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1995 NHL playoffs

The 1995 Stanley Cup Finals: Devil Of An Upset

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The Detroit Red Wings rolled through the NHL regular season for the second straight year as the best team, albeit this time in a lockout-shortened 48-game schedule. With Sergei Federov leading “The Russian Five”, the Red Wings looked unstoppable when they came into the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals.

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The same had been true in 1994 when they lost in the first round, so no one in Detroit took anything for granted. This time around, the Red Wings left no doubt about who was the best in the Western Conference (Detroit did not move to the East until the realignment of 2014).

The Wings had a potent offense with Federov and Ray Sheppard lighting the lamp, and the skilled passing of defenseman Paul Coffey. Goaltender Mike Vernon anchored the second-best defense in the NHL. This group blasted through the three rounds of Western Conference playoffs with a record of 12-2.

Awaiting them in the Stanley Cup Finals were the New Jersey Devils, who’d lost a heartbreaking seven-game conference finals the year prior to the New York Rangers. Martin Brodeur was still a mostly unknown goalie, as he led the way for a team whose success was built around defense.

Brodeur and the New Jersey defense wouldn’t be unknown much longer. Though were the fifth seed in the East, New Jersey had played its best hockey in the second half of the regular season and then rolled through the Eastern Conference playoffs with a record of 12-4.

New Jersey’s defense, with its famous “neutral-zone trap” would one day define hockey, and it all started here at the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals. The Devils came into famed Joe Louis Arena and took the Finals opener by a 2-1 count, thanks to limiting the Detroit offense to just 17 shots on goal. A 4-2 win in Game 2 also saw the Red Wings’ attack fail to get 20 shots.

An array of offensive talent doesn’t mean a lot if that talent can’t get shots on the net, and New Jersey had the Detroit offense completely locked up. Then the Devils’ own attack started to get rolling when the Finals went east and that meant it was all over but the shouting.

Five different New Jersey players lit the lamp in the 5-2 victory of Game 3.  The Devils won Game 4 by the same score and for the first time in franchise history were hoisting the Stanley Cup.

New Jersey held its opponent to two goals or fewer 16 times in 20 games, including all four in the Finals. Claude Lemieux scored thirteen postseason goals for New Jersey to win the Conn Smythe Award, as MVP of the entire playoffs. Ironically, Lemiuex would end up with the Colorado Avalanche a year later and be at the heart of a fierce and bitter rivalry the Avs would have with these same Red Wings he helped torment in 1995.

In time, Detroit would eventually overcome the frustration and get over the top, solidifying their reputation as one of the NHL’s great franchises. But New Jersey was starting a pretty good reputation of their own, setting the stage for Stanley Cups again in 2000 and 2003. Their upset win of the 1995 Stanley Cup Finals was the first of what would be many big hockey moments in the Garden State.

1995 Sports: Dynasties Built, Developed, Validated & Restored

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The year that was 1995 sports was one of the dynasty. All of the six major team championships—the Final Four, the Stanley Cup, the NBA Finals, the World Series, the college football title and the Super Bowl—had dynastic overtones to it. In some cases, the dynasty was known at the time, in other cases we know it from the perspective of history, in still others it was an old dynasty coming to life, but it looms over every single championship run.

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We knew at the time that the Dallas Cowboys were aiming for dynasty status. They had won the Super Bowl in 1992 and 1993 and reached the NFC Championship Game in 1994. One of the big sports stories of the year was the highly publicized pursuit of free agent cornerback Deion Sanders by owner Jerry Jones.
The acquisition of Deion gave the Cowboys the extra piece they needed to win a third Super Bowl in four years and earn dynasty status.
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The Nebraska Cornhuskers were already one of college football’s top programs, and a long-awaited national championship in 1994 had gotten the monkey off the back of their coach, Tom Osborne. It turns out, Osborne was just getting started. The 1995 edition of Nebraska football was one of the great college teams of all time. They won a repeat title and two years later, the Cornhuskers also completed a three crowns-in-four years run that earned them the dynasty tag.
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The period of NBA basketball from 1991 to 1998 was defined by Michael Jordan, with one notable exception—the interlude when he went to play minor league baseball. The Houston Rockets won the championship in the Jordan-less year of 1994. And though MJ returned in 1995, it was late in the regular season.
Houston again won a title and solidified themselves as the top alternative to the Jordan Bulls. And speaking of those Bulls…after Michael’s return, he played a marquee playoff series against the Orlando Magic of Shaquille O’Neal and came up short. It would be the last time Jordan came up short, as his own dynasty was back on track.
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No dynasty ever dominated its sport the way the UCLA basketball program did under John Wooden, with their ten national championships from 1964-75. The dominance was so thorough, that an entire era of college basketball history is defined by its conclusion, and it serves as the marking point for where the modern era of the NCAA Tournament really begins.
But UCLA had never cut down the nets since Wooden’s departure. 1995 finally changed that. With Ed O’Bannon leading the way, the Bruins beat defending national champion Arkansas and UCLA was back atop the college basketball world.
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I suppose it’s debatable whether the New Jersey Devils are a dynasty, and they certainly weren’t perceived as such when the 1995 Stanley Cup playoffs began. But what’s indisputable is that the Devils were embarking on an era where they would become one of the NHL’s great franchises—over the next nine years they would make the Finals four times and hoist the Cup on three of those occasions.
The first one came in 1995 when they upset the Detroit Red Wings in a shocking Stanley Cup Finals. It was the last shocker in a postseason that began when the Western Conference saw three first-round series go to Game 7s, and two of the top three seeds eliminated in them.
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Finally, we come to the Atlanta Braves. Over the previous four years they had won two pennants, made three NLCS, and were in position to at least go back to the postseason in 1994 before the strike wiped out everything. In future years, they would continue to win NL East titles—every year through 2005—and win two more pennants.
But in only one of those years would they win a World Series and that was in 1995. Without this championship, Atlanta would have lived in sports infamy (I don’t condone that line of thinking, I’m merely acknowledging its reality). The Series they won in 1995 at least provided some inoculation against harsh judgment and validated their long dynastic run through the National League in general, and the Eastern Division in particular.
Atlanta’s World Series victory over the Cleveland Indians was cathartic for the franchise, but nothing was more cathartic for baseball fans—still wounded after the strike of 1994—then the excitement provided by the Seattle Mariners. The M’s staged a dramatic late-season comeback to win the AL West, and then one more dramatic comeback to upend the New York Yankees in a thrilling Division Series.
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Read more about the 1995 Seattle Mariners