Description
Professional hockey was a vast wasteland in Detroit through much of the 1970s and into the 1980s. Between the 1966-67 season and the 1985-86 campaign, the Red Wings played in a grand total of four playoff series, winning one of them.
Things were in the process of changing, though. Steve Yzerman was taken in the first round of the 1983 NHL entry draft, the same year that the Wings also tabbed two other prominent figures for the team over the next decade, Bob Probert and Joe Kocur. The Bruise Brothers.
Probert and Kocur. Kocur and Probert. It didn’t mater in which order they arrives, you didn’t want to catch either end of this doubleheader. Two of the most prominent heavyweights in National Hockey League history, Kocur led the NHL with a Detroit club-record 377 penalty minutes as a rookie in 1985–86, becoming the first Detroit rookie to ever lead the league in this department. Two years later, Probert garnered 398 minutes of sit-down time in the penalty box, shattering Kocur’s team mark and also leading the NHL.
Kocur may have possessed the hardest punch in hockey history, assembling a string of knockout victories that compared to Mike Tyson’s run of fistic dominance. Probert was more about durability. The Energizer Bunny of tough guys, Probert just kept throwing and throwing and throwing, long after his opponent had run out of gas.
Beyond their pugilistic prowess, both Probert and Kocur were solid hockey players who could perform effectively in roles other than that of an enforcer. During the 1987–88 season, Probert scored 29 goals skating on Detroit’s top forward line alongside Yzerman and Gerard Gallant and was selected to play in the NHL All-Star Game. During his career, he was a two-time 20-goal scorer.
Kocur left the Red Wings in 1991, won a Stanley Cup with the New York Rangers in 1993–94, then made a triumphant return to Detroit during the 1996–97 season. Skating on Detroit’s checking unit, the Grind Line along with Kris Draper and Kirk Maltby, Kocur helped the Wings to a pair of Stanley Cups.
To this day, they remain legendary cult heroes in Detroit, two Motor City icons who helped put Hockeytown back on the map.
