Tom Chorske remembers Saturday, June 24, 1995, like it was yesterday. The celebration continued through Sunday morning.
Hours earlier at the Continental Airlines Arena in East Rutherford, New Jersey, the NHL Devils won their first of what would be three Stanley Cup championships in nine seasons.
Just a year before, and just across the Hudson River separating New York and the Garden State, an electrified Madison Square Garden saw the hometown New York Rangers clinch their own first Stanley Cup title in 54 years.
Now, after 13 seasons skating in the Meadowlands, following a relocation in 1982 after skating as the Colorado Rockies, the New Jersey Devils were on even terms with New York for hockey bragging rights in the metropolitan area.
“The Devils had a party scheduled for the team at a nearby hotel. We had some beers in the locker room. That was it,” Chorske, who had just completed his fourth season in New Jersey, told The Epoch Times on Wednesday during a phone conversation from his home in Minnesota.
Once interviews were completed, photos snapped, and TV cameras packed away in the arena, Chorske recalls that his teammates kept the celebration of being “Kings of the NHL” going at a local, more private watering hole in nearby Verona, New Jersey, close to where a majority of the players resided in the Township of West Orange.
Arriving at the Verona Inn on Bloomfield Avenue, according to Chorske, who was a top draft selection a decade earlier by the Montreal Canadiens, it was handshakes and hugs all around.
Chorske and his Devils teammates “came through the front door at around 2 a.m. and left around 7 a.m. My wife Kristie had a house down the Jersey shore, so we ended up there after my teammates started leaving for their homes,” he said.
Much of the credit for the Devils’ first of what would be five appearances in a Stanley Cup Final goes to Hockey Hall of Famer Lou Lamoriello. Joining the club for the 1987 season, Lamoriello rebuilt the Devils’ franchise, which at the time wasn’t among the most competitive teams on the ice, into champions. It was Lamoriello, as general manager, who drafted goalie Martin Brodeur in 1990, who would go on to anchor the team for 21 seasons.
Upon retiring in 2015, Brodeur had more wins (691) and shutouts (125) than any goalie in NHL history. Lamoriello stuck with defenseman Ken Daneyko throughout his rebuild of rosters. Across 20 seasons with New Jersey, Daneyko remained a stalwart for all three Devils’ Stanley Cup champions.
Chorske remembers his teammates of 30 years back as being a close unit. He is also quick to give thanks to many who assisted in his growth as a player, after arriving in a trade from Montreal with Stéphane Richer.
“Our team just kept getting better. Scott Stevens came over a year before me. Daneyko handled our team so well. The coaching was so impressive. Jacques Lemaire and his assistant Larry Robinson kept us focused all season long. John MacLean added so much leadership.”
As Chorske recalls skating home games in the vastness of New Jersey’s wetlands 12 miles from downtown Manhattan, the Devils, as he remembers, were so far down in a sports market food chain cluttered with the New York Rangers, NBA’s Knicks, and MLB’s Yankees and the Mets, that his team was seen by some as minor league.
“Winning the Stanley Cup put the Devils on the New York–New Jersey sports map,” said Chorske, who last visited the Devils’ current home in Newark, New Jersey, in March 2015, for the championship team’s 20th anniversary.
The Devils’ championship season in the spring of 1995 almost didn’t happen. The 1994–1995 season, the NHL’s 78th year, was put on hold until Jan. 20. The normal 82-game schedule was reduced to 48 games. A lockout involving the teams’ owners and the National Hockey League Players’ Association delayed the start of the regular season, traditionally in October.
Later this month, on Jan. 27, when MacLean becomes the fourth name added to the Devils’ Ring of Honor inside New Jersey’s Prudential Center, Chorske plans to be in attendance in support of his former teammate.
“During our 20th reunion, I focused on seeing people, many of whom I hadn’t been around for years. That was fun. Coming back to New Jersey and seeing [John] honored, I think it will be just as fulfilling. Teammates walk together forever.”
After the magic of sharing in a championship with the Devils, Chorske went on to skate in seven more NHL seasons with five teams before retiring as a player in 2001. He went on to work in sports media as the analyst on Devils’ radio broadcasts during the 2006–2007 NHL season, as well as on TV supplying his hockey expertise during college games and for the Minnesota Wild on FOX Sports North.
As someone the Canadiens shipped to New Jersey, seen as a “project” for Lamoriello and his staff to figure out, Chorske proved to be NHL-worthy. When speaking at banquets or other public invitations, Chorkse is only too eager to put on his Stanley Cup ring for others to admire.
The ring is a reminder of what hockey’s ultimate reward is for a job well done, in this case for one remembered season in the Garden State.
