Joe Louis Arena - Usage By The Red Wings

Usage By The Red Wings

The Detroit Red Wings played their first game at Joe Louis Arena on December 27, 1979, hosting the St. Louis Blues. Later that first season it hosted the 32nd NHL All-Star Game on February 5, 1980, which was played before a then-NHL record crowd of 21,002. The event was made memorable when Gordie Howe of the Hartford Whalers was introduced on the Wales Conference line-up and received a ten-minute standing ovation. The 51-year-old Howe had played 25 years in Detroit and at the time was the NHL's all-time leading scorer. Joe Louis Arena was the site of the 1987 NHL Entry Draft, which marked the first NHL Entry Draft to be held in the United States.

The Red Wings have been very successful since the move to Joe Louis Arena, winning four Stanley Cup championships (with two of them, 1997 and 2002, taking place with the Cup clinching victory at home), and playing in two additional Stanley Cup Finals, in 1995 against the New Jersey Devils and in 2009 against the Pittsburgh Penguins.

A new television screen on the scoreboard was installed and debuted November 22, 2006, when the Red Wings played the Vancouver Canucks. That same day, the arena's West Entrance was named the "Gordie Howe Entrance" in honor of the legendary Red Wing player, and a bronze statue of Howe was placed inside the entrance. Those four LED video screens replaced four Sony JumboTron videowalls which had been installed in 1993, resulting in the relocation of the color matrixboards, which had originally been installed along with the scoreboard in 1990, to the corners of the fascia where they remain. The White Way Sign scoreboard, in turn, replaced an American Sign and Indicator scoreboard with a black-and-white matrix screen, similar to one at Cobo Arena, which had been installed when Joe Louis Arena was built.