Bruce Dowbiggin
When Russians Were Cool: How Detroit Brought Down The Wall
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
Play this drinking game. Every time some football analyst on TV says during the course of a game, “He’ll be a star for this team for years” take a drink. You’ll be tipsy in a hurry.
Maybe in the old days, Skip. But the concept of the players you’re loving now lasting very long with NFL, NHL, NBA or even MLB teams has come and gone. The new model was never more apparent as when the NFL No.1 seed Detroit Lions, replete with young stars, were blindsided from the NFL playoffs by upstart Washington’s rookie QB Jaden Daniels.
Heavily favoured Detroit (10 point favourites in some places) was loaded with superstars on their first contract. Jahmyr Gibbs, Jameson Williams, Amon-Ra St. Brown, Penei Sewell, Aidan Hutchinson (injured), Sam LaPorta, Jack Campbell and Ali McNeil (injured). Added to veteran QB Jared Goff and a sprinkling of veterans they seemed perfectly balanced.
Except the new mantra says you can only win a Super Bowl in this time of salary-cap hell with a HOF QB or a QB on his affordable rookie deal. Goff is neither, and to emphasize the mantra he threw four picks and fumbled once en route to the heartbreak loss. The dynasty turned into as ‘die-nasty”.
In the old days you’d just say “we will get them next year” and hope for better luck. But within two years the Lions will have to do a painful triage of their glittering young stars. You can’t pay them all, so who will go and who will stay? Adding to the misery of the salary-cap mandated chop will be can you get value for them in trades?
The Lions are far from the only ones dealing with leagues that value parity ahead of dynasty. In the NHL the Edmonton Oilers and Toronto Maple Leafs are hearing the steady tick-tock counting down on the NHL’s cap machine. The two clubs lost consistently for a decade to score top picks in the draft. Riding the skills of Conor McDavid and Auston Matthews they’ve brushed up against a Stanley Cup but have yet to do the deal.
As every fan of the teams knows it’s a race to add the proper players to the roster to compliment the young stars before they get too expensive. McDavid is an unrestricted FA after 2025-26 and as the league’s top star he will command the maximum under the salary cap where ever he lands. If that’s Edmonton he and Leon Draisaitl will be added to Darnell Nurse, Zach Hyman, Ryan Nugent Hopkins as a large portion of the cap. Can the Oilers balance these stars and still pay defensemen and goalies?
Ditto the Maple Leafs who have Matthews, William Nylander, Mitch Marner, Morgan Rielly and Chris Tanev hogging the top end of the cap. Can they find the right pieces at a cheap price to create a team that will reach the Final, let alone win the Stanley Cup? And can they do it before their core players start to decline?
For those reasons, NHL teams and players were fixated on the news that there will be no more escrow deductions taken from players the rest of the season. That led many to surmise that the salary cap will be going up significantly for the next few years, allowing teams more latitude to complete rosters and elite players to be paid their worth to the league. Even if true the increases will be proportionate, forcing the same constraints of a cap at the top and bottom of payrolls.
None of these economic concerns seem to bother the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers. With just a luxury tax, not a salary cap, to restrain them the Dodgers have added Japanese star Riki Sasaki and bullpen ace Taylor Scott to their payroll in the past week. This in addition to two-time Cy Young winner Blake Snell. Their payroll now exceeds $370 M. For 2025. By comparison the Pittsburgh Pirates sit at just $77 M for 2025 and the fans are outraged demanding the owner sell.
The Dodgers justify the spending because they are building a global brand. While the competing leagues constrict their payrolls to pay service to parity, MLB is allowing the Dodgers to take a soccer attitude to their payroll. The arguments for parity are pretty weak when you consider that their have-nots are happy to take the bounty of great TV/ digital/ logo revenue but refuse to improve their teams.
Which leaves us with the Toronto Blue Jays, definitely a large-market team trying to spend like one. Monday they announced the signing of FA Anthony Santander, who had 44 homers for Baltimore last season. This follows an offseason of humiliation where the team has made no progress signing its superstars Vladdy Guerrero and Bo Bichette.
Like NFL Lions or NHL Maple Leafs, the clock is ticking on their core players as they become prohibitively expensive. Should they sign both? One? Or trade them to get value before they scram to LA or New York? Right now they seem caught between bad options.
Meanwhile the underwhelming Jays management was punked— yet again—in pursuit of a high-profile Japanese FA. The very visible failure left many wondering if it was the market or the management that is holding back Toronto. Which might be another drinking game. Take a drink every time the Jays management swings and misses on a high-profile free agent. You’ll be in detox pretty soon.
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.
The recent appearance of Liberal-leader-in-waiting Mark Carney on the Daily Show has delighted a small segment of the Canadian voting pool and enraged a goodly part as well. During his nuzzle session with a highly uncritical Jon Stewart Carney announced that he was running to replace Justin Trudeau as Liberal leader and then prime minister for however long that lasts.
(If this distinction seems trivial we would recall that then-CBC vice president Kirstine Stewart once upbraided us for saying her actor husband was supporting Trudeau’s bid to be PM. A choleric Stewart said we’d got the story wrong. How so, we asked? He’s supporting him to be Liberal leader, she thundered. Not the PM. As if this were a distinction worth making.)
Back to Carney. To understand the gravity of his announcement on the Daily Show one must remember that for a generation of concussed Liberals and NDP hacks Stewart’s show from 1999 to 2016 was the Yankee Stadium of talk shows. In their estimation, Stewart was Reggie Jackson, mashing the fastball, while CBC’s At Issue panel was Jesus Ramirez, striking out on the curve in A Ball.
So for Stewart to grant time to an unknown Canadian banker who still thinks Greta Thunberg is relevant was intriguing. Or someone paid someone. In any event, the gotcha’ line from the chat was Carney, formerly governor of the Banks of Canada and the UK and now advisor to PMJT, repeating Stewart’s suggestion that he was the “outsider” in the race to succeed Trudeau.
For most sentient Canadians this was an epic humblebrag for the billionaire son of a former governor of the Bank of Canada whose wife does investment business with Trudeau eminence gris Gerry Butts. If Carney was an outsider what constituted an insider? It was to laugh.
Social media— that part not consumed by the visit of Alberta premier Danielle Smith and gadfly investor Kevin O’Leary to Mar A Lago— boiled with sarcasm and dismissal. Those wily Liberals aren’t going to fool us now, just as we are on the cusp of Pierre Poilievre taking power. No doubt Carney’s team— including PMJT— laughed in derision.
The Liberals culture club think that, if they could pass off Skippy as remotely capable, they can dress up Carney as an outsider for gullible Canadian voters.
But Carney may have accidentally have tripped over the truth. He is now an outsider. You see, the dotty Libs think the machine that selected/ elected Skippy in 2015 still works. CBC, G&M, Macleans, TorStar would decide the candidates and curate the process. Sadly for Butts, Telford and Skippy the Family Compact has been supplanted by social media both here and in the USA.
The turning point of Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential race was him pivoting away from the staged debates and ponderous Sunday morning shows of legacy media toward not just podcasts by Joe Rogan but also those of under-30 stars such as Theo Von, Adin Ross and Lex Fridman, among many. The cred he gained from the Gen X demo helped him sweep the Dems away. Elon Musk breaking the DEMs censorship strategy on Twitter (now X) also sent a shot at Team Kamala that the game had changed.
While Canada doesn’t have as many counter-culture podcasts as the U.S., there are enough young voters ignoring Canada’s chattering class to bury the Libs under Carney or the rest of the Goof Troop. No one with a pulse and a vote under 50 buys the old rag bag. It’s over for guys as exciting as a carrot expecting to harvest younger Canadians. They’re playing to an empty hall with the bespoke Carney.
This ironic twist is that all this is lost on Woke nobs who brag about their hip sense of humour. Who follow Stewart and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow to keep up with Trump Derangement. Who record SNL Update to hang on the sophomoric stylings of Michael Ché and Colin Jost. Who can recite extended bits from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Now they are the punch line. The outrage over the Mar A Lago visit by Smith and O’Leary is a perfect example of their dissociative thinking. The staged pictures had “blood boiling” in many progressives. “@OrbitStudios Jan 13 So… Kevin O’Leary is arrested immediately for treason the next time he sets foot in Canada, correct? I’m absolutely being serious here.” And that’s a mild response.
These armies of Liberal bots fumed over the treachery of talking about the economy with the man about to become the U.S. president again. Awareness much? None of the howler monkeys reacted this way when heroes like PMJT and his cabinet burned clouds of carbon to lobby the eunuchs of WEF, EU and Davos in Europe. They were hot on selling out Canada to the globalist gang’s climate narrative, and they couldn’t get there quickly enough. Crickets from the bot community.
But this is different, of course. Sure. In the past their pals in the Ottawa Press Club could protect these hypocrisies, burying unfortunate stories by segueing to David Suzuki saving seals or Margaret Attwood decrying the medieval treatment of Canadian women in the 21st century.
But social media obliterated the insider game. So much so that Trudeau and his cabinet cronies began banning speech as fast as possible. But it’s too late. Like the ghost leg syndrome, the script to shove an unelected climate crazy into the PMO will seem real to the Libs. But don’t be fooled. The end is nigh for the old way. Just look at Stewart’s ratings to see just how dead it really is.
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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