A bench mark

Sporting News, The, Oct 25, 1993 by Jeff Gordon

Superstars drive the modern NHL, and the Detroit Red Wings certainly have their share.

Steve Yzerman is a franchise center. Paul Coffey has scored more points than an defenseman in league history. Bob Probert is the toughest guy in hockey, and speedy Sergei Fedorov may be the top counter-attacker. Scorers, skaters and bangers abound on the Red Wings.

But the Red Wings haven't won a Stanley Cup since 1955.

Seeing coaches Jacques Demers and Barry Melrose competing for the Cup last spring caused Owner Mike Ilitch to question why these former employees were vying for hockey's Holy Grail after his more talented team had been eliminated in the first round.

"When the time came to choose a coach, it dawned on me that the same people are winning all the time," Ilitch says.

That feeling caused Ilitch to search for a new coach. After failing to land Mike Keenan -- who went to the Rangers for $3.5 million over five years -- the Red Wings signed Scotty Bowman to a contract that could pay him a record $2 million in the next two years.

There were slightly more than 100 coaching changes in the NHL in the 1980s, when the job was more perilous than being a high-wire aerialist. The trend has continued in the '90s as the 21 established NHL clubs already have used 52 coaches. Since 1980, six of the Jack Adams Award winners for coach of the year have been dismissed within two seasons.

But the precarious state of the coaching profession in the '80s has taken a dramatic turn with the newfound wealth Bowman, Keenan, Demers, Jacques Lemaire and others have received this summer, proving that the value of top coaches is now on par with, let's say, a speedy European goal scorer.

"Coaches are getting their dues and the respect they've never gotten," says Tampa Bay Lightning Coach Terry Crisp, who won the 1989 Stanley Cup in Calgary and was fired a year later. "When you won, it was always the team that won. When you lost, it was the coach's fault."

The dramatic successes of motivators such as Demers, Melrose, Pat Burns and Keenan changed some thinking. So did Bowman's tactical wizardry in Pittsburgh's 1992 Cup run and Al Arbour's adept reconstruction of the Islanders. Bowman's stern hand can already be seen in the discipline of the star-laden Red Wings lineup.

"If you're a general manager in the NHL and you want to make sure you have a star coach, you have to compete a little bit," says Jimmy Devellano, senior vice president of the Red Wings and the club's former general manager. "If you assemble some pretty good hockey players on your team, you want to go out and get the best coach you can find. If that means having to pay him, so be it. It's no different than going after a free agent. "

In 1990, the Red Wings fired Demers, kicked Devellano upstairs and hired former Capitals Coach Bryan Murray as general manager. Murray then hired himself as coach.

Last summer, Melrose was ready to graduate from the American Hockey League's Adirondack Red Wings, but Murray opted to coach another season. And the Kings stole Melrose.

Demers, meanwhile, left his broadcasting job in Quebec City to coach the Canadiens after Bums left for Toronto.

While Demers and Melrose coaxed their teams into the finals, the Red Wings squirmed after Bums' upstart Maple Leafs eliminated them in the first round. Murray, who could never conquer the playoffs, left coaching to concentrate on his other duties, and the Wings went shopping and came up with Bowman.

Instead of a rising coaching star, the Red Wings landed a legend.

That Bowman has been to the Stanley Cup finals nine times in 21 seasons and Yzerman has never made it to the finals in his brilliant 10-year career puts the emphasis on coaching into its proper perspective.

Thanks to Keenan's and Bowman's contracts, the parameters of coaching in the NHL have changed forever. Hockey people compared the moves to Pat Riley's leaving NBC for the Knicks and Chuck Daly's jumping from the Pistons to the Nets in the NBA.

"It's a momentum thing," Demers says. "Guys like Mike Keenan and Scotty Bowman went to teams that spend a tremendous amount of money. I look at what Chuck Daly got and Pat Riley. They changed the market for all the guys in the NBA. Mike Keenan and Scotty Bowman changed it for all of us in the NHL.

"Coaches were making $175,000, $200,000 a year. Now some are making $800,000, $900,000, $1 million a year. When I went to Detroit (in 1986), I was the highest-paid coach in the NHL in my first year there and I made $250,000. At the time, it was a lot of money to pay the coach.

"I don't want to get paid as much as Brett Hull. I don't want to get paid as much as Wayne Gretzky or Steve Yzerman. I'm really comfortable being the eighth, ninth, 10th highest-paid guy in the locker room."

The revolution came in two stages. Before last season, quality coaches such as Demers, Burns, Melrose and Brian Sutter joined new teams for long-term contracts paying in the $300,000- to $400,000-a-year range.

Those investments paid off handsomely. Demers led the Canadiens to their first Cup in seven years, and Melrose became the Kings' career coaching playoff winner in one spring.