Detroit Red Wings: Top 10 toughest players of all-time

8. Brendan Shanahan

Averaging about 1.63 penalty minutes a game, there is no questioning Brendan Shanahan‘s toughness. The Hockey Hall-of-Famer spent nine years with the Detroit Red Wings, accumulating three Stanley Cups and countless memories. The memories Shanahan implemented in people’s minds were both his craftiness with the puck and his physical play.

Before arriving to the Red Wings during the 1996-97 season, he spent nine seasons with othe teams. This included the St. Louis Blues (four seasons), New Jersey Devils (four seasons) and Hartford Whalers (one season).

In all of those seasons, Shanahan registered over 100 penalty minutes and over 25 points per season. So when the Red Wings acquired him, they got not only a point-producing winger but a physical one as well.

As a member of the Detroit Red Wings, Shanahan found immediate success both individually and as a team. In his first regular season with the Wings, he played 79 games, scored 46 goals, registered 41 assists and clocked 131 penalty minutes. Going into the playoffs, Shanahan remained hot, playing a flawless two-way game, helping the Wings win their first cup since 1955.

The rest of his career in Detroit was just as successful as his first season with them. In 1998 and 2002, Brendan won two more Stanley Cups with the Wings, accumulating a total of three Stanley Cup wins in nine seasons in Detroit.

Winning the Stanley Cup three times did not come easy. Shanahan had to fight for it, literally. His fight card includes heavyweights such as Bob Probert, Matthew Barnaby, Marty McSorley, Jim Cummins and Adam Foote. The most memorable scrap that Shanahan was involved in was on March 26, 1997, when the Detroit Red Wings took on the Colorado Avalanche.

After taking an absolutely idiotic cheap shot on Draper, Claude Lemieux of the Avalanche knew he was a walking dead man going into Hockeytown. In the opening minutes of the game, Darren McCarty, the Red Wings enforcer at the time, went after him. As McCarty was pummeling on Lemieux, Colorado’s goaltender Patrick Roy tried to blindside tackle him.  As Roy skated over to the fight, he was joined along by Avalanche defenseman Adam Foote who had the same idea in mind.

Before the two players could even make it over to the scrum, they were absolutely leveled by Shanahan. He took out the two with a single body check. After laying the two Avalanche players out, Shanahan exchanged punches with both Roy and Foote. The goalie broke off soon after to go after the Red Wings goaltender, Mike Vernon. In the meantime, Shanahan fed Adam Foote haymakers, absolutely clobbering him.

This moment defines his tenure in Detroit. The brawl showed that Shanahan was a team-first player in the essence that he contributed offensively, defensively and physically. Playing over 1,000 games in the NHL and averaging 1.6 penalty minutes a game is no simple feat. It takes grit. And Shanahan, without a doubt, had the toughness and grit to make him one of the toughest Wings in history.