NHL: Bowman says defense wins Stanley Cup championships

Published 5:36 pm Thursday, May 22, 2008

The man who coached the Pittsburgh Penguins to their last Stanley Cup championship, Scotty Bowman, was also behind the bench for the Detroit Red Wings’ most recent victory, in the spring of 2002.

Those championship seasons came a decade apart, proof that even Bowman’s teams didn’t win every single year. It just seemed that way sometimes.

Bowman won nine Stanley Cups as a coach and a 10th, in the 1990-91 season, as the Penguins’ director of player development and recruitment. He’s trying for his 11th starting this Saturday, when the Penguins, his former team, meet the Red Wings, the team for which he currently consults, in the much-anticipated 2008 Stanley Cup final.

“Not very often do you get the two top teams in the Stanley Cup final,” said Bowman in a telephone interview. “Pittsburgh didn’t finish first, they finished second, but arguably if (Sidney) Crosby had played the whole year, they would have. The way they finished the season and the way they’ve gone through the playoffs, there’s no question they were the best team in the East.”

Bowman sees a lot of similarities between the teams and one major difference — Detroit’s experience on the blue line. As good as Sergei Gonchar, Ryan Whitney, Hal Gill and Brooks Orpik have been for the Penguins this spring, it is hard to put them at the same level as Nicklas Lidstrom, Brian Rafalski, Niklas Kronwall and Brad Stuart. The Penguins have zero blue liners with a Stanley Cup ring, and just two (Gary Roberts and Petr Sykora) throughout their line-up. The Red Wings, meanwhile, have 10 players who’ve previously won a cumulative 23 Stanley Cups, including Lidstrom (3), Rafalski (2) and Chris Chelios (2).

“You’ve got tremendous young forwards on both teams and experienced defense in Detroit,” said Bowman. “There are a lot of intangibles there. The fact that both teams have been real strong at home — Detroit has lost one game and Pittsburgh didn’t lose any.”

Bowman went to Pittsburgh in the summer of 1990, not to coach, but to beef up the Penguins’ front office. He joined the organization the same day as coach Bob Johnson, hired by general manager Craig Patrick to bolster the experience of an organization that had missed the playoffs in seven of its previous eight seasons. Patrick’s decision to hire two ambitious, larger-than-life personalities was heavily scrutinized at the time. In hindsight, the fact that Patrick had the courage of his own convictions — to hire the best available front-office talent — proved wise. The Penguins won back-to-back championships in ‘91 and ‘92 and finished either first or second for the next six years, decent results for a franchise that had been the model of mediocrity for its first 23 years.

Bowman left Pittsburgh after the ‘93 season to join Detroit. Yet when Bowman originally joined the Penguins’ front office, he thought his coaching days were through.

“I was actually more interested in going to Pittsburgh because I didn’t think I’d ever have to coach again, because Bob was a career coach and a good one,” said Bowman. “We hit it off right at the beginning. I was the fellow that went around and watched teams play. I didn’t have to leave home. My kids were still in school. It was a good fit for me at the time.

“As everyone knows, we won (in 1991). But then Bob got sick preparing the U.S. team for the Canada Cup. It was in August, 1991, when Bob and his wife Martha were in a restaurant and he got dizzy. That was the start. I remember getting a call from Craig saying Bob wasn’t feeling good. He still was with that team for awhile.

“Bob’s condition then worsened. When we got into training camp, Craig said, we knew he was going to be in for quite a battle, but we want to keep the job open for him. So the reason I went in as interim coach was to keep it on a positive note for Bob, because nobody really knew how he was going to respond.

“So I went in, just month-by-month, hoping that Bob would recover. Then things just got worse. We all went out to Colorado Springs. We saw him in mid-November and a couple of weeks later, he passed away.”

The Penguins struggled to an 87-point finish, dealing with the effects of Johnson’s absence and the ubiquitous Stanley Cup hangover.

“After Bob passed away, because we weren’t doing too well, he said can you stay on and stick with the plan and we’ll put our heads together. We made a good trade — we traded Mark Recchi; but we got Rick Tocchet and Kjell Samuelsson and Ken Wregget. “It definitely put us over the top because we got an experienced defenseman. Rick Tocchet fit in perfectly with us as a power forward — teams didn’t take any advantage of us when he was there. I didn’t do a lot of coaching. Barry Smith and Rick Kehoe did most of it — I just supervised. Then of course, we got in trouble the first series with Washington. High-scoring games, we weren’t going to be able to beat ‘em.

“I went to Mario (Lemieux) and said, ‘if we’re going to win this series, we need to play better defense.’ With his help, we transformed the team.”

As much as the focus in the Stanley Cup final will be on scorers, Bowman believes championships are ultimately won with defense. Even the most precocious offensive teams of all time — his Penguins, the Oilers of the 1980s — eventually learned to batten down the hatches in the playoffs.

“Defense, that’s the thing,” said Bowman.