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Stanley Cup Finals
PITTSBURGH When the Red Wings and the Penguins play the 15th Game 7 in Stanley Cup finals history Friday night, Mike Babcock and Dan Bylsma will be behind the benches, trying to outcoach each other.
But six years ago they were on the same side in a Game 7, a night, Bylsma said, that is “emblazoned in my memory.”
For him, it came down to a single moment, captured in a newspaper photograph.
It was June 9, 2003, at the Meadowlands, in East Rutherford, N.J., the rubber match of the Cup final between the Devils and the Anaheim Ducks. Babcock was coaching the Ducks, and Bylsma, a fourth-line forward and the Ducks’ alternate captain, was standing in the clear in front of the Devils’ net.
A shot whistled in from the blue line.
“I tipped it at my shoulder; it went in the air,” Bylsma said Wednesday. “I had one more swing at it, but I failed to make contact.”
The puck did not go in, and the Devils went on to win the game, 3-0, and the Cup.
“USA Today the following morning had a picture of me and Marty Brodeur with the puck in the air that was my chance when it was 0-0, and I do remember it very vividly,” said Bylsma, 38. “I don’t know if I saved the picture, but I think it’s probably somewhere. I don’t look at it, I don’t pick it up. It’s not something that I like to think about.”
Babcock, 46, remembers that Game 7 too, although in a different way. He didn’t cite Bylsma’s missed chance, but a more tactical aspect of the experience.
“You know, that game was tied after one, 0-0,” Babcock said. “It was our best start in the series in their building. I thought it was going to go our way, and it didn’t.”
Those contrasting memories highlight what seems to be one small difference between Babcock and Bylsma. Both are upbeat, even-tempered coaches with obvious strategic acumen. But Bylsma seems more ready to acknowledge the pain of defeat.
“That’s the agony and the beautiful thing of sport, that we play a game, and we play it to win a Cup, to win a trophy, to be the best,” Bylsma said. “When you don’t get it, it’s painful. And when you get it, it’s glorious, and you get a lot of good pictures. You take the bad ones if you don’t win and you put them in a basement in a box somewhere. And we’re looking for one we can hang on the wall.”
Bylsma was not coaching the Penguins last year when they lost the Cup final to Detroit in six games, but he knows how his players felt.
“I read not too long ago that experience is what you get when you don’t get the result you want,” he said. “I don’t want that experience again. I had it in ’03. I know these guys had it last year. I don’t think they want to gain that experience again.”
Babcock said this week that not winning the 2003 final was “absolutely devastating.” But on Thursday he said the summer that followed was great, and that he had no fear as this year’s Game 7 approached.
“This is why we came here,” Babcock said, speaking via telephone hookup from Detroit. “Here’s an opportunity. You have Game 7. You’ve got a chance, and you ask me a question about fear. I don’t understand that thinking at all.
“When you’re a kid, at least in Canada, and you don’t even have a net, you put little snow piles in the street; you’re dreaming of scoring the game-winning goal of Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final,” Babcock added. “You’ve been doing that your whole life. Now you’ve got it. Play and have some fun.”
Babcock was not oblivious to disappointment after the Penguins’ 2-1 victory on Tuesday night, which extended this series to the full seven.
“It might have been a little more fun last year,” Babcock recalled saying to his children. “And my youngest daughter said, ‘Yeah, it was more fun.’ That’s just the way it is. We’re all human; we all want to have success.”
But, he added: “When I got up this morning it was: ‘Let’s get out there. Let’s enjoy this.’ My phone’s ringing off the hook. Everybody wants a ticket. I don’t know where they think we’re getting them from.”
Bylsma said he was looking forward to the challenge of Game 7 as well, and the opportunity for someone to make history in a way he could not quite do in 2003.
“There’s going to be a chance,” Bylsma said. “There’s going to be a play, a blocked shot to score a goal. That’s where we put ourselves: a one-game, one-chance scenario.”
“And,” he added, “there will be a picture the next morning.”
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