The 10 types of player/team reunions, and how often they work

Last week, we celebrated Valentines Day by encouraging you to break up. When things aren’t working out for a player on your favorite team, sometimes it’s best to just say goodbye, even if that means all sorts of ugly drama.

But there’s another side to that coin. Sometimes, two sides go their separate ways and then realize that they shouldn’t have. Often, that just leads to regret. But every now and then, everyone can swallow their pride and get back together.

That happens fairly often in the NHL. We saw it last week, when the Senators reacquired Ryan Dzingel. And we apparently came close to a much bigger example, with reports that the Penguins had given serious consideration to a reunion with Marc-Andre Fleury.

That one feels a little too perfect, and it might seem like it would inevitably work out great for everyone involved. But that’s now always how these things go, and getting back with an ex isn’t always the smartest move. Sometimes, it’s best to leave the memories alone.

So today, let’s sort through some complicated feelings about reconciliation by looking back through NHL history at some of the times that a star player has returned to familiar territory. We’ll divide them into 10 different categories, and see if some have better outcomes than others. (Spoiler alert: They do.)

The Final Bow

We’ll start with one of the most common reunions. In this case, a player spends a big chunk of their career establishing themselves as a star with a team. For whatever reason, they end up leaving, and maybe have success elsewhere. But then time catches up, and they find themselves at the tail end of their career, with maybe another season or two left in the tank.

They’re not a star like they once were, at least in any real sense beyond name value, but they can still contribute something. With the clock ticking on their career and (often) dwindling options for where to land next, they head back to the scene of their greatest success for what will probably be one last run. Not to win a Cup, since the team is bad, but just to close the door in a way that feels right.

Notable examples: Glenn Anderson in Edmonton, Curtis Joseph in Toronto, Rob Blake in Los Angeles, Kevin Lowe in Edmonton

If you’re not a fan of those teams, you might not even remember any of those comebacks. But that’s kind of the point – they’re for the player and the fan base, and nobody else even needs to know.

How it usually ends: They don’t put up great numbers, because they just can’t anymore, and the team isn’t very good. But nobody really cares, because sometimes it’s just nice to have a familiar face back in the fold.

Unfinished Business

A modified version of the The Final Bow, this category is another that sees a player return to a former team late in his career. But this time, while the player may not be the star he was in his prime, he’s returning to a contender. This isn’t about a bad team getting some sympathy PR by bringing back a familiar name. Instead, it’s a good team with Stanley Cup aspirations bringing back a name from the past as, they hope, one of the final pieces of a championship puzzle.

Notable examples: Doug Gilmour in Toronto, Dave Andreychuk in Buffalo, Justin Williams in Carolina, Sandis Ozolinsh in San Jose, Dominik Hasek in Detroit, Denis Savard in Chicago, Rick Tocchet in Phialdelphia

Also, Michal Handzus in Chicago at the 2013 deadline, although I’m not sure he really counts since he’d only played a few games there the first time.

How it usually ends: There are a wide range of outcomes here. Hasek and Handzus won Cups, albeit in diminished roles. Williams helped the Hurricanes get back to the playoffs, and they had a nice run. At the other end of the spectrum, Gilmour blew out in knee in his first game back with the Leafs and never played again. In between, you just hope the returning player will occasionally show you a few flashes of what they were in their prime, and maybe help you win a key game or two.

Unfinished Business, except it’s the Devils

Yeah, they get their own category.

>> Read the full post at The Athletic

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Podcast: The final curtain

In this week's episode of Biscuits, the Vice Sports hockey podcast:
- I try to make the case for the Tom Wilson contract
- Dave and I look at Jarome Iginla's Hall-of-Fame case
- The Canucks part ways with Trevor Linden
- Cody Ceci wants $6 million, and other arbitration absurdities
- We try to guess what Mark Stone and William Karlsson will ask for
- Reader questions
- And we close things out with the long-awaited Sedin twins interview

>> Stream it now:

>> Or, subscribe on iTunes.

Grab bag: MLB enters its dead puck era

In this week's Friday Grab Bag:
- MLB is in the middle of a crisis that may seem familiar to hockey fans, although the way they're dealing with it won't
- Should fans be bothered by cap circumvention?
- We say goodbye to Trevor Linden with an obscure player who was once traded for him
- The week's three comedy stars
- And we mark Jarome Iginla's retirement with a YouTube look back at The Shift

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

Weekend wrap: Defending Linden, weird standings, and what's wrong with the Rangers?

Opening faceoff: A moment of parity

We’re living in the NHL’s age of parity. That’s been well-established for a while, and whether fans like it or not, most of us have come to accept that this is just how the league works now.

Anyone can beat anyone else on any given night, the loser point means almost everyone finishes over .500, and aside from a few outliers at either end, the gap between good and bad is smaller than ever.

But even given that reality, something weird is happening in the NHL these days.

We're used to parity being something that reveals itself over the course of a season, where there's enough time for the occasional hot and cold streaks to balance out. But these days, you don't even have to take a long view to find league-wide parity. It's playing out over the course of a few weeks.

Last Thursday, a reader sent me a note with an interesting observation: Heading into that night's action, 27 out of the league's 30 teams had won either four, five or six of their last ten games. That's a full 90 per cent of the league within a game of breaking even.

The other three teams weren’t even extreme outliers; nobody in the NHL had won more than seven or fewer than three of their last ten.

Take a look at the standings today, and you'll see a similar story — although not quite as extreme. Twenty-four of the 30 teams fall within that four/five/six-win range, and again, nobody is outside of that three-to-seven range.

That's not quite as extreme as we saw last week, but still less than what we'd expect if we were just randomly flipping coins.

Meanwhile, only one team in the league (the Philadelphia Flyers) has an active winning streak longer than three games, and only one (Colorado Avalanche) has lost more than that many in a row.

None of this is to say that some teams aren't playing especially well or poorly lately, as we'll see in the sections below. But even those teams aren't really seeing any dramatic swings in their win/loss records these days, and the practical impact has been that we're not really getting all that much movement in the standings.

Nobody is soaring or plummeting; instead, we're seeing a handful of teams move up or down by a spot or two, but nothing that feels like a big change.

There's still a lot of season left, as we're constantly reminded. That might be good news for NHL teams who aren't happy with their place in their standings and are hoping to make a move.

The way everyone's going these days, it may take a while to get anywhere.

—

Road to the Cup

The five teams that look like they're headed towards Stanley Cup favourite status.

5. San Jose Sharks (15-9-1, plus-9 true goals differential*) – Yeah, I know, I'm not completely sold on this pick either. With the Capitals and Lightning struggling, it was either the Sharks or the Blue Jackets, and the Sharks have won six of seven.

Besides, I still want to see one more solid week from Columbus. (My current plan is to say that every week for the rest of the season and hope nobody notices.)

4. New York Rangers (17-8-1, plus-31) – This seems low, right? It probably is, but see the section below.

>> Read the full post at Sportsnet

Weekend report: About that playoff bubble...

Faceoff: The disappearing playoff bubble

With five weeks to go in the regular season, this is supposed to be playoff bubble time. The trade deadline has come and gone, and all the contenders have finished shopping for the final pieces to put them over the top. Now it's time to shift our focus to the group of teams fighting it out for the remaining playoff spots, watching them jostle their way up and down the standings with each night of action. That's the bubble, and it's usually the single biggest story for the rest of the season.

There's just one problem: We may not have much of one this year.

In a typical year, we'd see plenty of teams fighting for plenty of spots. And we seemed headed that way again this year; just a few weeks ago, this year's field looked wide open. But today, there's not much drama to be found.

The West is already all but down to two teams and one spot, as the Wild and Avalanche battle for the final wild card. The top three in both divisions are largely locked in, and it would take a major collapse to knock the surging Predators out of the other wild-card spot. So it's the Wild and Avs and that's pretty much it.

The East is a little bit more interesting, with both wild cards still in play. The Penguins and Red Wings currently hold those, and both teams still have a chance to climb the standings and catch teams like the Islanders or Bruins. But as of today, only one team on the outside is within five points. That would be the Flyers, who sit four back of the Wings and have a game in hand. The Hurricanes, Senators and Devils are each barely sticking around at six points back, although Carolina just traded its best player and New Jersey is missing its starting goaltender.

It's still possible that the races could tighten up, or that some new team could take a late run to at least make things interesting. If anything, last year's furious hamburger-fueled charge by the Senators should remind us to never say never.

But it's also possible that we could head into the season's final month with the 16 playoff teams all but settled, and nothing left to play for besides seeding and lottery odds. In a season that was already lacking any drama around the Presidents' Trophy or the scoring race, we might all be in for a rough few weeks of trying to come up with things to talk about.

Race to the Cup

The five teams with the best shot at winning the Stanley Cup.

5. Dallas Stars (40-20-7, +23 true goals differential)—Sunday's 2-1 win in Ottawa was their second straight victory after an ugly stretch of six losses in seven games, and narrowly pushes the Stars past the Blues for a top five spot.

4. Tampa Bay Lightning (39-22-4, +28)—Make it nine straight wins, and sole possession of first place in the Atlantic.

>> Read the full post at Vice Sports

When captaincies go bad

After months of speculation, the San Jose Sharks finally named their new captain last week: nobody. They won’t have one this year, going with four alternates instead.

That’s going to be a little bit awkward for Joe Thornton, who wore the “C” last year before having it taken away after the Sharks’ painful first-round loss to the Kings, and is still on the roster. And then there’s Patrick Marleau, who was San Jose’s captain for five years until he was stripped back in 2009, and is also still on the roster.

But while the Sharks’ situation was unusual, and probably handled about as poorly as it could have been, it wasn’t unprecedented. In fact, lots of star players have had a “C” taken away over the years,¹ and many times the whole thing has been handled quite amicably.

But “quite amicably” is boring. We want some bad blood. So for today’s history lesson, let’s look back at five cases of NHL captains who lost their “C” under less-than-ideal circumstances. You’re not alone, Joe — and some of these guys had it even worse.

Rick Vaive Hits the Snooze Button

Being the captain of the Toronto Maple Leafs during the Harold Ballard era was a tough job. Ballard was essentially every stereotype of a rotten, greedy sports owner brought to life, except worse. He was a miserable crank, not to mention a convicted fraud, and legend has it that he once shut off the Maple Leaf Gardens drinking fountains and cranked up the thermostat on a hot day to force fans to buy soda (on which, it goes without saying, he’d raised the price).

So it was no surprise that Ballard didn’t get along with his captains — or just about anyone, for that matter. In 1979, Ballard and GM Punch Imlach started a feud with Leafs franchise player and captain Darryl Sittler that culminated in the future Hall of Famer slicing the “C” off his own jersey with a pair of scissors. Sittler was eventually given the captaincy back, and wore it for two more years before finally tiring of Ballard’s sideshow for good and requesting a trade.

Vaive took over the Leafs captaincy during the 1981-82 season, the first of a franchise record three straight in which he’d score 50 goals. He held the honor until a Saturday morning in Minnesota in February 1986. Vaive had gone out with former teammate John Anderson for what he called a “late-night bull session” and overslept the next day. He missed a scheduled practice, and Ballard responded by stripping him of the captaincy. He was traded to Chicago a year later.

After the Sittler and Vaive debacles, the Maple Leafs apparently decided that captains were more trouble than they were worth, going without one for three full seasons. That ended with two years of Rob Ramage, which gave way to the beloved Wendel Clark–Doug Gilmour–Mats Sundin era. With Ballard long gone, these days captains are finally treated with some respect in Toronto. (Until the team loses a few games in a row, in which case we ask Sittler if we can borrow his scissors.)

>> Read the full post on Grantland

Comeback kids: Eight NHL stars who came home

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

First the 1994 Conference Finals, and now this

I set two goals for myself going into this season. Two milestones that, if reached, would let me know that my work here wasn't going to waste.

The first was to top 10,000 visitors in a month. Due largely to rampant Wendel-mania, that happened in November. Thanks to everyone for your continued support.

The second, far more important goal: to have one of my ideas blatantly stolen by an NHL franchise.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Vancouver Canucks!

Canucks.com to celebrate 16 days of Trevor Linden
Nov 27, 2008, 12:39 PM EST Vancouver, B.C. – The Vancouver Canucks are proud to announce that Canucks.com will celebrate 16 Days of Trevor Linden, beginning on Monday, December 1st, 2008. The special 16-day initiative will take an in-depth look at Trevor Linden's career, concluding on December 16th, 2008 just one day prior to Trevor Linden's sweater retirement ceremony.

The 16 Days of Trevor Linden will feature video and print content as well as a series of photo galleries highlighting Linden's hockey career spanning more than two decades. The 16 days of coverage encompasses draft day in 1988 through to his last game on April 5, 2008 and will include stories and accounts from on and off the ice courtesy of former teammates, coaches, fans and countless others impacted by Trevor.

Exclusive commentary from former teammates and coaches will highlight a collection of excerpts to be included in the 16 Days of Trevor Linden. Video content will depict the terrific '94 run to the Stanley Cup, a collection of Linden's most memorable goals from his 19-year NHL career and a number of other significant moments in Linden's career. A compilation of photos will comprise a series of photo galleries including one gallery highlighting some of his many involvements with those in the community.

To access the 16 Days of Trevor Linden, please go to Canucks.com starting December 1st through December 16th, 2008.

The biggest thrill of Trevor Linden's
young life: the time he met Captain Kangaroo

(Glove tap: Canucks Hockey Blog)

What a fantastic idea. Why didn't I think of it?

You can preview the full list here. It kicks off today with Linden's draft day (cough). Future installments will include Linden's emotional return after being traded away (cough), and the heart-felt ovation he received from the home fans late in his final game (dammit, why can't I stop coughing?).

So apparently, this week's trade works out like this: The Leafs get Vancouver's last two GMs, the Canucks get a stolen blog gimmick and a conditional back-stabbing captain to be named later.

I'm going to go ahead and call that even.