Bob Pulford is aware that the Blackhawks’ recent six-game undefeated streak wasn’t the magnetic force primarily responsible for pulling a standing-room-only crowd of 22,135 through the gates of the United Center when the Pittsburgh Penguins made their only appearance of the season last month.
“Mario Lemieux is what you call a superstar,” the Hawks’ senior vice president said. “When he comes into your building, people will come to see him.”
As the NHL prepares for Sunday’s All-Star Game in Denver, it is reveling in the sold-out buildings and renewed interest Lemieux’s return to the game has sparked in the last month. Since he came out of retirement Dec. 27, he has 16 goals and 16 assists in 16 games.
He has reclaimed his position as the NHL’s No. 1 attraction, a role he inherited from Wayne Gretzky.
But without him, where would the NHL be as it tries to reinforce its presence? And because Lemieux is 35, the NHL will be looking for another marquee attraction again soon.
There is no shortage of quality talent, most notably Jaromir Jagr, Lemieux’s teammate. St. Louis’ Chris Pronger, the reigning most valuable player, and Los Angeles’ Rob Blake attract attention, but they are not surpassing talents. Colorado goaltender Patrick Roy often is considered the best at the NHL’s glamor position. Colorado’s Joe Sakic and Dallas’ Brett Hull also are popular figures.
When Lemieux retired after the 1996-97 season, Jagr, his linemate from the Czech Republic, was considered his heir apparent. He acted accordingly, leading the league in scoring the last three seasons and leading some to declare him the best player in the world.
“Jagr is a much better all-around player [than Lemieux],” said Washington’s Olaf Kolzig, who last season earned the Vezina Trophy as the NHL’s best goaltender.
But is Jagr or anyone else a superstar who transcends the sport? In its history, the NHL has had only a few.
Pulford, who has been in the NHL as a player, coach or executive since the 1950s, has seen some of the best.
“The Rocket, Maurice Richard, was the first superstar I saw,” he recalled. “Then Gordie Howe, and to a certain degree Jean Beliveau. Bobby Hull was certainly a superstar–he had that charisma and people wanted to see him. After Hull there was Bobby Orr and Guy Lafleur and Wayne Gretzky and then Mario Lemieux. All those guys could put people in a building.
“A lot of people hoped that after Lemieux, Eric Lindros would be the guy because of his size and how he played. But he never really took over. Other than Lemieux, I don’t see anybody with that superstar ability. I see players who have a lot of ability, but I don’t see players with that charisma, the kind of stars we used to see.”Lemieux and Jagr are the marquee names in Sunday’s All-Star Game, and the plot calls for them to be adversaries. Lemieux will be playing for the North American All-Stars and Jagr for the World All-Stars, who would be more aptly identified as the European All-Stars.
Colorado boasts the best record in the NHL at the All-Star break. The Avalanche has three players on the North American team–goaltender Roy, center Sakic and defenseman Ray Bourque–and has center Peter Forsberg on the World team.
Roy, who has more victories than any other goaltender in NHL history, and Bourque, who is making his 19th consecutive All-Star appearance, are Hall of Famers in waiting. Sakic is leading the league in scoring, and Forsberg is making $10 million a year, joining Anaheim’s Paul Kariya as the highest-paid players in hockey.
But none has generated the non-stop hype that Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter and Allen Iverson command in the NBA, which lost a one-of-a-kind superstar when Michael Jordan retired three years ago.
Several factors make it difficult for the NHL’s best players to develop the star quality comparable to that of their counterparts in basketball and baseball, the two other major sports that have franchises in the U.S. and Canada.
Richard, Beliveau and Lafleur had a built-in identity as members of the Montreal Canadiens. They were “the Flying Frenchmen,” heirs to the great hockey tradition of Canada’s French-speaking province of Quebec. Conversely, Howe was the best player to come out of western Canada and he was in the forefront when the Detroit Red Wings battled Montreal and Toronto for NHL supremacy.
In Chicago, Hull, the “Golden Jet,” was a precursor to Jordan as a dynamic, crowd-pleasing offensive player. His departure for the World Hockey Association left a void that took more than a decade to fill.
Orr revolutionized the game as the prototypical offensive defenseman, a player whose rink-long rushes brought a different dimension to the sport. Denis Potvin of the New York Islanders, Paul Coffey of Edmonton and Pittsburgh and the Blackhawks’ Doug Wilson followed and became integral parts of their teams’ offenses, a radical departure from the norm when the NHL was a six-team league.
Gretzky was the teenager who came to the NHL when it absorbed the WHA’s four survivors. He soon became the greatest scorer in hockey history and the cornerstone of an Edmonton dynasty that was to goal scoring what the New York Yankees’ “Murderers’ Row” was to home runs in the 1920s.
Next came Lemieux, a center who not only had Gretzky’s scoring ability but also was bigger and stronger and, some say, more talented.
But does the line end with Lemieux? There is no clear-cut successor as the game’s most dominant performer and most popular gate attraction.
Expansion is prompting some teams to play a style that militates against scoring, which doesn’t help develop stars. The defending Stanley Cup champion New Jersey Devils use a zone-trap defense that slows the game and has become a model for expansion teams.
Hawks coach Alpo Suhonen understands the reason for the trap, but he doesn’t like it.
“How can you keep up the players’ morale if you have an expansion team that doesn’t have the skill?” Suhonen asked. “You have to keep the game close. That’s the only way you have a chance to win, and sometimes you will win that way.”
In Pulford’s opinion, the NHL should ban the zone trap, just as the NBA has banned the zone defense. “There’s no doubt that the zone trap inhibits the star players,” Pulford said. “Today we have the most outstanding goaltending I’ve ever seen in the NHL, a lot of outstanding goalies. People like to see teams trying to score and goalies making great saves. The zone trap detracts from that.”
And from the chances of finding the next Mario Lemieux.
