In the Friday Grab Bag:
- This week's CBA news was a good thing, but let's not celebrate yet
- I try to stay positive about this year's new rules
- An obscure player with lots of (Scrabble) points
- The month's three comedy stars
- And Survivor contestant Tom Laidlaw pranks the 1991 Kings, a team he was not on
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In the Friday Grab Bag:
- What your pick to win the Stanley Cup says about you
- An appreciation of the Muzzin Spot
- An obscure player who did what Connor McDavid and Alexander Ovechkin did this week
- The week's three comedy stars teach us that math is hard
- And our YouTube clip helps us get caught up on all the big offseason moves... from 1986.
Most of the dust has settled on the first few days of free agency, and a handful of themes have emerged. Fiscal sanity is one, as teams mostly stayed away from the sort of long-term mega-deals that almost always turn out to be mistakes. As always, much of the focus was on veteran defensemen. And the UFAs were largely overshadowed by the extensions being signed by players like Carey Price, Marc-Edouard Vlasic and (any minute now) Connor McDavid.
And then there was the heartwarming storyline that emerged on day one: homecomings. Not only did players like Joe Thornton and T.J. Oshie stay with their current teams, but plenty of guys returned to franchise they'd previously starred with. That list included names like Justin Williams, Mike Cammalleri, Scott Hartnell and Patrick Sharp.
Reunite! Saad, Sharp (CHI); Hartnell, Lindback (NSH); Dadonov (FLA); Pominville, Johnson (BUF); Cammalleri (LA); Moore (TOR); Williams (CAR)
— luke fox (@lukefoxjukebox) July 1, 2017
Bringing back a familiar face makes for a nice storyline, and it's almost always an easy sell for fans. But the NHL has a long history of players using free agency to return to a former team, and results have been mixed. Sometimes it works, sometimes it's a reminder that breakups happen for a reason.
So today, let's look back at five Hall of Fame stars who chose to return to their former team via free agency, and how those deals worked out for both sides.
The exit: After winning the Stanley Cup with the Rangers in 1994, you’d think that Messier would have been able to write his own ticket in New York. But his relationship with the Rangers' front office was always contentious, including a post-Cup holdout in 1994 that reportedly had the team thinking about trading him.
He ended up sticking around, but when free agency arrived in 1997, Messier kept his options open. Despite being widely expected to return to New York, he eventually bolted for the Canucks.
The return: It's fair to say that the Messier era did not go well in Vancouver; the whole thing was a PR disaster form Day 1, with the Rangers' great seeming to do everything short of tear the "C" off Trevor Linden's jersey and shove him onto an ice floe. By the time Messier had been bought out after three disappointing seasons, he stood as one of the most hated Canucks ever.
Meanwhile, the Rangers hadn't made the playoffs since Messier's exit. There wasn't much suspense over where he'd wind up, and he eventually signed a two-year deal, at which point he was immediately handed back the captaincy.
The result: Mixed. Messier had an impressive 67 points in his return to New York despite turning 40 during the season, and he managed to play three more seasons after that. But he never got the Rangers back to the postseason, meaning one of the greatest winners in the sport's history went his last seven seasons without appearing in a single playoff game.
In the Friday Grab Bag:
- The Oilers come up with a brilliant new way to screw over their fans, and I love it
- NHL teams sure love hiring former star players for critical front office jobs
- An obscure player who waited 14 years for his shot at the big leagues
- The week's three comedy stars, including some Phil Kessel payback
- And please rise and remove your caps for the singing of the playoff national anthem
In the Friday grab bag:
- The NHL's unforgivable World Cup mistake
- How to save the trade deadline
- The week's three comedy stars
- A classic Canada Cup clip
- and more...
Last month, it was announced that Sergei Fedorov and Nicklas Lidstrom would be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, in their first year of eligibility, this November. It’s fitting that the two players will go into the hall together since they had a lot in common; both racked up individual honors throughout their careers, both had extensive international experience, and both defied the stereotype of European stars being too flashy by excelling at both ends of the ice.
And, of course, they had one more thing in common: They spent more than a decade as teammates with the Detroit Red Wings in the ’90s and early ’00s. And most important of all, now that they’ve been named to the 2015 Hall of Fame class, they’ve finally earned a seat at the big kids’ table for 2002 Red Wings team reunions. More on that in a second.
We’ll tend to use this feature to highlight teams that were underappreciated or largely forgotten, and it’s hard to make that argument for the 2001-02 Red Wings. After all (spoiler alert), they ended up winning the Stanley Cup. But we’ll make an exception here, because while the ’02 Red Wings were certainly impressive at the time, the lens of history has left them several magnitudes more fun. And it’s becoming apparent that we’ll never see a team quite like them again.
The 2000-01 Red Wings had racked up 111 points, tied for the second-best total in the league. That team was pretty stacked in its own right, with Lidstrom and Fedorov joined by established stars like Steve Yzerman, Brendan Shanahan, Chris Chelios, and Igor Larionov.
The 2001 Wings went into the playoffs as solid favorites over the Kings, who by this point were well into the eminently forgettable Ziggy Palffy era. But after a pair of convincing Detroit wins to start the series, Los Angeles squeaked out four straight one-goal wins to take the series, finishing things off with Adam Deadmarsh’s Game 6 overtime winner against Chris Osgood.
Clearly, a first-round exit for a team with as much talent as the Red Wings was unacceptable. Something had to be done. But what?
Detroit general manager Ken Holland had already been on the job for several seasons and two Stanley Cups (one as GM), so he wasn’t a guy who’d be afraid to come up with a strategy and execute it. In the case of the 2001 offseason, that strategy apparently involved watching a VHS tape of an All-Star Game from the early ’90s and screaming, “Get me all those guys.”
Holland got started in late June, trading Vyacheslav Kozlov and picks to the Buffalo Sabres for legendary goaltender Dominik Hasek. It was a lopsided trade in the Wings’ favor, driven more by the Sabres’ finances and Hasek’s desire to chase a Cup outside of Buffalo than by actual hockey concerns, and Holland took advantage. The acquisition paved the way for Osgood’s exit, as he was picked first overall by the Islanders in the waiver draft.
Days later, Detroit signed Luc Robitaille, who’d been part of the Kings team that had knocked the Wings out of the playoffs months earlier. They followed that up by signing Brett Hull in August, making them the first team in NHL history to have three 500-goal scorers on the roster at the same time. (The three were Hull, Robitaille, and Yzerman; Shanahan would make it four late in the season.)
When all was said and done, the 2002 Red Wings were very, very good. They were also old. Very, very old.
So, so old.
The acquisition of Hull gave the Red Wings a stunning 10 players who’d be 35 or older by the end of the season. And we’re not talking about some grizzled veterans playing supporting roles — virtually all of the team’s top players were ancient. Larionov was already in his forties and Chelios would join him during the season. Hull and Hasek were 37, Yzerman was 36, and Robitaille was 35. Guys like Shanahan, Lidstrom, and Fedorov were considered the team’s youthful core, despite all being well into their thirties.
And it wasn’t just the big names. The 2001-02 Red Wings roster also contains a nice selection of “I forgot he ever played for them” old guys, including Steve Duchesne, Fredrik Olausson, and Uwe Krupp.
You could never build a team like this in today’s NHL; not only would the salary cap make it impossible, but today’s style of play would see all those old guys get eaten alive. But while the 2001-02 Red Wings were still in the middle of the clutch-and-grab era, the game wasn’t that much different, and plenty of people thought Holland was crazy to assemble this many old codgers on one roster and think he could win with them.
Then again, if you’ve got to load up on old guys, they might as well be good ones …
The most surprising move from last week’s trade deadline was the deal that sent Roberto Luongo and his supposedly untradable contract to the Florida Panthers in exchange for goalie Jacob Markstrom and forward Shawn Matthias.
Beyond being a massive shakeup for the Canucks, the trade marks a homecoming for Luongo. While he was drafted and played his rookie season with the New York Islanders, he first established himself as an NHL star over the course of five seasons as a Panther. Now, eight years after the trade that sent him to Vancouver, he finds himself back in Florida, where he’ll presumably finish his career.
That puts him in some pretty good company. More than a few NHL stars have eventually found their way back to teams where they’d made their names to spend their final seasons. Sometimes it worked out great. Sometimes it didn’t.
What does the future hold for Luongo? It’s hard to say, but we can draw some clues from the stories of these eight examples from the NHL history books of stars returning home.
Let’s Never Speak of This Again: Mark Messier and the New York Rangers
First Time Through: Messier was already a star after a decade (and five Cups) in Edmonton, but it was the trade to the Rangers on the eve of the 1991-92 season that transformed him into a league icon. He won the Hart Trophy as MVP in his first season in New York. By 1994, he’d won something even more important.
By the time he reached free agency in 1997, he was pretty much unanimously viewed as the greatest leader in hockey, if not all of sports, and was assumed to be a Ranger for life.
How He Left: The Rangers showed a surprising lack of urgency in retaining their 36-year-old captain, and the Canucks put on a full-court press to lure Messier out of New York and reunite him with coach Mike Keenan. They got their man, signing Messier to a shocking five-year deal that paid him $6 million a season.
Upon arriving in Vancouver, Messier was immediately handed the captaincy at the expense of the popular Trevor Linden. He was also given his trademark no. 11, even though it had been considered unofficially retired since Canucks player Wayne Maki had died of cancer in 1974. Then Messier led the team to a grand total of zero playoff appearances in three seasons.
The Return: Messier’s disastrous stint in Vancouver was cut short when the Canucks bought him out (a move that led to a multimillion-dollar legal battle, which Messier finally won in 2012). The Rangers re-signed him and gave him back the captaincy, at which point he guaranteed he’d lead the team back to the playoffs. He did not, though he did play reasonably effectively for four more years.
The Legacy: Canucks fans hate him. Rangers fans just pretend the whole thing never happened.
A Captain Comes Home: Trevor Linden and the Vancouver Canucks
First Time Through: Linden was the second-overall pick in the 1988 draft, and made his Canucks debut that year as an 18-year-old. He’d spend a decade in Vancouver, earning a reputation as a workhorse and regular 30-goal scorer. In 1991, the 21-year-old became the youngest captain in franchise history, and in 1994 he led the team to within one game of a Stanley Cup.
How He Left: So like I was saying, Canucks fans really, really hate Mark Messier.
After handing his captaincy over the Messier in 1997, Linden lasted just a few more months before a feud with Keenan made his departure inevitable. In February, he was traded to the Islanders for Todd Bertuzzi, Bryan McCabe, and a draft pick.
That was actually a pretty decent haul, as Bertuzzi and McCabe both developed into All-Stars. After giving up that much to get him, the Islanders got one full season out of Linden before flipping him to the Canadiens for a draft pick that turned out to be Branislav Mezei because, hey, Mike Milbury. Linden lasted less than a year in Montreal before another trade sent him to Washington.
The Return: In November, 2001, the Capitals dealt Linden back to Vancouver for draft picks. He’d play six more years as a Canuck before retiring in 2008 as the franchise’s all-time leader in games played. His final game in Vancouver featured a lengthy standing ovation, after which Flames captain Jarome Iginla led his team over to shake Linden’s hand in a show of respect.
The Legacy: Seriously, tell the next Canucks fan you see that you think Mark Messier was a better leader than Trevor Linden. You’ll be on fire before you hit the floor.
>> Read the full post on Grantland
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