by Howie Mooney
There’s an old saying about general managers making deals that “the best trades are sometimes the ones that aren’t made”. That statement can always be debated, but there are some trades that weren’t made that are very compelling to look back at well after the fact. In today’s little discussion, we’re going to go back three decades and look at a trade that was “definitely on the table” between the Ottawa Senators and the Detroit Red Wings and the talks involved a couple of pretty big names.
Coming out of the summer of 1995, the Detroit Red Wings were coming off a Stanley Cup Final appearance. They had just been swept in that final series by the mind-numbing and defensively stifling New Jersey Devils. One would think though, that after being knocked out of the 1994 playoffs after the first round by the San Jose Sharks, the Wings would have been pleased to have made the Cup finals the following season.
But they were not.
The Devils’ neutral zone trap was incredibly effective throughout the postseason, and it was integral in allowing them to completely frustrate the Red Wings’ potent offense. In the team’s exit meetings, Scotty Bowman, the coach – and also the general manager of the Detroit club – stressed to every one of his players how important effective defensive play was to their team’s success.
With Steve Yzerman, Bowman tried to make the point that the Wings would be better if the captain would focus more on playing a two-way game. Remember that the 1994-95 season had been delayed by a labour action and didn’t start until the third week of January. Teams played schedules of 48 games. Paul Coffey was the team’s leading scorer with 14 goals and 58 points. He won the Norris Trophy as the league’s top defenseman, and he came fourth in Hart Trophy voting as the league’s Most Valuable Player.
Sergei Fedorov finished second in the team’s scoring with 20 goals and 50 points in 42 games. Dino Ciccarelli had 43 points in 42 games. Yzerman scored 12 goals and added 26 assists in 47 games. Stevie Y had turned 30 as the playoffs were winding down. There were some in the organization who perhaps felt that his best days were behind him. Word went around the league that Bowman was interested in perhaps dealing his captain.
That news didn’t really sit well with Yzerman when he found out. It actually seemed to take him by surprise. “I would have thought that somebody would have come to me and said, ‘Look, this is the way it is, this is why we have to do this.’ I guess they aren’t adult enough.” The Wings had reportedly been burning the phone lines with teams in their attempts to deal their star centreman.
At this time, there was a team in the league that was heading into their fourth season of existence and having some issues of their own with their only real star. The Ottawa Senators had shown only marginal improvement during their first three seasons. Their 19-year-old ballyhooed 1993 draft pick, Alexandre Daigle, was not really performing the way they had forecast. And their leading scorer, Alexei Yashin, was beyond disgruntled.
In the Ottawa Citizen on September 11, 1995, Ken Warren asked (and did his best to answer) ten questions about the Canadian Capital’s team. There were things like ‘Can head coach Rick Bowness and GM Randy Sexton save their jobs?’, ‘Where and when does (owner) Rod Bryden dip into his wallet?’, ‘What can (defenseman) Steve Duchesne bring to the Sens?’ and ‘Can Alex Daigle continue to progress on the ice and take on a leadership role?’
But the question at the top of his nearly full-page article was ‘When will the Alexei Yashin situation get resolved?’
Yashin was an exceptional hockey talent. He could stickhandle his way through other players if he were in a phone booth. He could score and he could also be an excellent facilitator as well. Through his first two seasons and 130 National Hockey League games, he had accumulated 123 points. And he was able to do it all with a flair that caused fans (and opposing general managers and coaches) to gasp in amazement.
But as Warren posed in his piece, “Whether Game 131 comes in a Senators’ uniform is a pivotal organizational question, one which could dictate the future of general manager Randy Sexton and coach Rick Bowness.”
Yashin was a great player on a very bad team and this combination did not excite him. He was forced to play with an array of wingers, and he complained about the supporting cast that had been placed around him. He also complained that he wasn’t being paid enough to endure the torture of playing on a last-place expansion team. Those were not his words, by the way, but they more or less reflected his sentiments. He was going into the third year of a five-year, $4.2 million contract and he was bristling at the prospect of that.
The night before Warren’s column came out, Yashin began holding out for more money from the club. While the Senators went to Canton, New York for their training camp, Yashin wasn’t there. He stayed in Moscow and worked out with the Central Red Army team. Yashin’s brashness led Rod Bryden to step back from his longstanding pledge to never ever trade Yashin.
The team’s director of player personnel, John Ferguson, quit the team after Bryden said that. The Senators began taking calls on Yashin. They didn’t necessarily act on them, but they did accept the calls. According to Viv Bernstein of the Detroit Free Press, one of the calls to the Sens’ front office came from the Red Wings.
Bernstein said that, in the late summer of 1995, the Wings called Randy Sexton and offered right winger Ray Sheppard, Yzerman and winger Martin Lapointe for Yashin, but the Senators turned the proposal down. Undeterred, they told Sexton that if he ever wanted to talk, to give them a call back.
Pierre McGuire had become an assistant coach on the Senators’ staff the summer before that 1995-96 season. On the Jeff Marek Show podcast The Sheet, he confirmed that the Wings and Senators indeed had conversations about the Wings’ proposal. “I can tell you that I was in Ottawa then, we definitely had talks with them. That was true.”
McGuire continued. “Yzerman for Yashin was definitely on the table. I can tell you when it happened. We were driving from Belleville back to Ottawa after an NHL exhibition game and Brad Marsh, myself, Randy Sexton and Ray Shero were in the car. And Brad had been a teammate of Steve Yzerman’s in Detroit, and we had talked about what Steve Yzerman would mean to the franchise in Ottawa and that’s how that whole thing started.”
The only thing was that no one seemed to check with Yzerman. According to Kevin Paul Dupont of the Boston Globe, the Wings’ captain had supplied the team with a list of 8-10 teams he would be willing to be traded to. He had told his superiors that he would not report to Ottawa if dealt there. He never had to worry about it, in that vein.
Yzerman took Bowman’s earlier words to heart, and he worked on his 200-foot game. In 1995-96, the Wings were a regular season juggernaut, amassing 62 victories and 131 points. But they lost the Conference Final to Colorado in six games. That was the series in which Claude Lemieux shoved Kris Draper’s face into the top of the dasher board and destroyed Draper’s jaw and orbital bone.
That persistent work, and Yzerman’s leadership, propelled the Wings to the Stanley Cup championship the following season. The Red Wings had become the force that many had predicted they would be a few seasons before. Detroit won the Stanley Cup in 1996-97, 1997-98, 2001-02 and another iteration of the team won it in 2007-08. They lost the Cup final in 2009 to the Pittsburgh Penguins.
But, during Yzerman’s time there and under the ownership of Mike Ilitch, who adored his captain, Detroit had become Hockeytown and the Wings can trace a good portion of that great ride to their decision to NOT trade Steve Yzerman back in the fall of 1995.
At the beginning of 1996, the Senators were foundering. Their record was 8-35-1. They hired Jacques Martin as their coach on January 24 and, though it took a little time, he put the team on the path to respectability. The club was not good enough to even come close to making the playoffs in 1995-96. But, on April 15, 1996, they did defeat the defending Cup champion Devils 5-2. New Jersey had needed a win that night to stay in contention for the postseason. The loss eliminated them.
The Sens under Martin played their ‘trap’ system as well as anyone and in 1996-97, they finished five games under .500 with a record of 31-36-15. That was good enough to earn them a playoff berth for the first time. They took the heavily favoured Buffalo Sabres to a seventh game before ending up at the wrong end of a 1-0 loss.
In 1997-98, the Senators posted a winning record for the first time. They went 34-33-15 and their reward for getting into the postseason tournament as the eighth seed was to face the top-ranked New Jersey Devils in the first round. With Damian Rhodes playing incredibly in goal for Ottawa, they gobsmacked their opponents, taking the series in six games. They lost in the second round to the Washington Capitals in five. But strides were being made under Martin’s defensive-minded schemes.
Eventually, the Ottawa Senators did trade Alexei Yashin. He seemed to spend his entire tenure with the team being miserable. I remember having an arranged interview with Yashin in a prepared room under the stands at what was then called the Corel Centre, the home rink of the Sens. For every question I asked him, his responses consisted of a single word. Of all the interviews I ever did with players from the team, that was the only one I ended without being able to use any of the recorded material.
It took until June of 2001 for then-general manager Marshall Johnston to trade Yashin to the New York Islanders for the then-unpolished Zdeno Chara, Bill Muckalt and the first-round selection in the 2001 draft, which turned out to be Jason Spezza. Yashin had sat out the entire 1999-2000 season in an effort to extract more money from the team.
By the time of the eventual deal, hockey fans in the nation’s capital were relieved that it had taken place. So was the team’s owner, Rod Bryden. “He asked if I was happy and I said I was”, said Marshall Johnston. “So, he said that if I was happy, then he was happy too.”
One can only imagine how happy Ottawa hockey fans might have been had Randy Sexton accepted the Red Wings’ proposal to send Steve Yzerman, Ray Sheppard and Martin Lapointe to the nation’s capital for one Alexei Yashin back in 1995. Given how well their team did later in the 1990s and the early 2000s, Detroit probably made the right decision to keep their captain.
The Senators made it to the Stanley Cup final series in 2007. And in 2017, they lost in seven games to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the Eastern Conference final series. Other than that, Sens fans have not been allowed to have good things.
In 2025, those fans are hoping to see their team provide the electricity that hasn’t been felt in a few years.
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Howie’s latest book The Consequences of Chance, seventeen new and incredibly detailed stories of outlandish and wild events that occurred in sports over the last fifty years, is available on Amazon. It’s the follow-up to his first books, Crazy Days & Wild Nights and MORE Crazy Days & Wild Nights! If you love sports and sports history, you need these books!
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