Good morning, Detroit

Good morning, Insiders, good morning, Detroit, and good evening to you, wonderful Joe Louis Arena.

The Joe is not a modern building. This isn’t meant as a rip – several players spoke endearingly of this yesterday – but there is a familiar smell when you walk inside The Joe. It is not the same powdered-donuts-and-sugar smell that permeates through the XCel Energy Center. Did you think Anaheim’s old scoreboard was out of date? It was a vision of the future compared to the one still hanging in Detroit. It may not lack the modern amenities such as “a viable working press box that features enough space for broadcasters to sit down,” but it does allow those covering a hockey game to feel as though they are actually at a game, and not 100% separated by a partitioned work area away from those who paid to enter.

In the mid-to-late 1990’s and early 2000’s, Detroit represented the apex of the league’s competitive hierarchy. There was also Dallas, and Colorado and New Jersey, but those franchises were simply a platform that held up the Red Wings’ success at the top of the league’s pyramid. It was a special time and place if you were a hockey fan in the state of Michigan, where it was practically impossible to not support the Wings. It was somewhat similar to being a Lakers fan around the same time; for many, you got through the regular season, and then everyone was on board in the playoffs. I remember my freshman year in Ann Arbor in 1999-00, the first of two hockey seasons that culminated with a Kings-Wings series. I had tickets to Game 2 but did not have a car to drive downtown; I asked Brett, a Grand Rapids native and the only Michigander on my hall who had a car if he would go, and with a pure unadulterated joy (and about 13 exuberant words that would get him cornfielded from LAKI) he agreed to, and we headed east on I-94 towards one of the several forgettable playoff games the Kings played in the building over that two-year stretch. (I was also at Game 2 in 2001, but not Game 5, the major turning point in that memorable series.) There was a suffocating intimidation of playing that team and being a part of that crowd as a visiting fan in 2000 and 2001. Even today, Joe Louis Arena is still among the loudest buildings in the league.

Beyond the Red Wings, there were College Hockey at The Joe nights, CCHA Super 6 tournaments – both Alec Martinez and Jeff Zatkoff appeared for Miami University in the now defunct conference’s tournament – and Great Lakes Invitational games, which Martinez and Matt Greene and many others who grew up in Michigan attended, games that regularly drew crowds that nearly matched those of the Red Wings. I’ve already spoken with several players and Helene Elliott about this, but there were fond memories shared of playing in (and covering) youth, college and NHL games at Joe Louis Arena, and a nine-year-old Martinez, who grew up in nearby Rochester Hills, was in the building when Detroit completed its sweep of Philadelphia in 1997 and paraded the Stanley Cup around the ice.

Next year, the Joe will give way to Little Caesars Arena, a rink that doesn’t have the same ring to it but should still be a beautiful new building in the league.

Enough sentimentality. After deicing during a snowstorm in Buffalo, we landed at Detroit-Metro just before sunset on Wednesday.

We commuted against traffic amidst low-teen temperatures toward our downtown hotel, and after rising this morning I learned that it was eight degrees, Fahrenheit.

That’s it for now, Insiders. There’s lots more to come from the Joe, where we should see an interesting game between a Kings team looking to bounce back from Tuesday’s game and a Wings team that lost 4-1 to the Coyotes that same evening. I’ll probably have a little bit more from Dean, and as noted, recollections of Joe Louis Arena from the Michigan contingent on Los Angeles’ roster. Let’s talk soon, Insiders.