1. 09 Wings
2. 01 Devils
rest doesn't matter. that 09 detroit team was incredible.
'09 Wings are a real curates egg. Regular season was underwhelming. We were
terrible defensively, I mean truly atrocious. Made worse by the fact Osgood couldn't stop a beach ball. Luckily we had a monster offense which bailed us out night after night. Every game we were either blowing a 2 goal lead in the 3rd period, or coming back from a 2 goal deficit in the 3rd.
Then come the playoffs Osgood went into '08 beast mode. We swept the BJs in round 1, 75% of which was down to Ozzie.
2nd round was the war against the Ducks. Every Wings player involved in that series said it was the toughest series they ever played in.
3rd round we beat Chicago 4-1, but 3 games went to OT, Brian Campbell was like a 4th forward for us, and they weren't really ready to beat a proper team in the playoffs yet.
So onto the finals with Pittsburgh by which point we were crippled with injuries.
Lidstrom - emergency surgery to quite literally save his testicles. Missed 1 game and came back
Ericsson - emergency appendectomy. Missed one game and came back.
Rafalski - separated shoulder
and herniated disk
Datsyuk - broken foot. Missed first 4 games of finals, came back as soon as the swelling had gone down enough to get a skate on
Cleary - Double groin tear. Couldn't walk up stairs, but carried on playing.
Lilja - out with concussion
Kopecky - out with broken cheekbone (no loss mind
)
Hossa - torn rotator cuff. Had off-season surgery and missed first 3 months of following season.
Holmstrom - no specific injury but so beaten up he talked about retiring, said he didn't think he could put his body through that again.
We got outplayed the first 2 games of the finals, but thankfully we had Fleury in net to give us a 2-0 lead. How we took that series to 7 games I have no idea, we only played well in one of them. That whole playoff run was based on Ozzie's goaltending and heart, grit and will from the players.
TL;DR - the team looked good on paper but never actually played that well.