A lot of you came to this team in the Datsyuk and Zetterberg years or even later, and that's wonderful, that's the team handing itself down the way it should. But I want to take a minute on a name some of you only know as a banner, because the bones of this whole franchise were set long before the Russian Five.
The Production Line. Howe, Lindsay, Abel. Gordie Howe on the right, Ted Lindsay on the left, Sid Abel in the middle. They led the league in scoring as a unit, they were nasty and brilliant in equal measure, and they are the reason Detroit became a hockey town in the first place, before the wheel meant anything to the rest of the country. Lindsay is the man who founded the players association and got blackballed for it, the toughest decent man this game ever produced. Howe is, well, Howe.
I'm not asking for worship. I'm asking the younger crowd what you actually know about the pre 1990s history of this club, and whether any of it gets passed down to you, or whether the rebuild and the Datsyuk years are where your sense of the team begins. No wrong answer. I'm just an old man curious where the memory ends.
honest answer gordie my sense of the team starts at like the 2008 cup because that's the first one i was old enough to really remember. i know the names howe lindsay abel and i know they're sacred but i'd be lying if i said i knew the actual hockey. threads like this are how it gets passed down though. keep telling them. we're listening even when we don't post.
Bless you for writing this, Gordie. The Ted Lindsay part is the one I beg the young folks to actually look up. Terrible Ted got himself frozen out of the league he made better because he had the nerve to organize players who were being treated like cattle. The man has a trophy named after him now, voted by the players, which is the most fitting revenge in sports history. You want to understand the soul of this franchise, you start with a left winger who'd fight anyone on the ice and fight the owners off it. That's Detroit hockey.
I'll be honest from the analytics generation: most of my real knowledge starts in the late 90s and everything before is more legend than lived memory for me. But I think that's exactly why threads like this matter. A franchise's history only survives if the old guard actively hands it down, because it isn't on the highlight reels we grew up on. Howe is a number on a banner to me in a way he clearly isn't to you, and the only fix for that is you telling the stories. So please keep telling them. The memory ends wherever the storytellers stop.
real talk my knowledge of pre datsyuk history is like 70 percent stuff i learned from threads exactly like this one 😅 the production line, terrible ted, the russian five, the konstantinov stuff. none of it was on the tv i grew up on. the old heads on this board are basically the oral tradition keeping it alive. respect to the elders fr 🫡
at least you kids are asking. that's more than most. my fear isn't that you don't know howe, it's that the league itself has scrubbed the toughness and the soul that made guys like lindsay matter. you can learn the names. you can't get back the era. but learning the names is how you keep from repeating the mistake of thinking the team started the day you started watching. good on you for listening.
the line that's going to stay with me is the memory ends wherever the storytellers stop. that's the whole reason this board matters more than the score on any given tuesday. we are literally the mechanism by which a 12 year old who just picked this team learns who ted lindsay was. gordie and otto you're not old men yelling at clouds, you're the archive. don't you dare stop.
Well now you've gone and made an old man's eyes water before lunch. That's all I needed to hear, kid. Not worship, just listening. The names will survive if you keep asking and we keep telling, and a hundred years from now some young Wings fan will know who Ted Lindsay was because of a forum thread on a quiet day in June. That's how a town stays a hockey town. Through the long offseasons, by remembering out loud. Thank you all.