The Grind Line

The Gears That Powered the Detroit Red Wings to the Summit

By the author of the award-winning best-seller, The Russian Five.

The Grind Line is one of the most successful units in hockey history, and without peer among so-called fourth lines, for those who insist on numbering them.

Kris Draper, flanked by Kirk Maltby and Joe Kocur, and later Darren McCarty, deserve their rightful place in Detroit shoulder-to-shoulder with the Production Line, the most famous forward unit in National Hockey League history: Gordie Howe and Ted Lindsay alongside Sid Abel, and later Alex Delvecchio, four men whose numbers hang from the rafters at Little Caesers Arena.

This book argues, and has the receipts to prove it, that the Grind Line was every bit as important in its era as the Production Line was in the dynastic 1950s.

"Those four guys, they made all the difference," says Scotty Bowman, the Hockey Hall of Fame coach who wrote the foreword to this book.

©2025 Keith Gave (P)2025 Keith Gave