In 1982 when Mike Ilitch bought the Red Wings’ franchise from Bruce Norris it was as broken down as a business can be. We don’t know or can’t remember how lucky we are. If you’re under 50 the first rebuild may have happened before you were born or cognizant of hockey. If you’re over 50 your memory may not be as sharp as it once was. A long, difficult rebuild was the only way forward, and Jimmy Devellano was hired to do it.
The addition of 6 new teams in 1967 to the ‘original six’ laid down a marker that the NHL was a business that intended to grow. Wings’ owner Bruce Norris, the son of the Red Wings’ founder James Norris, ignored the marker. After winning 4 Stanley Cups in the 1950’s, the Red Wing train had enough momentum to roll into the 1960’s, and they also had Gordie Howe, the most popular and successful hockey player of the day, (outside of Montreal).
As the league expanded and wrote new TV contracts, the franchise required new and better modern management, but mired in multiple divorces, and booze, and busy with the family grain and cattle business, young Norris was unable to to provide it. The 1960’s passed with no Cups, but the 1970’s were even more dismal. The best Norris offered were a series of empty gestures, like hiring Ted Lindsay as the coach; the same Ted Lindsay that he’d traded away earlier as a punishment for an attempt to unionize the players. By the end of the 1970’s Olympia was empty, so bad that the security guards let kids in for free through back doors just to fill up some seats (thanks!). The Dead Wings, that was the Detroit franchise. They even managed to anger Gordie Howe who said that in his new front office job with the Wings he received the mushroom treatment: He sat in a dark little office and once in a while they threw a shovel of manure on him.
Devellano Arrives
The franchise re-awakened in 1982. Mike Ilitch bought the team that summer and by fall had installed Jimmy Devellano as the new GM. Devellano took a boot strap path to NHL team management that would not happen today, unfortunately. He dropped out of high school in the 9th grade and eventually found work with the Canadian government that required regular business travel. On the road, Devellano made a habit of attending major junior hockey games in the evening. When the league expanded in 1967 Devellano made the acquaintance of the new St. Louis franchise GM Lynn Patrick and worked as an amateur scout. He was eventually hired as scout by the New York Islanders in 1972, became an assistant GM eventually, and helped draft the players who won 4 straight Stanley Cups from 1980 to 1983.
After their 3rd Cup in 1982, Mike Ilitch hired Devellano away from the Islanders, making him the new Red Wings’ GM. It turned out to be one the best moves of Ilitch’s career as owner. One of the men Devellano knew from his time in St. Louis was assistant coach Scotty Bowman who eventually led the Wings to 3 Stanley Cups. It’s a small world is as true of hockey as any business field.
The first time I heard Devellano’s name was the fall of 1982. The Detroit sports media was instantly skeptical of the small, pudgy bespectacled Devellano and in interviews challenged his every answer. This was a time when even sport’s media was adversarial. Devellano spelled out a strategy of building the team through the draft, but was immediately met with cynical backtalk from the writers and sportscasters. He even had to defend the notion of building a watchable team from castoffs and old vets to try and fill the arena on weekday nights. What choice did he have? Faced with an army of cynics, the experienced Devellano never retreated.
Devellano’s Drafts
His first draft in 1983 proved consequential and made him and Ilitch look like geniuses, and silenced the skeptics. Steve Yzerman in the 1st, followed by Lane Lamber, Bob Probert, Petra Klima, Joey Kocur and Stu Grimson. In total these 6, out of 13 picks, played 5,086 games in the NHL. It might have been one of the great drafts ever had it not been for the character flaws of Probert and Klima, which pushed back the Wings next Stanley Cup finals to the 1994-95 season. This was the Red Wings’ first Cup final since the league expanded in 1967. They lost the series in 4 games to the New Jersey Devils.
With the draft of Petra Klima and his subsequent smuggling out of Czechoslovakia, Devellano displayed the risk taking that would be a hallmark of his career. He continued to look at Euro players who were not highly scouted until he hit a huge grand slam in the 1989 draft: Nik Lindstrom in round 3, Sergei Fedorov in round 4 and Vlad Konstantinov in 11. This draft also included Mike Sillinger, Bob Boughner (current assistant coach) and Dallas Drake. Together the group played in 5,946 games (it would have easily crossed 6,000 had Konstantinov’s career not been cut short by a dope smoking limo driver!), with 1226 goals and 2367 assists for a total of 3593 points. I don’t know if any GM has had a better draft than that!
After a few more drafts and trades, Devellano made his most interesting and innovative hockey statement: The Russian Five. How does a plan this brilliant come out of a man who dropped out of high school after flunking 9th grade algebra and scrapped his way into hockey management? “Tough times make strong men” may not be an empty cliche after all. It’s take some steel to trade away a perennial sniper like Ray Sheppard, 52 goals for the Wings in 93 - 94, for Igor Larionov, who scored 12 goals in the Wings’ 96 - 97 Cup year. The Professor, as Larionov came to be known, was the final stroke of Devellano’s masterpiece.
For all his abilities as a scout and GM, both in the draft and in trades (we’ll forget and forgive the Federko/McKegney trade where we lost Adam Oates to St. Louis) it took Devellano 6 seasons for his Red Wing team to post 80 or more points in an 80 game season! And before they got to the Stanley Cup finals in 94-95 there were backslides. Not every draft yielded a crop of stars, much less a single NHL player. The year his captain Steve Yzerman ran into an immovable goalpost that ended his season is one backslide. The four years where Devellano moved aside as GM for Coach and GM Bryan Murray, 1990-94, was another backslide (future post). But the 94-95 team had 12 Red Wings’ draft choices, proof that Devellano had stuck to his guns.
When the Wings finally won the Cup two years later, they had 15 Red Wings’ draft choices on the ice. Devellano was a patient man and a GM who never lost sight of his final objective and how he wanted to get there. Mike Ilitch, likewise, knew what it was like to build from the bottom up - from a single pizzeria to Red Wings’ owner! Did their backgrounds helped them to form a bond that finally brought success to the Detroit Red Wings?