15 Years Later: The 2008 Red Wings, a Retrospective

In 2008, the Red Wings were the NHL's gold standard in more ways than one. How do they look at 15 years' remove?

Fifteen years ago this month, the Detroit Red Wings lifted the Stanley Cup for the eleventh time in franchise history. It was the team’s fourth title in eleven seasons. If you are the kind of person who is stringent in their application of the label “dynasty,” perhaps believing that a minimum of three consecutive championships is an essential criterion, then you might not count the Red Wings from the late nineties through the late aughts, but you couldn’t put any other hockey team in front of them during that span. In the nascent days of the NHL’s salary cap era, the ‘08 Wings provided the league with an aspirational gold standard.

In June of 2008, you would be in rare company if you suspected that the end of a golden age was imminent, but with the benefit of hindsight, maybe it wasn’t so surprising. To be sure, there was one more big run left—the following season’s journey to a Cup Final rematch with the Penguins, a home defeat in Game 7, and symbolic torch-passing to Sidney Crosby, but beyond that, precious little.

In the four seasons spanning the NHL’s 2005 return from another lockout and that 2009 Game 7 loss in Detroit, the Red Wings won nine playoff series.  They twice won the Western Conference and took home the big prize in 2008.

From the 2009-10 season to the present, the Wings have won just two playoff series, both of them prior to joining the Eastern Conference before the '13-14 season. 

In 2017, Detroit missed the playoffs for the first time since 1990—a streak generally accepted as a core cause for the depth of the ensuing and ongoing rebuild.

The last core member of the last Red Wing champion retired in 2018: Henrik Zetterberg.  And injury had long since diminished his powers. 

Kirk Maltby decided he'd had enough in 2010, and his grind line teammate Kris Draper followed suit the following year. Brian Rafalski and Chris Osgood also called it careers in 2011, the former briefly reversing his decision via a three game stint with the ECHL’s Florida Everblades in 2013-14 and the latter having not played forty-plus games in a season since ‘08-09. 

Nicklas Lidstrom and Tomas Holmstrom hung up the skates in 2012. In 2016, Johan Franzen retired and Pavel Datsyuk returned to Russia, signing in the KHL.

In other words, at the rate of a trickle, the band broke up, and, within a decade, the notion of the Detroit Red Wings as a standard for excellence around the league was laughable.

Yet the legacy of the 2008 Red Wings could not be so easily forgotten. With the possible exception of Darryl Sutter’s Cup-winning LA Kings, they remained the supreme example of possession-based hockey in the NHL. Conveniently, the ‘07-08 season is the first for which we have (mostly) reliable shot data and thus a sort of year zero for modern analytics. With those tools at our disposal, we can better express the extent of those Red Wings’ dominance.

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At fifteen years' remove, it’s striking that this wasn’t a team of preposterous talent up and down the lineup, layering one scoring line on top of another in the style of the ‘15 Blackhawks or the ‘16 and ‘17 Penguins.  To be sure, they weren't bereft of talent, but you wouldn't confuse the lineup for an all-star team.

At the top of the lineup, there was glimmering skill: Datsyuk, Zetterberg, Lidsrom, Rafalski. But from a depth perspective, these Wings were more dependent on brawn than skill. Up front it was Draper, Maltby, and Drake. Along the blue line, Lebda, Lilja, and whatever remained of Chris Chelios.

It was during the 2008 postseason that Johan Franzen, with his eighteen points in sixteen games, emerged as one of the best power forwards in the league. 

In many ways, Franzen epitomized his team’s ability to blend supreme skill with rugged physicality.  In the Wings’ second round sweep over Colorado, Franzen scored nine goals, a comic number of goals in a four-game series befitting a player whose domination was becoming cartoonish.

Franzen wasn’t just a Tomas Holmstrom clone, efficient in his ability to make life miserable by standing in front of the opposing goaltender; instead, Franzen brought the instincts and skill of a pure goal scorer, while sharing Holmstrom’s refusal to allow myriad cross checks and slashes deter him from standing just beyond the blue paint.

Of course, it is via Franzen that the decidedly ugly side of the ‘08 Wings’ legacy emerges: Revelations about the leadership style of their head coach. 

In 2008, Babcock was perceived as hockey’s pre-eminent tactician, and his psychology degree from McGill was oft-cited on the NBC Broadcast as proof of his ability to push players to their very limit. By the time Babcock was let go by the Maple Leafs in 2019 (five years after he’d left Detroit), it had become clear that “bully” was a more appropriate term for the embattled coach than “tactical genius,” and that, during his time with the Wings, Franzen had been his primary victim. 

To the Swedish outlet Expressen, Franzen described Babcock as “the worst person I have ever met.”  Among his primary allegations is that Babcock forced him to repeatedly play through injury (often head injury) to a degree that continues to plague his day-to-day life close to a decade after retirement.

Franzen played all but one of his seasons in the NHL with Babcock as his coach, and here again, there is a sense that Franzen’s career arc reflects that of the 2008 Red Wings on aggregate. As much as the ‘08 postseason was a breakout, the franchise’s soon-to-set-in malaise made it difficult for a playoff-hardened power forward to further demonstrate his mettle. 

He would prove just as much of a problem for opposing defenders the following spring, but, as the years wore on and Detroit faded from true championship contention, Franzen lacked the platform to further solidify his status among the best postseason forwards of his generation. 

How his career may have looked different if liberated from Babcock is unknowable. Regardless, whatever supposed psychological chess Babcock playing with his team came at serious cost, and it was Franzen who was forced to pay the greatest price.

Though the ‘08 triumph was just fifteen years ago, it surely feels longer than that to Red Wing fans.

In sports media, we have a tendency to jump too quickly to the wrong conclusions in our assessment of championship teams. However, with fifteen years separating us from that champion, perhaps we can arrive on the right takeaways for once. 

To look back on the '08 Wings is to reckon with the fact that key aspects of the team’s glory unlikely to be replicated in the 2020s. No, this isn’t the pre-salary cap, Hall-of-Famer-riddled ‘02 roster, but Nicklas Lidstrom—arguably the greatest defenseman of all time—is not walking through the door to skate twenty-five minutes a night. Acquiring players of Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg's caliber with sixth and seventh round picks respectively will never happen again.

In my estimation, Wings fans ought to note two things, two characteristics that helped ensure this illustrious roster could translate its defining possession play into the postseason success necessary to immortalize it, as they take a wistful look back at their most recent champions.

First, unique though they were, Datsyuk and Zetterberg—then affectionately known as the Euro Twins—might offer a hint at the path back to the promised land. Neither Datsyuk nor Zetterberg was ever the highest scorer in the league, but both were close and, more importantly, both excelled in the defensive third of the rink.

Whether you are compelled by data visuals or YouTube highlight mixes, Datsyuk’s work has become the stuff of legends, staking a claim to being the most dominant 200-foot player of his era and among its most iconic and influential. Meanwhile, It is Zetterberg’s 3-on-5 effort—the shift—in Game 4 that would become the defining moment of the Wings’ run, the apex coming when Zetterberg nullified Crosby’s stick at the goal mouth for what should have been a tap-in. Two games later, it was Zetterberg’s determination that snuck the Cup-winning goal through Marc-Andre Fleury in Game 6.

From a hockey perspective, few players have seen their career and achievements age as well as Datsyuk has. His absurd hands made him an idol to the NHL’s YouTube generation of players and fans (I for one must have watched a particular mixtape of his, set to Fort Minor’s “Remember the Name,” somewhere between 500 and 1,000 times). Meanwhile, the proliferation of advanced stats revealed him to be even better than the hockey watching public realized at the time. At his apex, Pavel Datsyuk was the flashiest player in the league, his hands the supreme envy of his peers, but his stats were anything but empty with the Yekaterinburg-born forward remaining one of the league’s best play drivers until his return to the KHL.

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Meanwhile, Zetterberg has become underrated with the passage of time. Because the end of his career was (in a literal sense) long and painful due to his back injury, it was easy to lose sight of just how dominant he was at his peak. Like Datsyuk, his calling card was never raw point production but rather his ability to create offense for himself and his line mates while never yielding an inch to his opponents. After 2009, Zetterberg offered one last glimpse of his gifts in 2013, when his defensive brilliance (and gamesmanship) drove Jonathan Toews and the eventual champion Chicago Blackhawks to their absolute limit in a second round series.

With Datsyuk and Zetterberg lurking in the top six (sometimes together and sometimes driving their own lines), Detroit didn’t need to have the league’s absolute top regular season scorers. Instead, thanks to their 200-foot acumen, the Red Wings inevitably posed match-up problems for opponents' top scorers.

An essential truth of the 2008 Wings is that the team’s best attackers were also its best defenders. This applies to Datsyuk and Zetterberg and is of course also true of Nicklas Lidstrom. After all, the nickname the perfect human is not assigned lightly. 

If the defensive prowess of the team's top scorers offer one hint as to the path back to the summit of the NHL, its blend of elite skill with bottom six physicality and grind provides another. 

With the likes of Datsyuk, Zetterberg, and Franzen operating at an elite level and handling the bulk of the goal scoring in the top six, Drake, Maltby, and Draper could play simply and effectively. They still dominated the puck, but they did it in their own manner—using physicality to play downhill and keep play hemmed 180-feet from Osgood's crease.

Thanks to this ability to mix styles and change rhythms, Detroit could blow Colorado out of the water with its extraordinary firepower in the second round, absorb and respond in kind to Dallas’ physicality in the Western Conference Final, then demonstrate too much control and too much aptitude in possession for the Penguins to match.

So, yes, it’s been fifteen years since the Cup spent a summer in Hockeytown, and its return probably isn’t as imminent as Detroit fans would hope. But, looking back at the ‘08 team in all its glory and for its faults, it is undeniable that Wings fans had the chance to witness one of the iconic teams of the NHL’s salary cap era.