detroit pounced a year in advance. Rockstrom convinced the Wings brass to use their last possible chance to grab Lidstrom—a potential gem who he believed would turn into a top pairing defender. Wary that someone could spill the beans to other teams, only four members of the organization—Devellano, Smith, Holland and Rockstrom—knew the secret until the day of his selection. 

It worked like a charm. Lidstrom was still available come round three and was taken by the Wings—to the confusion of many in attendance. Even the NHL’s Central Scouting Bureau had very little info on what was considered quite an off-the-board choice (or “project,” as it’s often dubbed today).

As the league scrambled to figure out the Lidstrom pick on the draft floor in Minnesota, the Wings were thinking even further to the east for other delightful discoveries. Once the spring of 1989 rolled around, Soviet authorities had finally begun actively marketing some of their established stars to interested buyers in North America… it was still believed that the Soviets would want to hang on to their elite younger talent for several years to come. This mindset warded off many teams from wanting to “waste” a pick on such an arduous scenario. The Wings were not so easily scared in 1989. Having already passed on grabbing Sergei Fedorov when they had the chance in 1988, they used their fourth-round pick, number 74 overall, to select him the following year. 

Devellano certainly wasn’t planning to miss out on Fedorov on this particular occasion. As he told NHL.com in 2015, “My thinking was, ‘Let’s call a spade a spade; how many fourth-round picks who are North American make it big?’ Very few… So what I said to myself was, ‘This is the best 19-year-old in the world, and I’m going to pass on him (again) to probably take a minor-league player?’ Forget about that, he’s coming on the Red Wings’ list, and we’ll worry about it in the future.” A star centre with Moscow CSKA, Fedorov internationally and domestically was featured as the playmaking, defensively responsible force on a line with fellow teenaged phenoms Alexander Mogilny and Pavel Bure—a ridiculously potent grouping that was the equivalent of a 2004 Russian squad icing a line with Evgeni Malkin between Alex Ovechkin and Ilya Kovalchuk. 

Mogilny himself had been secured by the Sabres with the 89th overall pick a year earlier, but scouts were salivating that perhaps Bure or Fedorov could be available the next year as well. Fedorov had even been offered the chance to jump ship with Mogilny earlier. Before becoming the first Soviet player to successfully defect, Mogilny revealed his intentions to close friend Fedorov in a Stockholm hotel room they shared. Fedorov rejected the offer to join him, however, figuring it was a lark, prank or some sort of joke that was never supposed to be acted upon. But within 48 hours of the chat, Mogilny bolted the premises in an elaborate escape where he gained contact with the Sabres and the parties enacted a covert flight plan into the USA. While Fedorov stayed put for the meantime, the Wings were undeterred in taking him, even if it made the Soviet authorities keep even stricter surveillance on their prized pupils. 

At his team’s drafting table that day (in 1989), Devellano reportedly promised Smith that they could go after at least one more Russian before the day was over. That next one ended up being Fedorov, who many whispered might just have been the best on that line because of his uncanny ability to handle the duties of a two-way centre while the explosive Mogilny and Bure were freed up to earn the glory of scoring most of the goals. Devellano would make his reasoning clear down the road by stating, “As was the case with Petr Klima, my strategy was simple. We would draft the best players, and if they happened to be behind the Iron Curtain, we would use our ownership resources to find a way to get them out.” Such boldness confirms the theory that quality ownership is perhaps the most important element in forging a perennially successful sports club. 

Indeed, the Ilitches—who also own the Detroit Tigers—were the polar opposite of what Wings ownership had been under Bruce Norris. Their willingness to use their big dollars, trust their personnel and treat their employees with a degree of loyalty and compassion certainly gave the franchise some incredible mileage in their eventual reign as the model NHL organization from the mid-1990s to the early 2010s. The drafting wizardry of 1989 didn’t necessarily begin and end with the Wings, though. And it could’ve been even richer. While Wings personnel in later years claimed they were ready to grab Fedorov’s linemate Bure with their sixth-round pick and deal with any questions of his eligibility later, they never got the chance to add him. Another team’s plans got in the way. 

Detroit’s management group had apparently mused about grabbing Bure in the fifth round after already having secured Fedorov. As Holland told the Toronto Star’s Bob McKenzie in 1995:

We (were) at the draft table and Christer tells Neil “Now we should take Bure”… Neil said he didn’t think Bure had played enough games to be eligible. So Neil goes and checks with (NHL vice-president) Gil Stein, and Stein tells Neil that Bure has only played seven games and it has to be eleven (sanctioned games) to be an eligible pick. Neil comes back and tells us that, and Christer says “No, that’s not right. He played eleven. I know he played eleven.” Neil goes back to Stein and tells him our European scout said Bure should be eligible. 

Stein still said no. The NHL’s records showed just five games played in 1987–88—figures Rockstrom believed were erroneous. So Neil comes back to the table and it’s coming to our turn. We didn’t think Bure was eligible, so we took someone else (Shawn McCosh)… Finally, Neil said we were going to take Bure with our next pick no matter what and let the league settle the eligibility thing later. We were just about to pick him when the Canucks announced his name.

It was Canucks GM Pat Quinn who swooped in on Bure during that sixth round (overruling his second-in-command, Brian Burke, who at the time thought Bure was too small for the big leagues of North America). Thankfully for the Canucks, their head scout, Mike Penny, agreed with Rockstrom’s assertion that Bure had made the required number of appearances and convinced his boss to turn in the card with Bure’s name on it. With whispers that the Oilers were looking to nab him too, the Canucks stepped up to make “The Russian Rocket” their own at number 113, and did so only three spots ahead of where the Wings ultimately took Dallas Drake—perhaps Detroit’s most successful North American pick that year, but a far cry from a future Hall of Famer like Bure. 

As consolation the Red Wing later nabbed Vladimir Konstantinov in the seventh round. To put the finishing touches on their 1997-98 Stanley Cups they added USSR stars Igor Larionov, Sacha Fetisov and Slava Kozlov. The NHL— and Don Cherry— was never the same after the triumph of the Russian Five

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx

BRUCE DOWBIGGIN Award-winning Author and Broadcaster Bruce Dowbiggin's career is unmatched in Canada for its diversity and breadth of experience . He is currently the editor and publisher of Not The Public Broadcaster website and is also a contributor to SiriusXM Canada Talks. His new book Cap In Hand was released in the fall of 2018. Bruce's career has included successful stints in television, radio and print. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster for his work with CBC-TV, Mr. Dowbiggin is also the best-selling author of "Money Players" (finalist for the 2004 National Business Book Award) and two new books-- Ice Storm: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Vancouver Canucks Team Ever for Greystone Press and Grant Fuhr: Portrait of a Champion for Random House. His ground-breaking investigations into the life and times of Alan Eagleson led to his selection as the winner of the Gemini for Canada's top sportscaster in 1993 and again in 1996. This work earned him the reputation as one of Canada's top investigative journalists in any field. He was a featured columnist for the Calgary Herald (1998-2009) and the Globe & Mail (2009-2013) where his incisive style and wit on sports media and business won him many readers.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Liberals Hail Mary: To You From Failing Hands

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In case you missed it, the Hubris party has halted the business of Canada for three months in the heart of the biggest existential crisis since NAFTA. The reason? Justin Trudeau called timeout to allow banker/ green advocate Mark Carney to slide into his chair before the next election becomes Bull Run.

Who is Carney? In September Justin Trudeau appointed him a “special advisor” to the Liberals. He then asked for— and received— $10 B for Brookfield, the private hedge fund of which he was chairman, so that he might sprinkle it on the Green Agenda. There’s more, but this tells you why Libs think he’s ideal.

In his introduction to a nation that didn’t know Mark Carney was a solution to anything, Carney insisted that Canadians want new ideas, new energy, new purpose. (In his defence his opponent Chrystia Freeland is mumbling the same contrition.) And who were the architects of the malaise requiring such an overhaul?

The Liberals themselves. Okay, the NDP rates blame for polishing the Liberal apple in a minority government. But Canadians have long ago consigned Jagmeet Singh to a deserved obscurity. Yes, the denials choir at the Toronto Star and CBC are trying to harpoon Pierre Polievre for ruining the Parliament that Liberals prorogued. While the Flora MacDonald Marching Society cites Donald Trump’s tariffs for the crisis. Deny, deny, deny.

It’s not working. Consult the polls. Even the staunchest supporters of Canada’s self-appointed national party are fed up with PMJT and his legacy. In fact it is stunning to see how wobbly the Liberal platform is under Carney. All the massaged polls and handshakes with Olympic heroes on the Rideau Canal cannot disguise that their legacy issues are now DOA. As we wrote last week the challenges come on a many fronts.

Trump’s tariff challenge/ 51st state tease is the most public challenge— and the one the Liberals believe they can whipsaw to their favour. #OrangeManBad simply tore away the PMO’s artifice of postmodern Canada. By threatening tariffs and gleefully laughing about Canada joining America he exposed an entitled political elite unwilling to admit that the world has changed.

By stirring Canada to some united economic response against his audacious measures Trump has shown Canadians how little they have in common. Ontario and Quebec want Alberta to put on the hair shirt. Alberta wants Quebec to pay its fair share. etc. Trump’s new Commerce secretary says it would be an easy ask to avoid tariffs. But Trudeau/ Doug Ford would rather posture and preen. Canadians, after years of sitting in first-class but paying for economy, now find themselves exposed to the world. As we said in 2018, Canada is an ingrate nation living off Trump’s America.

The destruction of Liberal DEI legacy doesn’t stop with tariffs. The PMO pretends that they can still use the Climate inquisition to hammer Canadians. But Trump has moved the West away from the Al Gore/ King Charles doomsday consensus. By taking America out of the UN Net Zero scheme he’s produced a landslide of financial institutions and governments escaping the draconian conditions imposed by this once-mighty body. Trudeau’s precious climate supports are toppling almost as fast as Sir John A. statues.

Trump has forced the high and mighty in banking, investment and government— who’ve been wedded to these principals— to escape his climate wrath. Trump used the election to remind voters of deadlines for catastrophic weather that come and go with only elites getting rich. During the 2024 vote he heard from average people who no longer believe the Greta Thunberg countdown clock to ruination. And he said, Drill, Baby, Drill.

CO2-obsessed Canada, meanwhile, is still dithering on its commitment to what CBC and everyone in Parliament stubbornly call the “climate crisis”. Carney talks about moving away from the sacred tablets of climate change, but only to find a new green euphemism for draining the public purse.

Another sacred cow of Trudeau’s Disaster Run has been his stewardship of Covid 19— a talking point he brags about openly but whose Emergency Measures Act  are condemned by the courts and public opinion. Again, Trudeau’s flank has been protected by purchased media and a smothering censorship program.

But now Alberta’s Covid Task Force has ripped the province’s actions in the two-plus years of virus, vaccine and vexation. The Davidson Report demonstrates how The Science was used to defend government overreach while health officials used faulty data to deceive the public about the reality of Covid. (The criticisms apply to the federal response just as easily.)

One example cited in the Task Force report was one we wrote about continuously from 2020-2023. Namely the media’s daily positive CPR tests that purported to show massive numbers of infected Canadians. The truth was 80 to 90 percent of the “results” were false positives or samples too small to be transmitted or make the carrier ill. Even when they knew in 2020 no one bothered to let citizens in on the scam.

Want more? Another sink hole beneath the Libs is the Rez Schools “murdered babies” libel they used to cast Canadians as genocidal. Trudeau sought to criminalize any doubt on their veracity. Turns out that the money allocated for exhumation of alleged graves of victims has turned up nothing. Instead the “$12M spent to find purported 215 children’s graves at an Indian Residential School was instead spent on publicists & consultants with no graves found to date. “

There’s more. Environment minister Stephen Gilbeault was found guilty of violating federal rules in siphoning  $254 M to a company he owns. While Conservative MPs continue to call for the release of “green slush fund” documents, Trudeau continues to defend his minister by burying the records. Then there is the $187 B in infrastructure grants supervised by former Lib cabinet minister Catherine McKenna that is unaccounted for.

Wait, there’s more. On the celebrated immigration front nearly 50,000 international students failed to show up at their designated colleges and universities in Canada during March and April 2024, according to government data.; No one can trace them. And let’s not forget the government’s seeming impassivity to the crowds of pro-Hamas fanatics crowding Canadian streets each week calling fore the death of Canadian Jews and anyone else trying to stop the intifada.

We could go on, but this seems like weak sauce on which to launch a new leader of the Liberals. But they’re going to try. And with Singh’s flip-flop, now refusing to bring down the government, it will have a puncher’s chance in the Liberal heartland. Expect them to try stretching the mandate till the fall and later while spitting out more federal aid money, a la Covid, to compensate Canadians for this stupidity.

The only question then, who volunteers to bell the cat? Can you say Convoy.2?

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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Bruce Dowbiggin

Contagion: How Celebrating Trans Has Created Fear, Not Understanding

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The campy, trashy ceremony celebrating dysphoria at last summer’s Olympics spoke to how pervasive trans politics has become. So it’s no surprise that amid the avalanche of policies enunciated by Donald Trump in his first week as president is a ban on biological male athletes competing against women. Depending on the sports body this practice has already either been accepted wholeheartedly (swimming) or banned completely (world athletics). The recent Paris Olympics said they went by passport designation when they let Algeria’s Imane Khelif pound real XX biological females in boxing.

Trump’s EO mirrors the newly elected U.S. Congress which passed legislation banning trans athletes from competing against women. It also dovetails with orders that ban all U.S. passport applications with ‘X’ gender marker after Trump’s executive order.

As expected the trans lobby cranked up the outrage. Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., the only woman in Congress who played Division I college sports, said Republicans were using the measure to “inject themselves into decisions they have no business making.” She had company as 106 DEMs voted against the bill. Along with the industry that has made children’s author J.K. Rowling a pariah for dissenting.

Society’s recent obsession with gender dysphoria would have been an unimaginable development even a decade ago for a community that’s a rounding error in the census. Monty Python hilariously spoofed a man wanting to have a baby in Life of Brian. The cool kids loved it. Then.

Now trans-as-victim is embraced by radicals in academia and media— and championed by the Trudeau prime ministership and the Obama and Biden presidencies. Such is the hysteria surrounding the issue that it was headline news that future Canadian PM Pierre Poilievre insisted to a CTV interviewer that there are only two genders. Blockbuster stuff in CDN media.

While Canada remains mired as deeply as ever in DEI politics conservatives and evangelicals in Trump’s base are demanding that the trans movement be treated as a manufactured crisis created by radical left-wing elements. Is it real or is it a product of social engineering gone bad? The Salem Witch Trials ? The dawn of a golden age of dysphoria or a hysteria like the McMartin Pre-School witch hunts ?

MacDonald Laurier Institute fellow Mia Hughes has charted a history of similar social contagions such as bulimia and multiple-personality disorder. “In 1972, British psychologist Gerald Russell treated a woman with an unusual eating disorder involving binging and purging. Over the next seven years, he saw a further 30 woman presenting with the same condition. In 1979, he wrote a paper published in Psychological Medicine, in which he gave it the name bulimia nervosa….

“Then something remarkable happened. The illness swept the globe like wildfire… affecting an estimated 30 million people by the mid-1990s, the majority of whom were teenage girls and young women. The explanation for this rapid spread is what philosopher Ian Hacking calls ‘semantic contagion’ – how the process of naming and describing a condition creates the means by which the condition spreads. The epidemic of multiple-personality disorder in the 90s was spread this same way.

“Bulimia entered the lexicon via women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle and Better Homes and Gardens, which ran stories about this new and worrying disorder affecting women and girls. Multiple studies demonstrate the media’s culpability in the spread of social contagions

“In the first decade of the 21st century, the seeds were sown for another global contagion. A rights movement that started out with the aim of improving the lives of transgender people has given rise to a new type of gender dysphoria with all the hallmarks of a social contagion

“Just like bulimia, gender dysphoria was virtually unheard of in the teenage girl population prior to 2010, and then, all of a sudden, countries all over the industrialized world saw an explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender. [Ed.: statistics show it rising by 500 percent] It was the perfect storm. In the 2010s, the media fascination with transgenderism began with ‘Caitlyn’ Jenner and I Am Jazz; the political left became infatuated with trans rights, and schools started teaching gender ideology to children as young as kindergarten.

“Social media came on the scene and provided the perfect super-spreading environment. Teenage girls are now just one click away from 1000s of TikTok and YouTube videos of young women proudly showing off their mastectomy scars and extolling the joy of taking testosterone.

“Just as this new, atypical type of gender dysphoria was emerging, gender clinics, at the behest of activist groups, abandoned the psychotherapeutic approach of watchful waiting and adopted the affirmative model – fast-tracking these teens to irreversible medical procedures.

“We’re in the eye of the storm right now, so most people can’t see the damage being done. But soon, all the young people emerging from this contagion sterile and missing body parts will be visible for all to see, and people will be horrified that they supported such evil.”

Knowing the lunatic left’s penchant for denial the trans contagion evil will be suppressed and forgotten. The young women who lost Olympic medals and world records to biological men will be memory holed. The social suffocation employed to defeat its critics will be re-defined as an attack on the proponents of the movement. Not convinced? Veterans of the McMartin travesty in Los Angeles still remain astonished by the complete lack of accountability of those who perpetrated this fraud.

Hughes may be right that, just like bulimia, the trans contagion has peaked and is diminishing. But the people who cultivated it as.a tool to punish their enemies will still be in place, waiting for social media to embrace their next campaign of punishment. Their ruthless, recklerss grasp for power is the real contagion of modern times. Solving that will take more than a Donald Trump executive order.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster  A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada’s top television sports broadcaster. His new book Deal With It: The Trades That Stunned The NHL And Changed Hockey is now available on Amazon. Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History, his previous book with his son Evan, was voted the seventh-best professional hockey book of all time by bookauthority.org. You can see all his books at brucedowbigginbooks.ca.

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