Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (7 page)

“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
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DETROIT, MICHIGAN

T
hey 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.

“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
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T
ucked 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: