Lidstrom’s departure leaves void for Detroit
Retiring defenceman one of game’s all-time greats
Where does Nicklas Lidstrom rate among the greats?
I say he’s in the Top 25 players of all-time, which is different than throwing him into a conversation about whether he was better than Ray Bourque or Doug Harvey, with Bobby Orr at the summit of the defence mountain.
Here’s my list of the 25 best players in history: Wayne Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux, Mark Messier, Jean Beliveau, Phil Esposito, Steve Yzerman, Rocket Richard, Guy Lafleur, Orr, Lidstrom, Bourque, Harvey, Denis Potvin, Paul Coffey, Larry Robinson, Martin Brodeur, Patrick Roy, Glenn Hall, Mike Bossy, Jaromir Jagr, Brett Hull, Bobby Hull, Joe Sakic and Ron Francis.
There could be lots of debate there, but there’s none about Lidstrom’s place in the pantheon of NHL players.
Fortunately, the Detroit Red Wings had Lidstrom for 20 years. The Boston Bruins only had Orr for 10 years, until he dragged his ravaged knees to Chicago for 26 games over two seasons with the Blackhawks.
“Those 10 years of Bobby Orr ... he was the best player in the world. He changed the game,” said Red Wings general manager Ken Holland.
“Nick is going to go down with a handful of the greatest defenceman, four, five or six, but what separates Nick is he won a Norris Trophy at 41. He won Norris trophies when he was 37 and 38,” said Holland, who knew Lidstrom was special through the 1990s, even if he didn’t win a Norris until 2001.
“When we won the Stanley Cup in 1997, ( Vladimir) Konstantinov was runner-up (to Brian Leetch). We had Vlad then and Yzerman and (Sergei) Fedorov (up front to get all the hype). Then Vlad had the car accident (a limousine crash which left him brain damaged, his body a shell of his old warrior self), and the next three years Nick was second in voting (to Rob Blake, Al MacInnis and Chris Pronger). But from 1998 until 2011, he was either first or second 10 times,” said Holland.
“And we made the playoffs every year Nick was here. In the finals six times, four Stanley Cups, 233 playoff games. That’s like another three seasons. This is a 20-year-old league now and Nick is twice as old, but I still think in 2012-13, he would have been in the top 10 defencemen.”
“Last year at the 60-game mark, I still thought Nick could play himself in the race for the Norris again, but he got hurt (a hairline foot fracture).”
Holland lived through Yzerman retiring because he knew Yzerman’s knee was wrecked, and he had Pavel Datsyuk and Henrik Zetterberg at centre.
Lidstrom is a different story. “When Steve retired, we still had Nick. His retiring leaves us with a hole. Yeah, it’s a crater.”
The Red Wings never use the woe-is-me card, but in the last two years they have lost Lidstrom, the hugely underrated Brian Rafalski (retired), and Brad Stuart, one of their glue guys, their secondpairing hard-nosed veteran, is almost surely going to freeagency on July 1. He wants to be back in California, if possible, because his family has stayed there while he’s played for the Wings. That’s a big gulp.
Lidstrom told Holland he was retiring just before Memorial Day weekend.
“I didn’t say much. I did a lot of listening,” said Holland.
Holland told him to take the weekend, but when Lidstrom said he was following through with his decision because he didn’t have the drive to train anymore and felt his game had slipped marginally, Holland pulled one more card out of the deck.
“I saw Chelli (Chris Chelios) and he said he was going paddle-boating with Nick. I told Chelli to take one more run at Nick. Two hours later, Chelli called and said ‘No chance.’ ”
“I looked around the room at the press conference and lots of people were dabbing their eyes. Usually when it’s the end of a career for a player, everybody knows why, but ...”
But Lidstrom quit a year before he had to, just as Gretzky did in 1999.
Holland is eyeing Nashville’s Ryan Suter if the Predators can’t sign him. Holland has said with respect to the prize free agents (Zach Parise is in the same boat), he would be willing to trade for their negotiating rights, usually a window of a few days around the draft and before July 1 when they hit the marketplace for one and all.
“I’ve never done it and it would depend on what the price is, but I’m not opposed to anything,” said Holland, who knows the Philadelphia Flyers have made a history of trading for negotiating rights of UFAs such as Scott Hartnell, Kimmo Timonen and the Predators’ Dan Hamhuis. The Flyers signed the first two, and couldn’t work out a deal for Hamhuis in 2010. They dealt his rights to the Pittsburgh Penguins six days later.
The salary cap is going up to $70.3 million from $64 million as of July 1, but only until a new collective bargaining agreement comes in, when the cap will likely drop substantially because the owners don’t want to give the players 57 per cent of the league revenue, more like a 50-50 split.
The Red Wings won’t be spending fools, but they would love Suter; they’ve played against the Predators constantly in the playoffs. Parise, they envision, could play with Datsyuk.
For now, they have Niklas Kronwall, Ian White, Kyle Quincey, Brendan Smith and Jakub Kindl as their top five on defence, with two huge holes. Holland knows he’ll have to get somebody to replace Stuart too, but he doesn’t have a lot to trade.
There are even some intriguing trade proposals.
The most interesting one on the web has the Washington Capitals trading Mike Green and centre Brooks Laich to the Red Wings for Johan Franzen, Darren Helm and Kindl. Green for Franzen. Laich for Helm and Kindl.
I like the first part; that’s a wash. But Laich, who would be a top-six forward in Detroit, does more than Helm. He’s not as fast, but has better hands. And Kindl? Is he any better than a No. 6 defenceman? The Red Wings would move him, but how would he make the Capitals defence better?