Alfredsson’s path to Senators filled with great stories
TORONTO — One of Daniel Alfredsson’s first acts after being drafted by the Ottawa Senators was to pick up a map to find out where Ottawa was.
He knew it was the capital of Canada, but beyond that he wasn’t sure.
When Alfredsson was selected in the sixth round of the 1994 National Hockey League draft in Hartford, Conn., there was no such thing as the internet or email, and cellphones were literally just used to make phone calls. P eople could actually completely disconnect.
In fact, Alfredsson didn’t find out right away he’d be drafted. In the hours after it wrapped up, Stockholm-based agent Claes Elefalk, who now works with J.P. Barry and Pat Brisson at CAA Hockey, called Alfredsson to let him know he’d been taken by the Senators.
He never thought someday he’d become a Canadian citizen and call Ottawa home, and, on top of that, on Monday he’ll be honoured as one of the National Hockey League’s all-time greats with his induction to the Hockey Hall of Fame.
GOT DRAFTED
“I was oblivious that there was a draft,” Alfredsson told this newspaper this weekend. “An agent called me and said I was drafted. I didn’t have an agent and I just asked him, ‘What happens now?’ He said the team will probably contact you and sign you to a contract.
“A few weeks later, I tried to call Claus, who ended up representing me most of my career, but I couldn’t get a hold of him because he was on (paternity) leave. I ended up going with a different agent, but I got approached by Ottawa about signing a contract and I wanted to stay in Sweden for another year to play in the 1995 world championship in Sweden.”
Elefalk recalls that phone call to Alfredsson.
“I just remember when I heard in the sixth round that Daniel Alfredsson got drafted, he’s such a good player and I think I’ll give him a call,” Elefalk said. “I found a phone number and I’m calling Daniel Alfredsson and I don’t really think I even knew him. We certainly didn’t represent him then.
“I’m calling Alfie and I’m saying, ‘This is Claes Elefalk, the hockey agent. I’m in America at the draft and you’ve just been drafted.’ He says, ‘Oh, is the draft this weekend?’ That’s so funny. I told him he’d been drafted by Ottawa and I’d try to bring a jersey back home with me or something.”
The decision to take Alfredsson at No. 133 overall followed a battle at the Senators’ draft table.
The late John Ferguson Sr. liked Alfredsson so much the first time he saw him that he took the Senators’ top scout, Jim Nill, overseas to have a peek. Ferguson Sr. and Nill, now general manager of the
Dallas Stars, both saw something and felt it was worth taking a chance on Alfredsson.
“He wasn’t automatically on everybody’s radar as a national team member yet. He was somewhat off the beaten path a little bit.” said John Ferguson Jr., now assistant GM of the Arizona Coyotes, from a scouting mission in Germany last week. “He liked Alfredsson’s competitiveness, hockey sense and his skill. There was no question.
“(Ferguson Sr.) saw he could make plays in hard areas, he had the willingness to go to those areas and a willingness to play a twoway game. He demonstrated it at much higher levels in the years after, but that does require a great deal of projection, confidence, experience, and Alfie demonstrated all the things the Ottawa Senators need to see when they made the selection.”
Ferguson Sr. was a man of conviction, so, if he believed in you as a player, then he was going to do everything he could to help you get to the next level. That day in Hartford, though, he had to insist the Senators take Alfredsson with the pick.
The Senators had already selected centre Radek Bonk and defenceman Stan Neckar, so there was an argument about taking another European prospect. Ferguson Sr., who always had a strong voice, wasn’t going to be denied;
he slammed his fist on the table and convinced thengm Randy Sexton to give the green light.
“This pick was an out of the park home run,” Ferguson Jr. said. “There’s different ways about making those decisions and, ultimately, it does come down to the decision-maker. If you’re the decision-maker, at that point of the draft, with only a few picks left, you want them to be banging the table.
“(Ferguson Sr.) needed to do it and he did. He was never one who was afraid to share his opinion. He had the confidence and the experience. A lot of times you can have people banging the table and you may not have the trust to go with it. It’s a credit to them that they collaborated on the opinion.”
At the time, Alfredsson, 21, was a forward with Vastra Frolunda HC and wasn’t on anybody’s map. Ferguson Sr. had been tipped off by one of the Senators’ part-time scouts overseas — Lasse Lilja — that he needed to get to Gothenburg to see Alfredsson.
If Ferguson Sr. needed any backing that Alfredsson was the right selection, he got it during the 1994 NHL lockout from Michael Barnett, then a Los Angeles-based agent who represented Wayne Gretzky and took a group called “The 99 All-stars” overseas to play exhibition games.
Barnett, now a senior advisor with the New York Rangers’ scouting department, recalled seeing Alfredsson with Frolunda, when the 99 All-stars faced that club with a roster that included Doug Gilmour,, Sergei Fedorov, Rob Blake, Paul Coffey, Rick Tocchet, Steve Yzerman and other big NHL names.
“The ’99 All-stars’ was a team with 13 or 14 hall of famers, so we had a good team,” Barnett said. “When we got home from Europe, I called John Ferguson Sr. and said, ‘We played against this young redhead Alfredsson that you guys drafted in the sixth round, and he might have been the best player on the ice that night.’
“His reaction was, ‘Barney, we think we know what we’ve got in this guy and we’re hoping he’s going to come over next year.’ You go through the names we had on our roster and he was as good as anybody we had that night. When I told John that night, Fergie said, ‘We’re thinking he’s special and we’re hoping we can get get him here next year.’”
I’ve told this story before, but I never like people to forget what Ferguson Sr. meant to Senators’ organization and how much he loved his time with Ottawa.
I called him from the draft floor at the Nationwide Arena in Columbus and his wife, Joan, came on the line to say Fergie had been watching the proceedings and wanted the latest scoops.
While Ferguson Sr. was in the late stages of his battle with cancer in 2007, his voice, weakened by the disease, came on the line from his Windsor home with one final request.
“Do me a favour,” he told me that night. “Don’t ever let people forget I got (the Senators) Daniel Alfredsson.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Alfredsson showed up at rookie camp in 1995 and later turned heads in main camp at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y. He went on to become a special player, spent 17 seasons with the Senators and will be immortalized among hockey’s greats with family and friends on hand as part of the induction class of 2022 at the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“He wasn’t sure he was going to make the NHL the first year and he was prepared to play in the AHL for a year,” Elefalk said. “He was just an all-around player. His skating, physical game or his size never stood out, he was just a complete player and a leader. He checked all the boxes. That’s what made him a unique player.
“Nobody can say what Alfie’s best skill was. He shot well, he passed well and he skated well. He just did it all.”