Whether or not he's part of the best incoming Hall of Fame class ever, Brian Leetch can still appreciate entering with a big part of what may be the last superstar-studded NHL team ever assembled.
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| Donning his Hall of Fame blazer, Brian Leetch can't help but smile about his superb career of 18 seasons in the NHL. (Getty Images) |
That's because Leetch, who will join them and New Jersey Devils GM Lou Lamoriello when the 2009 class is inducted, spent most of his 18 NHL seasons with the New York Rangers and wasn't too shabby.
• Yzerman adds Hall of Fame to list of accomplishments
Leetch won a Rookie of the Year award in New York along with two Norris trophies and five All-Star nods, and became the first American to win the playoff MVP award when he helped the Rangers end their 54-year drought with their 1994 Stanley Cup victory. The slick defenseman certainly did play on some very talented clubs during his career, just none that came close to matching that particular Red Wings squad up and down the line.
"That team was loaded," said Leetch.
And in a way that may never be repeated.
Unencumbered by any spending limits in the days before the lockout, Detroit was able to bolster its lineup with a couple of superstars before the 2001-02 season, although they were aging ones in Hull, who would end his career as the third-highest goal scorer in history, and Robitaille, the top scoring left winger ever. Still the newcomers played a role in helping the Red Wings blow out the rest of the league, taking the Presidents' Trophy by 15 points and then the Stanley Cup with only seven losses in four playoff rounds.
"[Those moves] just gave us scoring depth," said Yzerman, who captained the Red Wings for 19 seasons. "Over the course of a season, the more depth and scoring you can have, it just alleviates [the pressure]. If a guy is injured, guys cool off for a while, somebody was always kind of picking up goals. It became particularly evident in the playoffs that year.
"We really had balanced scoring. I think at the end of the day, that was the difference playing Colorado in the semis, then ultimately against Carolina. Despite winning in five, they were relatively close games. We were able to generate, get more production from all four of our lines."
From a distance, Leetch said he could see how well the mix worked for the Red Wings.
"Their pieces all fit together and the style that they were able to play in the NHL at that time, where it was not as easy to play that puck-control game and to hold onto it for long stretches and to make as many plays as they managed to do was really impressive," Leetch said. "Yet still they had the guys that were there that could play a tough game and get in the corners and muck it up and be aggressive and be physical when they had to."
What the Red Wings had most of all though, was a remarkable collection of talent with half of the players routinely and perhaps presciently described as future Hall of Famers. One of those players, Igor Larionov, has already been inducted, and down the road, Chris Chelios, Dominik Hasek, Brendan Shanahan, Nicklas Lidstrom and quite possibly Sergei Fedorov and Pavel Datsyuk will get in.
For now though, the spotlight goes to the trio of Red Wings who played together in Detroit for only one season and accomplished their mission.
"I remember the first words at the beginning of training camp coming from [coach] Scotty Bowman and [GM] Ken Holland were: 'We're here to win the Stanley Cup so we're going to start preparing for it now,"' said Robitaille. "So they actually had strategized about training camp and we were going to have certain types of practices and making sure already that we were thinking of not getting any injuries and so forth.
"And that kind of blew me away thinking when you showed up at camp the first talk was about, 'OK, we want to play all the way to June so we're going to manage what we're doing now because it's going to be a long ride."'
And one unlikely to be repeated in terms of assembled personnel, given the constraints of the NHL's current salary-capped world. That's why Hull, who played for five different teams during his career, winning his first Stanley Cup with Dallas and scoring 86 goals once and more than 70 twice with St. Louis, considers his time in Detroit and that season in particular so special.
"I was lucky enough to kind of feel what it was like to be an old New York Yankee," said Hull. "I got to play for one of the greatest coaches that ever walked the earth. I had more fun in the one year of playing for Scotty than I did my whole career. We just seemed to have the same philosophy. We thought the game the same way.
"To play on that team with him coaching, it felt like you were on a team with [Mickey] Mantle and Lou Gehrig, Yogi Berra, all those great players. It was scary."
Scary good. Just like the class of 2009.
