Penguins vs. Avalanche: the ’96 Cup Final that never was

The Pittsburgh Penguins host the Colorado Avalanche this evening in a rare interconference match.  While the Penguins have regrouped following a long list of early season injuries to post a 7-2-0 record in their last nine games, Colorado is travelling in the opposite direction.  The Avalanche started the season hot with a 12-3-2 record, but have since stumbled in their last twelve games, losing eight times including four post-regulation losses.

Illinois-native Craig Anderson is a reflection of Colorado’s rise and fall this year.  The goaltender, often mentioned as a possible U.S. Olympic team candidate, was one of the top netminders in the NHL in October, going 10-2-2 with a 2.04 GAA and .939 SV% and allowing four goals in a game just once.  Since that time, he is just 4-5-3 / 3.31 / .896 and has given up four goals in a game seven times.  Also, when Colorado rolls into Pittsburgh tonight, the Avalanche will be without their top two goal scorers, right wings Milan Hejduk and David Jones, both of whom suffered knee injuries last weekend.

It is always interesting to flip open the almanac when a Western Conference team visits Pittsburgh as the current schedule format minimizes games between opposite conference squads.  The last time Colorado skated on Mellon Arena ice, Saturday, December 10, 2005, current NBC hockey analyst Ed Olczyk was head coach of the Penguins and Mario Lemieux was still an active player (though he did not play that night).  Eighteen year old rookie Sidney Crosby recorded an assist and Maxime Talbot scored the winning goal in a 4-3 victory.

However, whenever my thoughts rest on Colorado, I always find myself thinking back even further, back to 1996 when in one darkly revolutionary spring, upstart Florida, playing a depraved brand of clutch ‘n’ grab hockey cloaked in the garb of “neutral zone trap”, deprived fans of skilled hockey of the chance to see the Penguins and Avalanche in the Stanley Cup Final.  Instead, the upstart Panthers whacked and hacked their way past Pittsburgh in seven games, then got swept by Colorado in four, losing when German-born defenceman Uwe Krupp scored the only goal of Game Four in double overtime, giving the franchise, who just one year previous were still the Quebec Nordiques, their first ever Stanley Cup victory.

Occasionally, I still shake my head when thinking of 1996 and how a Pittsburgh/Colorado championship match would have been a classic Final talked about for years.  It would have been a clash of two teams featuring some of the most offensively-talented players in the prime of their careers, and might have cut off the alarming, ominous defence-oriented trend that was to tilt the game heavily towards boring, low-scoring strategies indefinitely.

With New Jersey winning the Cup in lockout-shortened 1995, then Florida, and not Pittsburgh, representing the East in the 1996 Final, other teams took notice and started unleashing all kinds of mayhem that ground offence to a near standstill by the beginning of this decade.  Yet it could have turned out differently had Pittsburgh and Colorado met in the ’96 Final.

Consider:

• Pittsburgh (Northeast) and Colorado (Pacific) won their respective divisions and were both seeded #2.
• Pittsburgh (362) led all of hockey in goals scored; Colorado (326) was second.  Detroit (325) was the only other team to score over 300 goals that year.*
• Mario Lemieux (69) and Jaromir Jagr (62) topped the individual goals chart.  Joe Sakic (51) was fifth.  Lemieux, Jagr, Ron Francis and Peter Forsberg were the top four in assists.
• Unsurprisingly, the Pens and Avalanche took the top five spots on the scoring list.  Lemieux won his fifth Art Ross Trophy and Jagr, Sakic, Francis and Forsberg were #2 to #5.
• Both clubs had four players with at least thirty goals and six with at least twenty.
• Eight players in the NHL that season scored fifty or more goals and the top ten point scorers all easily cleared 100 points.  In the twelve years since then, we have not come close to seeing that many players in the fifty goals or 100 point clubs in a single season.

Truly, 1995-96 was hockey’s last great offence-oriented season before the Dark Age of non-calls on hooking, holding, tripping and interference which substantially lowered scoring and excitement across the league.  The hockey world could have seen two teams with lots of scoring depth go toe-to-toe with the likely result being that other teams observing would have tried to imitate the success of Pittsburgh and Colorado by drafting and acquiring creative, skilled forwards and sharp-passing defenders instead of checking-line frauds.

Unfortunately, the Pens and Avalanche never met, and an Iron Curtain subsequently descended upon goal scoring for nearly a decade.

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* In 1992-93: 15 out of 24 teams scored 300+ goals.  In 1993-94, there were just 3 300+ goal teams.  In lockout shortened 1994-95, there were 4 (on projections over an 84 game schedule).  From 1996-97 to 2003-04, no team scored 300 or more goals in a season.

For further interesting information on the decrease in goal scoring from the early eighties until now, visit Chris Yarbrough’s Taking One for the Team.

Statistical sources: nhl.com, hockeydb.com