Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  As for Sakic’s second goal—in which he flew down the same side, curled, set Stevens in place as if he were more ice auger than defenceman, stepped into the clearing and blasted a quick shot to Brodeur’s stick side, well …

  “I really don’t know what happened.”

  Perhaps it is better, then, that we do the talking for him. Sakic, an amazed New Jersey coach Larry Robinson said when it was over, could have played the game carrying “eggs in his pants” for all his Devils were able to do to catch him. And Ray Bourque, Sakic’s relatively new teammate who played so many years for Boston, suggested that once Sakic gets his full speed up with the puck, even a defenceman of Scott Stevens’s stature is helpless.

  “If you miss,” said Bourque, “forget it.”

  But there is so much more to Joe Sakic’s season than this one night. He might win all four trophies. He will almost certainly win the Hart as the clear MVP of the entire league. He already came second in both the race for that Art Ross Trophy that went to the top point getter (Pittsburgh’s Jaromir Jagr) and the Rocket Richard Trophy that went to the top goal scorer (Florida’s Pavel Bure).

  Joe Sakic is thirty-one years old. He has spent his entire career with this organization, dating back to when the Avalanche were the Quebec Nordiques. He had been a junior sensation with the Swift Current Broncos but, likely because of his slight size, was not even the Nordiques’ first choice in 1987, his draft year. They took Bryan Fogarty, who never worked out, first (ninth overall), and on their next choice—after such names as Wayne McBean, Jayson Moore, Yves Racine, Keith Osborne and Dean Chynoweth had been called out by other teams—they went for the quick little centre from Western Canada with the fifteenth overall pick.

  Thirteen NHL seasons later and Sakic is numbered among the very best players in the league, with an impressive 1,178 points (including 457 goals) in his 934 regular season games played. His playoff performance is equally impressive, his 53 goals (and counting) the most any NHLer has scored over the past decade.

  Yet if he fails to get the public and media attention that such numbers demand, it cannot be said that he has passed unnoticed in hockey. He was, with Mario Lemieux, the most obvious among the first eight chosen to represent Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics. It has not been forgotten that, had Sakic not been injured in Nagano in 1998, there might have been no need of a shootout.

  The New York Rangers certainly noticed his worth a few years back when they tried to lure the then-restricted free agent away from Colorado with an offer sheet that forced the Avalanche to match and, for one season, made Joe Sakic hockey’s only $17-million-a-year man. Sakic’s financial value is of increasing interest in hockey circles, for on July 1 he will become an unrestricted free agent, able to choose wherever he wishes to play. He missed full agency by a mere six days last year and elected to sign a one-year deal for $7.9 million in order to be entirely free this summer.

  The Avalanche, however, will do what they can to keep their captain. The franchise is extremely rich and already pays teammate—and fellow former Quebec Nordique—Peter Forsberg $10 million a year. The gathered media wanted to talk about that yesterday afternoon. About that contract and free agency and what he would make and where he would want to play and …

  “I haven’t thought too much about it,” he said.

  It sounded much the same as the Joe Sakic of 1996, who was asked how he thought hockey fans regarded him. “I … don’t know,” he stammered. “I guess they can see for themselves on the ice—just a guy who works hard out there.”

  And gets the job done.

  The next year, Sakic was a pivotal player in Team Canada’s Olympic gold medal victory at the Salt Lake City Winter Games, where he was named tournament MVP. He played several more years but back issues finally forced retirement in 2009. He played 1,378 games, scoring 625 goals and 1,016 assists. He won the Stanley Cup twice, the Conn Smythe, the Hart as the league’s most valuable player and the Lady Byng as the league’s most gentlemanly. Today, Sakic works for the Avalanche in an executive capacity.

  THE LONG JOURNEY FROM DOUBT TO BELIEF: STEVE YZERMAN

  (National Post, June 14, 2002)

  DETROIT, MICHIGAN

  They are known, as well, by the way they come and go. At the rear entrance to the Joe Louis Arena, the diehard fans with their disposable cameras and autograph binders wait in a small red-and-white cluster at the point where the Red Wings players leave following the final practice before what these fans, and the players, trust will be the final game of the 2002 Stanley Cup playoffs.

  Chris Chelios and Brett Hull travel together in a thirty-year-old black Cadillac convertible, roof down, enjoying the spotlight and the cheers even if refusing to acknowledge their adoring fans. Young Russian Pavel Datsyuk stops his dark Mercedes and happily signs a few caps and jersey backs. Popular forward Darren McCarty stops his big SUV and signs his name and poses for photographs for as long as it takes, the lineup to get out of the players’ parking lot growing ever longer and ever more impatient.

  One of those stuck in the lineup is team captain Steve Yzerman. He sits, in a black Yukon behind darkly tinted glass, with his back oddly turned to the window and his stare self-consciously averted. He looks much more like a waiting getaway driver in a bank holdup than the sentimental favourite to win his second Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the playoffs. If the Wings were to have defeated the Carolina Hurricanes in Game 5 last night, the Smythe was expected to go him or to defenceman Nicklas Lidstrom, who has also performed brilliantly this spring for Detroit.

  Some of the players who blow by the diehards are lightly booed if they fail to slow or even acknowledge the fans’ presence. But not Yzerman. He sees his opening, stares straight down at the road ahead, turns even more away from them and guns his vehicle out onto the main road—and still they cheer and shout his name.

  To them, that’s just the way Steve Yzerman is.

  There was a time, only a few years ago, when he would disguise himself as he moved about the city. Dark glasses, hat pulled down. At one point, in late 1997, he even admitted that “the last five years I didn’t want to be recognized.” But that was before the one they call “Stevie Y” finally came true. Before the Stanley Cup victories in 1997 and 1998, before he won his first Conn Smythe in 1998 and later added such honours as the 2000 Selke Trophy as the league’s best defensive forward, and before Salt Lake City, where he may well have been the best player on the ice this spring when Canada won the Olympic gold medal.

  After nineteen years in the same Red Wings uniform, no one doubts Yzerman anymore. He has his Stanley Cup rings, the Olympic gold medal, the Hall of Fame is a lock—and yet he is still essentially the same shy, unfailingly polite, introspective young man who came out of Nepean, Ontario, two decades ago and discovered there was precious little recognition to go around in hockey after Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux had taken their fair share.

  It has been a long journey. His has gone from the twenty-one-year-old captain who seemed and acted too young to hold authority to one whose leadership today is lauded. He has gone from sixty-five-goal seasons and incredible scoring feats—“They were so long ago now I don’t even remember them”—to being known as much for his checking as for his scoring. “It just never got noticed until I stopped scoring,” he once said rather ruefully.

  He has gone from the fresh-faced eighteen-year-old who broke in in ’83 to a veteran who hobbles between games on a right knee so damaged it very nearly kept him out of the Olympics and will almost certainly require surgery in the off-season. It is, today, hard to believe that for years after Scotty Bowman came here in 1993, the Detroit coach was not a great believer in Yzerman, whom he regarded as somewhat one-dimensional. He fell out of favour. He was, at one time, on the verge of being shipped off to the Ottawa Senators, where it was presumed he would quickly live out his career and soon be gone. He was seen, then, as a brilliant player who could not quite deliver, the Stanley Cup just slightly beyond his grasp.

&nb
sp; “A guy like Yzerman,” former Montreal Canadiens general manager Serge Savard once said, “he’s never won anything.”

  Always there were doubts. He was twice cut from Canada Cup lineups and had even reached a point where he wondered himself if he was a winner. After that first Stanley Cup win five years ago he admitted, “I don’t have to battle other people’s doubts, or even my doubts, for that matter.” The new confidence changed him. He ceased having problems with Bowman as if, at last, each understood the other—though there may, in fact, be no understanding to be had for Bowman’s coaching genius.

  “How to get along with him,” Yzerman said earlier this week, “is to show up, work hard, and keep your mouth shut.” And then he paused, thinking to add one more critical point: “And play well defensively.”

  He is thirty-seven now, and while some have suggested the wonky knee may mean the Hall of Fame will come earlier than expected, others are convinced he has found new life with this late arrival of such success. Three Stanley Cups, after all, are one more than Lemieux, one short of Gretzky—the two figures in whose shadows he has skated all these years.

  “Age,” he now says, “has really become irrelevant in the league. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to be the same team five years from now, but age right now means nothing.”

  In fact, it does mean something significant: experience.

  Injuries began to take a terrible toll on Yzerman. He played but sixteen games in 2002–03, scoring twice. The next year he recovered to 51 points but the following year was lost to the owners’ lockout. He scored 14 goals and 20 assists in 2005–06 and then chose retirement. His 1,755 points left him sixth in all-time scoring and he was the longest-serving captain in NHL history. In 2009, he entered the Hall of Fame and in 2010 was named general manager of the Tampa Bay Lightning.

  SAINT PATRICK OF THE NETS

  (National Post, May 29, 2001)

  Tucked into a corner of Patrick Roy’s locker in the Colorado Avalanche’s suburban practice facility is a small photograph of Bobby Orr in a Chicago Blackhawks uniform. The two Hockey Hall-of-Famers—one ensconced, one on his way—have much in common despite their different eras and different positions, for just as Bobby Orr revolutionized the way defence is played in the modern game, Patrick Roy has done the same for goaltending.

  Where they may part company is in the second uniform. Bobby Orr looks out of sorts out of a Boston Bruins sweater. Patrick Roy—twice a Stanley Cup champion with the Montreal Canadiens, twice winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy as the Habs’ most valuable player in the playoffs—is today almost as familiar in the maroon, blue, grey and white of the Avalanche as he once was in the red, white and blue of Les Glorieux.

  It is now nearly six years since that fall evening in 1995 when the Detroit Red Wings trounced the Canadiens 11–1 and a furious Roy announced that “I’ve played my last game in Montreal” when coach Mario Tremblay finally relented and pulled him off the ice. But time is only part of the story. In the years since, Patrick Roy has delivered one Stanley Cup almost immediately to the Avalanche, and is three victories away from a second. He is, once again, counted among the early favourites for the Conn Smythe. But that too is only part of it.

  At thirty-five, Roy has reached that time of his life when the legacy is cemented. This was the season when, in an Avalanche uniform, he surpassed Terry Sawchuk to become the winningest goaltender in NHL history. He was already the winningest goalie in playoff history, but this spring added most playoff shutouts (eighteen and, perhaps, counting) to that record and, heading into tonight’s Game 2 against the New Jersey Devils, stands within reach of a few others:

  A victory tonight and Roy would tie another Hall-of-Famer, Montreal’s Ken Dryden, for the most consecutive wins in final playoff series: eleven.

  Sixteen minutes and eleven seconds without a goal being scored by New Jersey and Roy would slip past Clint Benedict for the longest shutout streak in finals play. Benedict did it with the 1923 Ottawa Senators and extended it with the 1926 Montreal Maroons. Roy hasn’t been scored on in finals play since the first period of Game 3 against the Florida Panthers, way back on June 8, 1996.

  He cannot even remember who it was that beat him (it was Rob Niedermayer). He will not predict when it will happen next. “There’s no rush,” he says.

  It has already been a fascinating spring for Roy. He was, early on, thought to be a problem for the Avalanche, an aging goaltender who had lost his edge, particularly after an opening game loss to the Los Angeles Kings in Round 2. The early criticism was, at times, as strong as the recent praise. “You’re not amused by that,” he says, “but you have no control over that, so you just try to remain focused. I always believed things would turn around.”

  In a way, the entire season has been like this for Roy. In the fall, he was embroiled in a domestic dispute in which charges were eventually dropped. Today, what debate there is around Roy has died down to speculation as to where he would be playing next year and whether or not he would be considered for the Canadian Olympic Team headed for Salt Lake City in early 2002.

  Roy is in the final year of a contract that pays him $7.5 million a year and will become a free agent this summer. Had his inconsistencies not improved, he might have been headed for his third NHL team. Should Colorado win another, the pressure will be on to keep him. Pressure is also suddenly building to include him on the Olympic squad, though it was Roy who allowed the critical goal in the 1998 shootout against the Czech Republic and Roy again who played somewhat listlessly as Canada came up short against Finland in the bronze medal game.

  But the good sense in waiting until the final moment to name the Canadian goaltenders is somewhat apparent this week as New Jersey’s Martin Brodeur looked rather ordinary in Game 1, while Roy sparkled when necessary. It may be that the same three goaltenders from Nagano will be headed for Salt Lake—Roy, Brodeur and Toronto’s Curtis Joseph—with the current “money goalie” the choice to start. And so far, neither of the others have proved to be the money goaltender that Roy so undeniably can be.

  “It’s something that I haven’t thought about, to be honest with you,” he says of the Olympic possibility. “It’s something that I don’t want to think about. I have no control over their selection. The only thing I can control is what’s going on right now.”

  And that, for the moment, is the Devils’ attack, which surely will not be as unimpressive from here on out as it was in Game 1. One NHL coach says that the Devils need to rattle Roy more by making him play the puck behind his net as much as possible. Roy is, by nature, so obsessively competitive, says the coach, that he will not be able to resist going one-on-one against Brodeur, who Roy concedes is the best puck-handling goaltender in the game. “Patrick,” says the coach, “can get out of control.”

  Certainly Roy’s reputation is of a fiery, at times unpredictable, competitor. His mannerisms—the once-novel butterfly style, talking to the goalposts, refusing to skate over the bluelines—made him both noticeable and often controversial right from his very first season in Montreal, and there remains a bit of an edge to him.

  He does not care to be reminded of his inevitable retirement. He says, somewhat curtly, that he has never considered the fact that he could be on the verge of becoming the first goaltender to win Stanley Cups in three different decades. He bristles when someone suggests that he and New Jersey coach Larry Robinson were once teammates in Montreal a long time ago. “Maybe for you,” he says, “but not for me.”

  He does concede, however, that experience, not time, has had its effect on him as a goaltender. “There are things that are different,” he says. “I don’t think I’m as quick as I was then, but experience sometimes will make up for that. I’m still moving pretty good side to side, but I know there are things that I was doing better then than I do now, and there are things that I do now that are better than I was doing then.”

  No matter how it’s done, however, the results seem to remain exactly the same: Patrick Roy
finds a way to win final series. No wonder Colorado coach Bob Hartley calls him “the spine” of the hockey club.

  “Patrick has given us a chance to win every game,” says Hartley. “He’s given us the belief that if we give him the necessary offensive support, he’s going to take care of the rest.”

  Patrick Roy retired in 2003 after a still-remarkable season in which he went 35–15–13 and posted an impressive .920 save percentage. He won four Stanley Cups, three Conn Smythe trophies as the top player of the playoffs and three Vezinas as the NHL’s top goaltender. In 2006 he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. In retirement he became owner and general manager of the Quebec Remparts junior club, taking over the coaching duties and winning yet another championship: the Memorial Cup.

  WITHIN ARM’S REACH: RAY BOURQUE

  (National Post, May 26, 2001)

  DENVER, COLORADO

  Perhaps there should be a statute of limitations on playoff beards.

  Ray Bourque should be excused, for there is something about his snow-dappled chin stubble that makes him look more like a middle-aged executive at the end of a two-week canoe trip than an elite NHL defenceman at the beginning of what he hopes will be the best two weeks of his career.

  Without the stubble Bourque could pass for thirty, a superbly conditioned athlete without an ounce of fat and with a head of hair so thick and water resistant it has been compared to an otter’s pelt. With the stubble he looks more than what he is, forty, and it serves as a prickly underline to the daily sidebar attached to this year’s Stanley Cup final: “Win One for Ray.”

  Raymond Bourque is forty going on forty-one. He is in his twenty-second NHL season. He won the Calder Trophy as the league’s top rookie in his first season and five Norris trophies as the league’s top defenceman in the seasons that followed. He has scored, in that time, a remarkable 410 goals and 1,169 assists for 1,579 regular season points and added another 178 points, and counting, in post-season play. He has played 1,612 regular season games and, this evening against the New Jersey Devils, will dress for his 208th playoff game. He has, however, one small shortcoming in that remarkable record: “I’ve never won my last game.”