Unrivaled: Inside Hockey’s Bloodiest Rivalry

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.6 • 3.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2022

⏱️ 50 minutes

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Summary

The Avalanche beat the Lightning to win the Stanley Cup last night, sending the trophy back to Colorado for the first time since 2001. It was an era when the Avalanche, and their archrivals the Detroit Red Wings, were engaged in a multi-year blood feud that became the center of the hockey universe. It was a rivalry perhaps best remembered for a game played 25 years ago, on March 26, 1997 in Detroit’s Joe Lewis Arena, and is now better remembered as “Fight Night at the Joe.” During the first period, Detroit’s Darren McCarty sought revenge on Colorado’s Claude Lemieux for a violent check in the previous year’s playoffs on the Red Wings’ Kris Draper. The hit caused severe injuries to Draper’s face, enraging the Red Wings, who were furious that Lemieux refused to even apologize to Draper. Now, a quarter-century later, those who were part of it are opening up about what made the rivalry so intense, as part of the latest E:60 special “Unvrivaled.” Detroit native Dave Fleming joins us to discuss the trajectory of the rivalry and why we may never see anything like it again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Dave Lemming, you are from Detroit, Ed.
0:03.0	You were there in your hometown this spring for an anniversary for a reunion of sorts.
0:11.0	So explain what this event was, what this whole thing was about.
0:19.0	Oh my God, Pablo, only in my beloved hockey town.
0:24.0	25 years later to the day in some remote nightclub outside of Detroit.
0:32.0	Could you get a standing room only crowd to watch an old grainy?
0:38.0	I swear it was in a VCR tape of a regular season hockey game from 1997.
0:47.0	Test, test, test, test, test. Welcome to the night.
0:50.0	Let the Joe. Listen, I don't even know how many Stanley cups the Detroit Red Wings have won.
0:55.0	Because there's been so many. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah.
0:58.0	But this game that they rewatched recently, Red Wings fans voted it.
1:03.0	Their absolute favorite game of all time.
1:06.0	I think this is the greatest moment of Detroit sports history.
1:09.0	It's the turning point for the Detroit Red Wings.
1:12.0	And it was one of the happiest days of my life.
1:16.0	Yeah, I mean, so a bit of accounting here, the Red Wings, yeah, 11 Stanley cups.
1:20.0	But this thing, this event overshadows all of it because the night in question, March 26, 1997,
1:28.0	the thing that you want to pop into a VCR in person.
1:32.0	It's better known is what?
1:34.0	Well, this taken on many monikers.
1:37.0	I personally like bloody Wednesday.
1:40.0	Oh, I heard that one.
	...

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