When Red Wings management walked into Minnesota's Met Center on June 17, 1989, no one could have known they were about to make history. Like any team, they were just trying to put together the best roster they could.
With 5,955 total games, 1,227 goals, 3,594 points and 5,108 penalty minutes, it's safe to say Detroit blew expectations out of the water. In fact, it assembled one of the greatest draft classes ever.
And like so many thrilling stories, it started with stealth and secrecy.
The Red Wings' 1989 class is most known for its pair of hall-of-famers: Nicklas Lidstrom, drafted in the third round; and Sergei Fedorov, drafted in the fourth. In each case, they came to Detroit because the Red Wings were willing to get creative.
In the case of Lidstrom, the player who became one of the greatest defensemen of his era was on very few draft boards. That's because he hadn't made Sweden's national junior team, and few scouts had ventured to Vasteras, Sweden, to watch him play. But the Red Wings did see Lidstrom play, and they knew they had a star on their hands.
As former Red Wings general manager Ken Holland recalled to The Athletic's Pierre LeBrun, “Back then, teams might have one person over there. All you really did was hit the major tournaments. I remember (chief scout) Neil Smith coming back from a scouting trip in December, and Christer Rockstrom had taken him off the beaten path to Vasteras. … Neil said to me, ‘We don’t want to go over there too much and alert anybody to Nick Lidstrom. But we’ve got him on our list.’ ”
And after picking two other players — Mike Sillinger and Bob Boughner — the Red Wings finally called Lidstrom's name. Two seasons later, he came to the NHL and almost immediately became Detroit's No. 1 defenseman. He stayed that way until his retirement in 2012 after 20 years in the NHL.
Lidstrom's career accolades are remarkable. He more than doubled the next-highest scoring defenseman in Red Wings history with 1,142 points across his 1,564 games. Those games played, by the way, rank second in Detroit's history behind only Mr. Hockey himself, Gordie Howe. Winning seven Norris trophies as the best defenseman in the NHL, Lidstrom is only equaled by Doug Harvey's seven and surpassed by Bobby Orr's eight. Elite company, to say the least.
Fedorov's history is just as remarkable — and it started off even more covert.
With the Cold War raging and Soviet players having to defect to play in the United States, general manager Jim Devellano and the Red Wings took a risk by drafting Fedorov in the fourth round — the highest a Soviet had ever been selected. The move was risky because there was no guarantee that they could get him to Detroit. But Yzerman had told Devellano four words that convinced him to take the swing:
“He’s better than me,” Yzerman said, recounted in a 2018 article by The Athletic's Joe Smith. And that became a common refrain once Fedorov joined the Red Wings, but first he had to come over to the United States.
Enter Detroit sport writer Keith Gave, whose book The Russian Five details his involvement in the Red Wings' efforts to bring Fedorov over to North America. As a former Russian linguist for the NSA, Gave was in a unique situation to help the Red Wings contact Fedorov and teammate Vladimir Konstantinov, picked in the 11th round of the same 1989 draft.
In a move straight out of a spy novel, Gave went to Finland to attend an exhibition game where the Soviet prospects would be playing. Outside their locker room after the game, Gave handed the players two media guides with letters tucked inside of them explaining Detroit's desire to bring them to North America. Less than a year later, Fedorov defected while in Portland, Ore., for an exhibition game. Konstantinov defected in 1991 after faking a cancer diagnosis to be released from the Red Army. it was like a John le Carré novel, except with Stanley Cups on the line instead of state secrets.
Once Fedorov got to North America, he lived up to every expectation. Using his signature speed and stellar understanding of the game, Fedorov proved to be one of the greatest two-way players of all time. He won two Selke trophies for top defensive forward. One of those came in 1994, when he became the only player in NHL history to win the Selke and the Hart Trophy for league MVP in the same season. Fedorov's 954 points rank second only to Yzerman's 978 in the time span he was with the Red Wings.
And if you ever doubted that Fedorov was the best player in the NHL at times in his career, just ask the likes of Yzerman, Wayne Gretzky, Nicklas Lidstrom, Ray Bourque and Jeremy Roenick, among the many others to lavish their praises on Fedorov.
Fedorov was also a shrewd negotiator, having sat out most of 1997-98 while negotiating a bigger contract. After the Carolina Hurricanes offer sheeted him, Detroit matched the offer and retained his services en route to another Stanley Cup, which included a hefty $12 million bonus for making the conference finals. The Red Wings paid up, and it was worth every penny. But in Federv's next wave of negotiations in the 2003 offseason, Fedorov signed with Anaheim for $10 million less than Detroit had offered. Having been snubbed by Fedorov, this led to ill will from Detroit that has only recently began to thaw.
Back before any of that in 1989, anyone who had seen Fedorov play knew that he was capable of such brilliance on the ice. But it took gumption for a team to draft Fedorov so high. Detroit's selection of Fedorov was a risk with so many other players available who wouldn't require spy moves to bring over. But those are the kinds of maneuvers that made 1989 such a special draft for the Red Wings.
The same can be said of 11th round pick Konstantinov, although his late selection was less of a risk than Detroit's gambit on Fedorov. After faking cancer with the help of a Russian journalist named Valery Matveev — who was also a friend of Fedorov — Konstantinov came to Detroit in 1991 and became a feared, physical blueliner for the Red Wings. His hits were vicious. His defense was impeccable. And especially as a member of the Russian Five lineup, he also proved an exceptional playmaker, too.
After Konstantinov helped the Red Wings win the 1997 Stanley Cup, tragedy struck. Just six days after hoisting the Cup, Konstantinov was paralyzed by a limousine crash that ended his career.
Had he not been injured, it's fair to wonder whether Konstantinov might be in the Hall of Fame alongside Fedorov and Lidstrom. He finished fourth in Norris voting in 1996. In his final 1997 season, he was runner-up to the New York Rangers' Brian Leetch.
What about the rest of the 1989 draft class?
Sillinger, picked 11th overall by the Red Wings, played 1,049 games and scored 548 points. Second round pick Bob Boughner eclipsed 600 games as a tough, journeyman defenseman, though none of those games came with the Red Wings. And hard-nosed winger Dallas Drake, picked in the sixth round, also eclipsed the millenium mark for games played. However, all three played the majority of their careers with other teams. Sillinger played for 11 other teams throughout his career, while Boughner played for six. Drake was a longtime Winnipeg Jet/Arizona Coyote before playing six years with St. Louis. He wrapped up his career with a one-season Red Wings reunion in 2007-08.
Look at it this way: Detroit's 1989 draft class was so good that it traded three everyday NHLers, and that's not even remotely considered a blunder.
The only other player from the class to play NHL games was Shawn McCosh, who got into nine games across 10 pro seasons. None came with Detroit. In 1990, the Red Wings dumped McCosh to Los Angeles for an eighth-round pick. The rest of the Red Wings' 1989 picks never played an NHL game. These picks were defensemen Scott Zygulski, Andy Suhy, Bob Jones and Greg Bignell; forwards Rick Judson and Joe Frederick; and goaltender Jason Glickman.
Overall, the Red Wings' 1989 draft class remains one of the greatest of all time. Few teams can boast a draft class with so many NHL games, let alone multiple hall of fame talents.
