Maybe you remember better than me, but the Penguins won in 5, taking the first three games by a combined score of 17-6. Lemaire wasn't even their coach yet. It was Herb Brooks.
The 1995 suffocating of the Pens was a much different story.
Yeah, the Lemaire-inspired DPE style was still a couple years off.
I went back and looked at a few articles from back then; here's a quote from a Cook article after the Devils won Game 4: ". . . .Penguins will tell you the Devils' secret was a blatant disregard of the rules. "To put it bluntly, Mario pretty much got raped out there," Peter Taglianetti said. "that's not what hockey's all about. It doesn't take a lot of talent to jump on a guy and hold him." Lemieux was especially angered by a sequence of second period confrontations with John MacLean. Twice, MacLean appeared to throw Lemieux to the ice. Lemieux looked to referee Mark Faucette, his expression begging for a penalty call. That didn't come until MacLean and Lemieux went down in a heap a third time. Faucette sent them both to the box. Lemieux was uncharacteristically livid. Ron Francis had to keep him from going after Faucette. "It was a matter of MacLean tackling me twice." Lemieux said. "Then, on the third one, we went down together. To me, it was obvious I wasn't the instigator on that one."
Contemporaneous articles talk about how close the last three games were (Pens had to come from behind in Period 3/Game 5), and Brooks talked about how hard the Devils played. There was definitely a complacency factor on the Pens' side and probably a let down from the end of the season and multi-season playoff win streaks also. When you read about the Isles' series, that combination of malaise and "tight checking" from the Isles carried over into the first several games, especially with Mario in and out and the Isles playing without Turgeon.
Cool reading about Deon Figures and Alex Van Pelt bracketing the Steelers' draft that year, plus the Steelers working to get rid of Bubby Brister (and people complain about Ben! Best part of the draft was the Rams taking Bettis at 10, so we essentially just deferred our second first round pick that year)
