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COPYRIGHT 2004 Century Publishing
THE 2003-04 DETROIT RED WINGS, 2002-03 Ottawa Senators and 1999-2000 St. Louis Blues have more in common than just being winners of the Presidents' Trophy. Each team established dominance over the course of 82 games. Nothing could derail their drive to become the NHL's best regular-season team. Not even injuries to key players could deter them from their quest. They consistently demonstrated their superiority against bitter rivals and teams from outside their division. So dominant were these teams that the only question posed by pundits was which team from the other Conference would meet them in the Stanley Cup final. But the playoffs told another story. And not just for those teams.
The same destiny was accorded other Presidents' Trophy winners who met a premature demise in the postseason, including the 1997-98 Dallas Stars, 1996-97 Colorado Avalanche and two consecutive Detroit squads in 1995 and 1996. In fact, seven of the past 10 regular season champions have been upset in the playoffs during the past decade. Little wonder people are asking ... is it really worth the hard push during the regular season when all anyone remembers is the playoffs?
"Here's out feeling here in Detroit," explains Jim Devellano, the Red Wings Senior Vice President of Hockey Operations. "We have a good franchise here, and I've had this feeling since the day I arrived 22 years ago. We sell 17,000 season tickets and we have played to a string of sellouts going back to the late 1980s. The reason we charge a lot of money for our tickets is we constantly put a pretty competitive team on the ice with a lot of stars and that costs a lot of money. As an organization, we feel an obligation to the people who buy our tickets in the regular season. We take the regular season very seriously and we try to win in the regular season and we don't hold up. We go for it."
Detroit has iced a contender in each of the past dozen years. Yet the Red Wings have learned through bitter experience that winning the trophy that goes to the NHL's best regular-season team hasn't been a good barometer of postseason success.
"We've been shocked and upset over the years," responds Devellano. "I remember in 1994 when we were the first seed in the Western Conference and being upset by the San Jose Sharks who were the eighth seed. I'm not sure that any (playoff series) was more shocking than that one. The year before we took a 2-0 games lead over the Toronto Maple Leafs, then a 3-2 lead only to...
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