Paul Devorski was one of two referees to preside over Stanley Cup Final games between Detroit and Pittsburgh in 2008 (when the Wings won in six) and in 2009 (when the Wings lost in seven).
He also officiated some classic international games, including the bronze-medal game in the 2010 Vancouver Olympics and the gold-medal game between Sweden and Finland in the 2006 Olympics in Torino (in which Nicklas Lidstrom scored the game-winner for the Swedes).
His career highlight? “Man, I have to say that gold-medal game in Torino,” he said after a pause. “That was such an honor.
“After that, to this day, that Detroit game is No. 2.”
That Detroit game, eh? We all remember that one. March 26, 1997. Devorski was in the eye of that hurricane that night a quarter-century ago, and for the first time he tells his side of that story in this book excerpt, “Vlad The Impaler: More Epic Tales from Detroit’s ’97 Stanley Cup Conquest,” by Keith Gave, coming out in April.
The morning after one of the most challenging, chaotic — and memorable — games of his career, referee Paul Devorski’s phone rang, just as he nervously suspected it would.
He had a good idea who might be calling, and he was right. The big boss, Brian Burke, was on the other end. Not good. Devorski knew what was coming.
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“Devo,” said Burke, then the NHL’s executive vice president and director of hockey operations — and the league’s chief disciplinarian — “do you think you might have been able to call just a few more penalties last night?”
“Well, yeah,” Devorski acknowledged. “I guess I maybe could have, sure.”
“OK,” Burke responded. “Just checking.”
And that was the end of it, to Devorski’s immense relief. But the message was received in no uncertain terms.
The night before, on March 26, 1997, he had called 148 penalty minutes in the fourth and final regular-season matchup between the Detroit Red Wings and the Colorado Avalanche — to the surprise of absolutely no one who was paying even remote attention to hockey in those days.
The Red Wings had a score to settle dating to the previous spring, when the teams met in the Western Conference finals. In a Game 6 at Colorado, when the Wings needed to win to stay alive, Avs forward Claude Lemieux hit a defenseless Kris Draper from behind. Draper fell forward, hitting his face on the dasher boards in front of the Detroit bench. The result: a broken jaw, fractured cheekbone, broken nose, damage to his right orbital bone, several missing or broken teeth — and, at least temporarily, the ruination of Draper’s ever-present smile.
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Eventually, the Avs added insult to injury, scoring the final three goals against a shaken Detroit team to dispatch the Wings, move on to the finals and sweep the Florida Panthers for their first Stanley Cup.
“I can’t believe I shook his (expletive) hand,” Detroit’s Dino Ciccarelli said later, referring to hockey’s time-honored series ending tradition. Which pretty much summed up how all of Detroit felt about the cheap-shot artist who rearranged Draper’s face.
Lemieux was slapped with a checking-from-behind major and ejection with a game misconduct penalty. Burke suspended him for two games in the finals. Draper took his meals through a straw for the better part of the off-season as his wounds healed around a broken jaw that had been wired shut.
Before March 26, the teams had played each other three times without serious incident, but everyone knew that if the Wings were ever going to have their revenge, it would be in this game at Joe Louis Arena. Certainly Brian Lewis, the NHL’s supervisor of officials, knew it. He’s the one who choregraphed the schedule for officials. Devorski and his two linesmen got their assignment for the game in Detroit about five weeks in advance. But early that afternoon, Lewis called Devorski to give him a heads up, that this likely would be a difficult game to officiate.
“Just be ready,” Lewis told him. “These teams really don’t like each other.”
Which explains why Devorski did more tossing and turning than resting as he tried to take his customary pregame nap.
The NHL didn’t institute a two-referee system until the start of the 1999-2000 season, so Devorski essentially would be the sole judge, jury and executioner in this game. It was a power he took seriously, a power he wielded resolutely — and it would ultimately have far-reaching implications.
Less than five minutes into the game, tensions flared in a battle of defensemen when Detroit’s Jamie Pushor fought Colorado’s Brent Severyn. At about the halfway mark of the period, forwards Kirk Maltby of Detroit Rene Corbet of Colorado engaged each other.
Then all hell broke loose at 18:22, when Detroit’s Igor Larionov, who had had just about enough of Peter Forsberg sticking him from behind as he was trying to carry the puck, finally turned and threw the first and only punches of his Hall of Fame career. The two fell to the ice, tangled up. Forsberg injured himself and wouldn’t return to the game.
[ Teammate: McCarty would be tossed from Wings-Avs’ ‘Fight Night’ in today’s NHL ]
But in that serendipitous moment, Darren McCarty looked around the ice, saw Lemieux and made a beeline, only to be intercepted by Avs defenseman Adam Foote. But as the two squared off, McCarty was calling for reinforcements. No, he didn’t need help fighting Foote. Rather, McCarty had a promise to keep, and this was his opportunity.
Immediately, Brendan Shanahan tapped McCarty on the shoulder and said he would take this dance with Foote. And McCarty turned his savage, pent-up attention toward Lemieux, who immediately surrendered, falling to his knees and covering his head with his arms in the classic turtle position.
If Lemieux thought McCarty might hold back since he was essentially surrendering the fight, he was regrettably mistaken. Using his right hand to pull Lemieux up from the ice, McCarty landed several punches to the face and head before dragging Lemieux to the boards directly in front of the Wings bench — giving his best pal Draper a front row seat — and then kneed Lemieux in the head, leaving him lying in a thickening, sickening pool of blood.
Of the three on-ice officials that night, Devorski had the least seniority. He was in his eighth season. Linesman Ray Scapinello, later inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, was in his 26th season and his partner, Dan Schachte, was in his 15th.
The linesmen had their hands full with all 12 players on the ice paired off. The main undercard among all those bouts was at center ice in what was widely considered to be the best goalie fight in NHL history. Colorado’s Patrick Roy, thinking McCarty and Shanahan were about to do a double-team, skated out of his crease to even things up. That’s when Detroit’s Mike Vernon came out to greet him. Despite being five inches shorter and weighing 20 pounds less than Roy, Vernon battered and bloodied his opponent.
While overtaxed medics immediately jumped over the boards to tend to Lemieux, the linesmen ushered the parade to the penalty box — but wondered what to do with McCarty. Both had turned to Devorski, saying almost simultaneously, “Dude, you’re going to throw him out, right? McCarty’s done, eh?”
“Nope,” Devorski said without pausing to think about it. “He’s staying in.”
In fact, McCarty didn’t even get the requisite five-minute fighting major. Instead, he was assessed a double minor for roughing. And Lemieux? He wasn’t penalized at all. Not even a two-minute minor for refusing to fight back and getting his butt kicked.
“Believe me,” Devorski said in a telephone interview nearly 2½ decades later, “if I could have assessed something like that, I would have.”
But it was his explanation for not coming down harder on McCarty that was astonishing, refreshingly candid and sincere.
“My memory was … I just couldn’t forget what happened to Kris Draper,” Devorski said. “I’m getting ready for the game, and they’re showing the highlights on TV — Kris Draper’s face after he got hit. I’m thinking, ‘Holy (expletive).’
“I’m being honest with you: McCarty should have been thrown out. He should have got 2-5-10 and game (misconduct) and be gone. But my just gut told me, ‘This guy (Lemieux) had it coming.’ I wouldn’t let it go. I couldn’t. So I told the linesmen, ‘No, I’m keeping him in the game.’”
In all, there were nine fights in the game, all in the first two periods. (That doesn’t include the McCarty-Lemieux and Larionov-Forsberg confrontations, because no fighting penalties were assessed.) Although the Wings got the better of the important bouts — Foote and Roy were bloodied along with Lemieux — Detroit trailed, 5-3, with less than 12 minutes to play. They hadn’t beaten the Avalanche since Game 5 of the Western Conference finals.
But the Wings mounted a furious and unforgettable comeback.
Martin Lapointe scored his 14th goal of the season at 8:27 of the third period with assists from Sergei Fedorov and Larry Murphy. Shanahan tied just 36 seconds later with his 46th goal, with assists from Larionov and Pushor.
The Wings needed a hero in overtime, and the guy who turned up to score the winning goal, by all retrospective accounts, should never have even been in the game. Larionov made the play with a spectacular move just across the blue line. He then passed to Shanahan, who one-timed the puck to McCarty breaking into the slot, and he redirected it past Roy from just outside the left post.
Game over. Delirium overwhelmed the crowd of 19,983 at The Joe. At the other end, Vernon celebrated the 300th victory of his career. And Devorski skated off the ice thinking the last thing he needed was that guy to be the hero.
“Yeah, overtime, then Darren McCarty sticks it up my (expletive) by scoring the winning goal,” Devorski said. “I knew there would be some, uh, discussion about that afterward. Every time I see that goal — it’s on TV all the time, eh? — I’m thinking, ‘Oh, shit.’
“Bottom line, though? Everybody knows, paybacks are a bitch, eh?”
Right or wrong — and many hockey lifers of a certain age saw nothing wrong with Devorski’s call given the way justice was long administered in the NHL — he knew a referee in today’s game would never survive a decision like that.
“If I made that call today,” Devorski said, “I’d get fired on the spot.”
And therein lies the difference between the kind hockey many of us loved — and miss desperately — and today’s game administered by Green Peace and assorted other pacifists who are running it into a slushy ditch.
There’s a postscript to this story, again told by Devorski: After retiring as a referee in 2015, Devorski was elevated by the league to serve as a supervisor of officials, essentially monitoring the games, grading refs and linesmen on their performances and offering guidance on how they might improve.
One assignment, during the COVID-19 pandemic when teams were playing to empty, cavernous arenas, took Devorski to Detroit. He typically would be assigned a perch in the press box, far above the ice surface. On this night, though, he found a comfortable spot a bit lower. It happened to be the section where Red Wings alumni congregate when they attended games.
“So I’m sitting there watching the game, and all of a sudden this guy walks in — the place is empty, right? — and sits about five seats away from me,” Devorski said. “I look over, and it’s Darren McCarty.”
McCarty looked over, too, and recognized the man who was a referee for 1,594 NHL games.
“The period ends, and Darren comes over to me and wraps his arms around me, giving me a great big hug,” Devorski said. “And he says, ‘I love you man. Thank you. … Thank you.’”
Vlad the Impaler
On June 7, 1997, in the prime of his NHL career, Vladimir Konstantinov — one of the most colorful and beloved athletes in Detroit’s sports history — helped lead the Red Wings to their first Stanley Cup championship in 42 years. Six days later, his career was over and his life forever changed when a limousine taking Konstantinov, fellow defenseman Slava Fetisov and team masseur Sergei Mnatsakanov home from a Wings golf outing crashed into a tree. The driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.
Gave’s new book, “Vlad The Impaler: More Epic Tales from Detroit’s ’97 Stanley Cup Conquest,” with scores of stories and anecdotes that will make readers alternately laugh and cry, celebrates Vladdie’s short but remarkable career as his former teammates and their fans commemorate the 25th anniversary of that wonderful season. The book is scheduled for release April 5 and available for preorder through Amazon and other booksellers.
A portion of the proceeds from the book is earmarked for the Vladimir Konstantinov Special Needs Trust.
Initially, doctors gave Konstantinov about a 10% chance to survive. But two months later, he awoke from a coma. He suffered irreparable brain damage, affecting movement, ambulation and many cognitive skills. Nearly 25 years later, however, with the help of 24-hour care and assistance, Konstantinov, 54, continues to fight onward, inspiring us all.
After drastic changes in Michigan’s insurance laws, a trust was established by Vladdie’s daughter, Anastasia, to try to provide all the care he would need for the rest of his life. Your purchase of this book helps. Thank you.
#Believe