Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read online

  The Los Angeles Kings are the youngest team in hockey, in first place in their division and considered a Stanley Cup contender; the Ottawa Senators are in the top four of oldest teams, hoping to rise high enough to claim a playoff position. The Kings are the model of consistency; the Senators the poster for streaking in both directions, coming into their match Monday night with Los Angeles having lost three games in a row. The Kings planned not a single change in the lineup; the Senators juggled theirs as if the players were a dropped deck of cards.

  Most significant among the Senators this Monday was the decision to scratch young defenceman Erik Karlsson, a brilliant-but-spotty twenty-year-old who has fought the flu lately and played as if he had it. The Kings, on the other hand, have a young defenceman, Drew Doughty, also twenty, who has already been a finalist for the Norris Trophy, which goes to the very best defence player in the league.

  It is the story of confidence—the one critical element to the game that defies all quantifying.

  Doughty may well have shown this most elusive of hockey traits by age one, when his father, Paul, handed him that first mini-stick in London, Ontario, but he certainly put it on public display in junior, where he was twice named the Ontario junior league’s top offensive defenceman when he played for the Guelph Storm. He was drafted second overall in 2008 (just behind Tampa Bay Lightning star Steve Stamkos) and surprised even himself by making the Kings out of that fall’s rookie camp.

  It may be unfair, but it is difficult to be noticed as an LA King when the time zones and media conceits so favour the East. He was named to the NHL’s all-rookie team in his first year but emerged as a true NHL star on the international stage, not in California. Doughty was named top defender at the 2008 World Juniors, where his team took gold, and was dominant at the 2009 world championships in Switzerland—Doughty’s play was the talk of the tournament. It led directly to him being selected, as the youngest player, to the 2010 Team Canada that won Olympic gold in Vancouver last February.

  “It was huge,” Doughty says of his 2009 experience in Switzerland. “The world championships helped me a ton. I went in there being the fifth or sixth ‘D’ and didn’t really know how much I was going to play. Yzerman was there, and all the guys who’d be picking the Olympics team. So if I hadn’t played as well as I had at the worlds, I don’t think I would have got invited to [the Olympic] camp—and never would have made the team.”

  The Olympics, however, were where he fully emerged as an elite player. He was expected to serve as a seventh defenceman, but by tournament end was as much a stalwart on the Canadian defence as current Norris Trophy winner Duncan Keith.

  “It did a lot,” Doughty agrees. “It was finally the moment where I realized I could play with the best players in the world. I went in there not playing a lot at the start and just sort of worked my way in, and that was a huge confidence booster for me. And since then, I’ve just sort of stepped up my game and been playing a lot better.”

  That applies to lately, as well, as Doughty is coming off an injury that cost him six games and kept the risk-taking young defenceman to one goal and six assists in thirteen games. “His game is coming around,” Los Angeles coach Terry Murray says. “Better things are starting to happen.”

  Doughty says he likes playing in LA—it was his favourite team in the years Wayne Gretzky was a King—and loves that he can live a normal life and “fly under the radar.”

  Perhaps somewhat during the season, but not if the Kings move on in the playoffs—and certainly not as far as Canada is concerned in international play. “He’s a great hockey player,” teammate Ryan Smyth says. “He has the confidence to make plays that D-men don’t make on a consistent basis.”

  But as for passing on Smyth’s long-time Captain Canada moniker, Smyth isn’t ready to discuss that. “I’ve got a lot more years left,” he laughs, “so I’m not passing anything along.” Yet.

  Drew Doughty was considered one of the league’s premier defencemen by the end of the 2010–11 season—unusual for a twenty-one-year-old in a position where players usually mature in their late twenties and early thirties.

  THE EVOLUTION OF KRIS LETANG

  (The Globe and Mail, May 4, 2010)

  PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

  There’s no need for the Montreal Canadiens to scout Kris Letang to find his weak spot. Just ask him. “The one-timer,” the young Pittsburgh Penguins defenceman says. “I’ve got to work on getting my shot away faster.”

  Let the improvement come next season, the Canadiens should hope, not this spring, with the Montreal–Pittsburgh best-of-seven second-round playoff series tied at one game apiece.

  Letang, a twenty-three-year-old native of Montreal, has a knack for big plays, whether setting goals up or scoring them himself—usually on a one-timer as he slips in, unnoticed, from the point. In Game 1 against the Canadiens, he set up fellow defenceman Sergei Gonchar to tie the game at 1–1, and then scored the team’s third goal as the Penguins romped to a 6–3 victory.

  Against the Ottawa Senators in the first round, he scored the game-winner in Game 2 on a brilliant feed from Sidney Crosby, allowing the Penguins to tie the series and eventually advance to the Eastern Conference semifinals. His first NHL playoff goal came in overtime last year, against the Washington Capitals. Had Letang not scored, his team would have fallen behind three games to none—and likely none of them would now be wearing Stanley Cup rings.

  He is far from the biggest name on the Penguins roster—lagging some distance back from Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Gonchar and others—but he is seen as the understudy to Gonchar. Sort of the team’s power-play quarterback in training.

  Nor is Letang the biggest player on the team, generously listed at six feet and 201 pounds. Yet he can hit with the force of a rocket, despite his seeming slightness. Pittsburgh head coach Dan Bylsma thinks a hard Letang hit on rock-solid defenceman Anton Volchenkov was where the Ottawa series began turning in the Penguins’ favour.

  Letang is happy to think of himself as the understudy to Gonchar, knowing the injury-prone thirty-six-year-old will not be there forever. The organization basically told him that in March, when it signed Letang to a four-year contract extension, at $3.5 million a year. The lengthy deal meant Letang was now considered part of the team’s core, along with Crosby, Malkin, Jordan Staal, Brooks Orpik and goaltender Marc-André Fleury.

  The Penguins like Letang’s play, obviously, but also his character, which was sorely tested two springs ago when his best friend, Vancouver Canucks defenceman Luc Bourdon, was killed in a motorcycle accident. The players had roomed together in their time with the Val-d’Or Foreurs in junior hockey, played on two Team Canada gold medal winners at the world junior tournament, and were planning to spend last summer working out together. Letang dealt with his grief quietly and with resolve, dedicating himself even more to the game his friend would never again play.

  What Letang is, at his best, is an attacking defenceman who does not neglect his own end and does not shy away from the corners. He is such a deft, quick skater with such an accurate shot that there are times when fans in other cities will hastily check their scoresheet to see who wears No. 58.

  Letang stands in awe of his team’s young captain, Crosby. Not so much for the scoring statistics and the trophies, but for Crosby’s remarkable ability to reinvent himself. Crosby finds his own flaws—first, lower-body strength; then, faceoffs; this past year, shooting—and sets about to correct them for the next season. In 2009–10, Crosby’s fifty-one goals tied him for the league lead. “He has amazed me how he can do those things,” says Letang, who intends to apply such determination to his one-timers from the point.

  He studies Gonchar as if No. 55 is the Bible—watching the way the veteran Russian gets away that first long pass, trying to ride the blueline on the power play the way Gonchar does, seeking to find those same narrow corridors to the net Gonchar is a master at. “It’s someone I would like to be,” Letang says of Gonchar’s work running the power
play. “I’ve always done that as a player, always looked for the chances to jump up into the play.”

  It comes by him naturally, as he was a forward up until fourteen. “It was just for fun at first,” Letang says. “Coach said we needed another ‘D’ for a game because one of our guys was sick. I tried it and liked it. I decided myself to switch.”

  He had to switch heroes, as well, changing from idolizing former Pittsburgh forward (and current club co-owner) Mario Lemieux to wanting to be able to play like smooth-skating Anaheim Ducks defenceman Scott Niedermayer. Letang is still a long way from such comparisons, but it is not entirely beyond the realm of possibility given the flashes fans have seen these past two springs.

  “I’m going to expect more of it next year from the way he’s played,” Bylsma says. Just as the Montreal Canadiens are likely to see more of it before this year is over.

  Much to the shock of the hockey world, Montreal bounced the defending Stanley Cup champions from the playoffs in 2010. Kris Letang matured into a true star in 2010–11, voted by fans to start in the All-Star Game and considered the key to Pittsburgh’s vaunted power play. He had indeed replaced Sergei Gonchar, who left Pittsburgh for the Ottawa Senators and the worst year of his NHL career.

  MARC SAVARD’S LONG JOURNEY

  (The Globe and Mail, May 1, 2009)

  BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

  He is known by his number, 91, by the name on the back, Savard, and the crest on the front, Boston Bruins, but also by a tag that has proved tougher to shake off than shin-pad tape. Marc Savard, selfish, lazy, not a team player … coach killer.

  He has heard them all. His father, Bob, a handyman in Ottawa, has heard them all, too; he even offers up “coach killer” in case it had been missed. Savard, as well as his father, would rather hear about the current Marc Savard, the slick-passing centre who regularly finishes in the top ten in NHL scoring, the admittedly once defensively deficient forward who was seen diving to block shots in Boston’s Round 1 romp over the Montreal Canadiens, the late bloomer (about to turn thirty-two) who would dearly love, finally, to wear a Team Canada jersey in the coming 2010 Vancouver Olympics.

  But will the reputation, however true or exaggerated, trip up the future hopes? “You get tagged with these bad raps,” Savard says, while his team readies to meet the Carolina Hurricanes in an Eastern Conference semifinal, “and there’s not much you can do about it. I get along great with every guy on this team. It’s just something they tagged on me and it’s really unfortunate. But I don’t let it faze me. I just keep playing.”

  He has played at a remarkably high level since the 2004–05 lockout season, which allowed him time to heal (knee and concussion) and then gave him a new game that rewarded speed and skill. Small by NHL standards (five foot ten, 190 pounds), Savard has averaged more than a point a game since the Bruins signed the free agent to a four-year, $20-million contract three summers ago.

  That’s quite a payday for a player who was once traded by the Calgary Flames to the Atlanta Thrashers for Ruslan Zainullin, who never played a shift in the NHL. Savard had 96 points his first year with Boston and 78 last year, when he missed several games to injury. His 88 points this year (25 goals) were a major factor in Boston’s surprising rise to the top of the Eastern Conference, making the once-dismissible Bruins an early favourite in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

  His passing abilities are so impressive—“Some plays make you think he has a set of eyes in the back of his helmet,” former Atlanta head coach Bob Hartley says—he has caused most Bruins fans to forget the playmaking centre he replaced, playoff-cursed Joe Thornton of the San Jose Sharks. “His first instinct is always to pass,” says twenty-one-year-old Phil Kessel, who became Boston’s top goal scorer this year with Savard on his line. “He’s the kind of guy who’s looking to pass, even if he’s on a breakaway.”

  And yet, there it was once more, a player whose first instinct is always to give the puck to a teammate, being tagged as selfish. “Somebody on TSN brought it up again,” Savard says. “The same old thing that I’m a ‘me-first’ guy. It bothers me. But I just take it for what it’s worth and just keep trying to prove every single day that that’s not the way I am.”

  Kessel has heard the raps against his generous centre and cannot comprehend how it happened. “I don’t know how he got that,” he says. “Who knows?”

  Bob Savard thinks it happened in Calgary. He also thinks his son had some “growing up” to do before he would become the player he is today. Others close to him agree; he had a harder time getting around himself than opposing defenders.

  Marc Savard had been a remarkably gifted player from virtually the first time he set out on skates in the little backyard rink. At six, the father says, other kids in tournaments were asking for his son’s autograph. He played like his idol, Wayne Gretzky, and everyone said he was a sure thing to make it. “I couldn’t see it myself,” the older Savard says. He had played a lot of hockey himself, but “I was a fighter, I had cement hands.” He thought his son too small.

  Size was a major factor. But it made the boy all the more determined. He cared nothing for school, only hockey and the chance to prove the naysayers wrong. One friend thinks this is what gave Marc Savard “a bit of a chip on his shoulder” in the early days and may have put people off. Too small, yet he played Junior B at fifteen. Too small, yet he twice won the OHL scoring championship while playing for the Oshawa Generals.

  Size made him a late draft pick; the New York Rangers took him ninety-first overall in 1995. Then, the Rangers virtually gave him away to Calgary simply to move up a couple of slots in a subsequent draft. It was in Calgary, Bob Savard says, that the tagging began. Though he scored points—53 his first year, 66 his second—Marc Savard fell out of favour with coach Greg Gilbert. Gilbert stressed defensive hockey first, and defensive hockey, from childhood, was usually so far down Savard’s list it didn’t even have a number. “I don’t know what it was,” Bob Savard says. “Maybe they thought he was always looking at his stats or something.”

  They thought he was a “whiner,” perhaps hockey’s worst insult. He thought he deserved more ice time, Gilbert thought not; player blamed coach, coach blamed player. “There were some tough times for sure,” Marc Savard says, “especially when I felt I could play in the league at the time. I had some tough situations there, you know, obviously the coach …”

  Calgary dealt him to the Thrashers in 2002, where a new coach, Bob Hartley, soon arrived and immediately had a profound effect on Savard. Player and coach lived on a golf course only five houses apart, and Hartley used “idle time”—pitching golf balls (Savard is a scratch player) and playing bubble hockey in Hartley’s basement—to get through to the player no one else had been able to penetrate. “If he would listen,” Hartley says, “I told him I would be willing to trade quite a bit of ice time.”

  What Savard listened to was a series of lectures on how good he could be if he wanted to be. “ ‘You’re going to waste quite a talent,’ ” Hartley told him. “ ‘Your talent is a given, but the rest of it is not a gift, you have to make a choice. You have the talent to be a star, but your worst enemy is you.’ In Marc’s mind, it was everybody’s fault, but I give him credit. He took the plan and went with it.”

  The plan was simple. Work harder, check harder, be a team player. In return for a new work ethic, Hartley gave him ice time with rising stars Ilya Kovalchuk, Dany Heatley and Marian Hossa. It paid off handsomely for all. Hartley “was like a father figure to me,” Savard says. “He really helped me out.”

  When it became clear to Savard and his agent, Ottawa-based Larry Kelly, that Atlanta wouldn’t be able to afford the sort of money that might be available once the player became a free agent in 2006, the choice came down to Boston or, surprisingly, Calgary, where Savard’s friend, team captain Jarome Iginla, was pressing hard for Savard to return. They chose Boston, in part because it was seen as a team on the rise, in part out of concern for Savard’s experience in Calgary.
r />   Boston coach Claude Julien has carried on where Hartley left off—exchanging ice time for a commitment by Savard to be “more accountable”—and those who may have once doubted his work ethic are now able to turn to YouTube for a clip of Savard throwing up on the bench after a shift. “He’s a money player,” Hartley says, “a clutch performer. Give me a minute left in a game and he’ll either score the goal or set it up. I just hope he gets a shot at the [2010] Olympics.”

  Bob Nicholson, president of Hockey Canada, says Savard’s improved play has not gone unnoticed—“he deserves to be on the radar”—but Canada is deep at centre, beginning with Sidney Crosby.

  “It’s a thought in the back of my mind,” Savard says. “It’s something I think about, for sure, but I got business here right now. I think the better our team does this year, the better the chances I’d have to play in those kinds of events.”

  On March 7, 2010, Marc Savard suffered a severe concussion when he was hit by Matt Cooke of the Pittsburgh Penguins. Cooke was neither penalized nor suspended for the headshot. Savard returned briefly in the playoffs—the Bruins lost to the Philadelphia Flyers—and began play again in the 2010–11 season, only to suffer a mid-season concussion in a game against the Colorado Avalanche. In February, the Bruins announced that Savard would not be returning to play for the remainder of the year.

  THE PRICE IS RIGHT

  (The Globe and Mail, April 26, 2008)

  MONTREAL, QUEBEC

  “Just look at that wall over there.”

  Carey Price is standing in front of his locker long after Game 1 has ended in his favour, well after the cameras and microphones have left the room and well beyond the call of duty for a goaltender who has just played, and won, a Stanley Cup game that went into overtime.

  “It’s impossible not to notice,” he says, pointing to the plaque of previous Montreal Canadiens who have been awarded the Vezina Trophy as hockey’s best goaltender: Patrick Roy, Ken Dryden, Gump Worsley, Jacques Plante five times in a row, Bill Durnan and a net full of other names, some faded, some forgotten.