“John MacLean! Can you outplay that guy?”
“Scott Stevens! Can you outplay that guy?”
And the Red Wings roster was stacked with future Hall of Fame players with names like Sergei Fedorov, Paul Coffey, Vyacheslav Kozlov, Nicklas Lidstrom and Steve Yzerman.
“Claude Lemieux! Can you outplay that guy?”
“Neal Broten! Can you outplay that guy?”
Lemaire went around the room, and the mood began to shift.
“I remember of couple of us whispering and going, ‘man, we might be better,’” Daneyko smiled remembering. “And that’s what Jaques wanted. He wanted to make sure that we weren’t taking a back seat to anybody.”
The Devils started to think that not only could they outplay those individuals, but as a collective, they were the better team.
“(Lemaire) wanted to make sure every guy in that room understood that we’re as good as them as a team,” Daneyko said. “They might have an individual or two that’s better in certain areas. But as a group, as a team, we were there for a reason. That we could play with them and beat them.
“And the rest is history.”
The Devils turned the script on the entire hockey world and defeated the mighty Detroit Red Wings by sweeping them in four games to capture the franchise’s first Stanley Cup title.
It was a feat that no one thought possible. No one, except every player in the Devils' locker room that is. Thanks in part to a psychological ploy by their head coach.
“That was genius. There’s always a method to the madness for certain coaches,” Daneyko said. “I remember a couple guys after that meeting saying, ‘Wow, he might be right. We might be better than the Red Wings!’ And we proved it.”