A FREE MAN
Could Brodeur actually leave the Devils behind?
‘The Devils is what I am,” said Martin Brodeur the day after the season ended, and of all the time he spent addressing his future, those were the six words that stuck. Some athletes are great enough, and lucky enough, and steadfast enough, to become icons; in the modern era, fewer still manage to stay with a single franchise for the entire span of their marvellous careers, where they become inescapably rooted in the memories of those who watched them. Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Babe Ruth — they are all powerfully identified with certain franchises, but did not spend all their time in just one place. The world always intervened.
When Nicklas Lidstrom retired in Detroit during the Stanley Cup final, he put himself alongside guys like Stan Mikita, Mario Lemieux, Steve Yzerman, Bobby Clarke, several generations of Canadiens. There’s something poetic about it, after all the business deals and brass-knuckle tactics of the post-reserve-clause era; there’s something lovely about, say, Stan Musial being a St. Louis Cardinal, and only a St. Louis Cardinal. Martin Brodeur reached 40 years of age with the same team, and he was supposed to be one of those guys. He may yet be.
But Friday, TSN’S Darren Dreger broke the news that Brodeur had hired an agent and would explore free agency, which for him has always been as theoretical and distant a place as the moon. Brodeur has been Devils property since he was drafted in 1990, and he was happy to remain so. Now, on Sunday, he can get Pat Brisson to listen to offers from anybody who might be interested. In what amounts to a small and discardable irony, that’s the same Brisson that just negotiated a deal that will see Sidney Crosby become, quite probably, a Penguin for life.
Hell, Brodeur hasn’t employed an agent in well over a decade; he didn’t need to. Brodeur was talking about longtime Devils general manager Lou Lamoriello before New Jersey began the 2012 Stanley Cup final, and he said, “When I fired my agent, I had to do a lot of negotiation with him. For me, talking to him is maybe not like one of the [other] guys here. We talked so much through the years, different situations — winning, losing, guys getting traded, things happening in locker rooms, outside. So many conversations, they kind of put me in the area even though I was never a captain or assistant, I was part of some of the discussion and stuff about leadership of the hockey team.
“There’s not enough I can say about him. I don’t know if someone else would have treated me the same way [elsewhere]. But I couldn’t be treated a lot better than I was my whole career.”
Now, Lou can’t take care of him, according to the Newark Star-ledger, which reports the looming money problems that hung over the team during its surprising playoff run — the Devils owe Us$80-million to lenders sometime this summer, according to various reports, after which the lenders can push the team into default — have left Lamoriello unable to commit to the team’s free agents, such as star winger and captain Zach Parise, and defenceman Bryce Salvador. And, incredibly, Brodeur.
“I don’t see myself at all [leaving the Devils],” Brodeur said when the season ended, “but again, I think circumstances are out of my hands. You never know, I guess. I don’t want to. It will definitely have to be something really weird if I’m going to do that … This is what I believe in … This is where I want to be, but there are circumstances that are going to be out of Lou’s hands and my hands that might [complicate] that.”
One presumes Lou talked to him about that, too. Brisson is probably intended at least partly as a bluff, a signal to owner Jeff Vanderbeek, who is still said to be seeking investors to help offset the club’s hefty debt load, which was only slightly eased by its run to the Cup final. That run had a lot to do with Brodeur, whose regular season was lousy — despite a better second half, among the 30 goaltenders who started at least half their team’s games, he finished 25th in save percentage.
In the post-season, though, he excelled. Two goals or fewer in the final four games in the first round against Florida; he put away Philadelphia in five, and outduelled the Vezina winner, Henrik Lundqvist, in the conference final. In the Cup final he allowed one goal in regulation four times, but it wasn’t enough. He allowed more than three goals three times in the entire playoffs,
I think circumstances are out of my hands
still stacking his pads and poke-checking and diving at just the right moment.
Now people are imagining him in the goal-tending ditches — Chicago, Florida, Toronto, Tampa — which requires imagining Gretzky in St. Louis, and Montana in Kansas City, and Jordan in Washington, and Ruth with the Boston Braves. Or, to use a more recent reference, Brett Favre with the Vikings and the Jets, though hopefully with fewer inappropriate text messages.
It makes for a fine backdrop to the NHL’S collective bargaining, which officially began with a meeting in Chicago on Friday. The Devils are just one of the league’s fiscal smokestacks, and the league will surely say that something must be done. Shane Doan is the only other active player with more games played with just one franchise — if one that moved from Winnipeg to Phoenix — and he may be leaving in free agency, too.
But while the league and the union fiddle, a part of New Jersey may just burn. Brodeur said during the Devils Cup run that a lengthy work stoppage would be the only thing that could conceivably keep him from returning; when asked about his start with the Devils, he said, “It took me a while to sign my first contract. A lot of things [Lamoriello] talked about was my progression in the organization, and how they were going to take their time. They never really deviated from their plan with me.”
Here he is, 22 years later. And perhaps the plan has changed.